Ukrainian drones burn Wildberries warehouse built to hold 54 million items

A Ukrainian drone attack overnight on Wednesday set fire to the Wildberries logistics centre in Kotovsk, Tambov region, about 420 to 500 kilometres from the front. Governor Yevgeny Pervyshov said roughly 100,000 square metres of the site were burning, a footprint he compared to 14 football pitches. Later he said the warehouse had been completely destroyed. One worker was injured. The company confirmed the strike, said the site had stopped taking inbound goods, and noted that the same hub had been hit in July and then restarted.

The Kotovsk complex opened in 2025 and was built to store up to 54 million items. Witnesses counted at least ten explosions in forty minutes. Mayor Alexei Plakhotnikov told residents to limit movement for two days and to keep windows closed because of smoke. Pervyshov said air defences and volunteer fire groups had destroyed 16 drones and that a downed drone had set a house alight in a dacha settlement.

The same night, Lipetsk governor Igor Artamonov said a drone-started fire at a private home killed a man and a 14-year-old and sent two women to hospital. A woman was killed in Belgorod region. Russian officials said 426 Ukrainian drones were shot down overnight. In occupied Luhansk, Reuters reported nine dead after a Ukrainian missile hit a bus. Monitoring channels also claimed a fire at the Lukoil refinery in Kstovo, Nizhny Novgorod region.

Ukraine has been hitting Wildberries sites since mid-July and has added Ozon, the other large Russian online retailer, in recent days. The two firms are among the few parts of the Russian consumer economy that have kept growing while much of the rest of the civilian sector has flattened under four and a half years of war. Burning their warehouses is a way to raise costs for households without striking a power plant or a housing block as the primary target. The secondary effects still land on workers and on towns that live off the hub.

The tactic also tests Russian air defence in the interior. Tambov is not a border oblast. If drones can reach a 108,000-square-metre shed there for a second time in six weeks, the same routes can reach other logistics parks, grain stores and assembly plants that sit on the same rail lines. Moscow has poured money into electronic warfare and mobile gun teams. The repeated hits on the same postcode suggest those layers still have gaps at night.

Wildberries and Ozon run the last-mile system that keeps provincial shops stocked when high-street retail is thin. A destroyed central hub does not empty every closet in Tambov the next morning. It does force rerouting through other nodes that then become the next obvious targets. Insurers and landlords will price that cycle. So will the Defence Ministry, which has to decide how many teams it can spare from the front to sit on warehouse roofs.

Kyiv has not issued a detailed claim for the Kotovsk fire. It rarely does for this class of strike. The pattern is the statement. Retail infrastructure is now part of the long-range list, alongside refineries. Russia continues to deny that it aims at civilians and continues to record civilian deaths from falling drones. The two facts sit next to each other in the same night’s reports, and they will sit there again the next time the sheds light up.