Petrol was on sale at fewer than a third of Russian filling stations this month, and the Ukrainian supermarket chain ATB began capping purchases on August 28 due to Russian drone attacks.

Ukraine has launched a total of 21 strikes against Russia’s oil refineries in August. Russia has retaliated by trying to systematically destroy Ukraine’s retail infrastructure, which has started to empty the shelves. The largest store operators announced on August 28 they are freezing pay and cancelling bonuses.

The 48 hours to Saturday morning Ukraine hit a Magnit hypermarket outside Moscow, a first for the chain, along with three retail and e-commerce warehouses in Rostov region.

Russia cut power to more than 300,000 people in Mykolaiv, burned 125 tonnes of grain on lorries outside Izmail, and destroyed a Fozzy hypermarket at Vyshneve. As this series has tracked since the campaign against the civilian economy began, the conflict has moved from a war of attrition to a total war after Russian President Vladimir Putin warned Ukraine it had opened a “Pandora’s box” by targeting Russian retail assets.

Russia's pumps run dry

Ukraine struck Russian oil refineries at least 21 times in August, which Bloomberg reports is the highest number of attacks on refineries recorded in a single month. Four of Russia's ten largest plants were among them. Crude runs fell to just over 3.8mn barrels per day, against 5.3mn to 5.6mn barrels a day in a normal summer, on figures from EA Analytics, a division of Energy Aspects.

A second wave of the fuel crisis is now well under way. Gasoline output fell to about 80,000 tonnes a day late in August against domestic demand of about 115,000 tonnes, or about 70% of what the country consumes, according to two industry sources cited by Reuters. The August average was about 90,000 tonnes a day, or roughly 80% of demand. Reuters names the plants halted in the past week as Perm, Nizhny Novgorod and Yaroslavl.

Drivers found petrol on sale at only 28% of filling stations nationwide on August 19, down from 41% a week earlier, and AI-92 at just 10% of stations in Moscow. The national average pump price was RUB76.04 a litre on August 10, about $0.95 at RUB80 to the dollar, up nearly 20% since the start of the year, and above RUB100 in some regions. Chains have reimposed per-customer volume caps and several regions are selling by number plate.

Moscow saw this coming. It banned gasoline and diesel exports from August 1 to January 31, and fuel retailers are already asking for the ban to be extended. Refineries get partial carve-outs from September, which tells you the government expects throughput back. EA Analytics puts a September recovery at about 4.2mn barrels a day, explicitly conditional on the strikes easing.

The heaviest blow of these two days landed on August 28 at the Slavneft-YANOS refinery in Yaroslavl, about 700 km from Ukrainian territory, where the general staff confirmed a fire and said the extent of damage was still being assessed. It was the eighth strike on that plant this year. Perm lost about 74% of its capacity to a strike on August 21, its second this year; NORSI at Nizhny Novgorod went down on August 26; and with Volgograd already offline every major Lukoil refinery in Russia stopped processing.

A Magnit, an Ozon depot and a warehouse that may or may not have been hit

Away from the refineries, Ukraine spent the two days on Russian retail. A drone hit a Magnit hypermarket at Pavlovsky Posad, about 65 km east of Moscow, on August 28. Moscow region governor Andrey Vorobyov said the blast wave shattered 46 windows in the adjacent clinic and closed its physiotherapy department. Nobody was hurt. It is the first reported strike on one of the grocer's hypermarkets, and it extends a target list that until now ran through warehouses rather than shop floors.

Overnight into August 29 the aim moved back to logistics, in Rostov region. Ozon said one of its logistics facilities there "came under a UAV attack last night", that "a small fire broke out, but it was extinguished immediately", and that it had suspended operations at the site for inspection. Staff had already been evacuated.

At a second site, a warehouse belonging to the electronics retailer DNS, the picture is less clear and worth stating carefully. Open-source channels published smoke imagery and said the building was still burning. Rostov governor Yuri Slyusar said only that drone debris had been found on the warehouse territory, which is not the same claim. A third report, that a Chizhik discount supermarket warehouse at Leninskoye was struck, rests on a single Telegram channel with no official confirmation at all. Slyusar said seven people were injured across the region, four of them taken to hospital. Russia's defence ministry claimed 313 Ukrainian drones destroyed overnight, a claim about interceptions rather than a count of what was hit.

Ukraine's Unmanned Systems Forces separately claimed 21 energy facilities in occupied territory and the Shchastia thermal power station were hit over August 26 to 28, listing substations in Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions and gas distribution stations in Crimea. The claim comes from the force's commander, carries no damage detail and has no Russian confirmation.

Six items per customer in Ukraine's biggest chain

From August 28 ATB began limiting customers to six units or six kilogrammes of a given product per receipt, nationwide and online, on eggs, canned fish and meat, oils, vinegar, starch, grains, pasta, cereals, salt, baking soda, sugar and dry groceries. This is not rationing and should not be reported as such. ATB's own explanation is that individual customers were buying in bulk to resell, stripping shelves locally, on top of the damage to its warehouses. Its representative said flatly that "there is no shortage of products in the stores". Silpo has introduced no comparable limits and has told customers not to panic.

Supermarket chain the Fozzy Group, which runs Silpo, Fora, Fozzy and Thrash!, said on August 28 that ten of its distribution centres had been damaged in August alone, that a Silpo supermarket in Kryvyi Rih had been destroyed, and that it was freezing hiring, cancelling the autumn salary review and Q3 and Q4 bonuses, and suspending voluntary medical insurance from October 1.

"We lost part of our logistics and production infrastructure and inventory," the company said, calling it "a difficult decision we took due to the scale of losses from Russian attacks" and insisting the measures are not indefinite. That is the first large Ukrainian retailer to cut its own staff costs because of the strike campaign, and it follows our reporting that retailers' logistics bills have already doubled.

Fozzy's own hypermarket and production facilities at Vyshneve, on the western edge of Kyiv, were hit on August 28. The store halted operations with the scale of damage still being assessed and nobody was hurt. It was part of a wider night: Kyiv regional head Tymur Tkachenko counted 14 warehouse premises damaged across five districts, along with 16 private houses, three apartment blocks and 16 vehicles. One warehouse held the stock of the bookshop Readeat and the publisher Vivat, which suspended shipments.

The most serious incident, and the one with the least settled account, was at Myla in Bucha district of Kyiv, where a drone strike on warehouses belonging to a private company started a fire that produced prolonged detonations, closing the M-06 Kyiv to Chop highway between the 15th and 32nd kilometre and forcing more than 200 people out. Ukraine's prosecutor general opened a pre-trial investigation into the legality of the storage of explosive materials at the site. Russia's defence ministry claims the warehouse held Flamingo cruise missiles and booster fuel. Ukrainian officials have not said what was stored there and the death toll has not been given.

Shops and forecourts took the rest. A drone hit an Epicentr hypermarket in Zaporizhzhia at about 07:30 on August 28, the chain's last operating store in the city, setting light to about 2,000 sq m and injuring four people. That afternoon a hypermarket in Pavlohrad burned, killing a 17-year-old and injuring seven. At about 17:00 a Geran-4 drone hit a petrol station in Kharkiv, where the emergency service said a 55-year-old woman was killed and four men injured. Agriculture minister Taras Vysotskyi has said Ukrainian production can still meet domestic consumption of basic goods and that gaps are a logistics problem, not a supply one.

Mykolaiv loses power for 300,000 and puts its trolleybuses on battery

The single largest effect of the two nights was in Mykolaiv. Shahed-136 drones, Banderol cruise missiles and an Iskander-M ballistic missile hit energy infrastructure in the city and in the Mykolaiv and Bashtanka districts early on August 29, leaving more than 300,000 consumers without electricity. Trams and trolleybuses stopped. Mayor Oleksandr Senkevych said 37 autonomous trolleybuses, which run up to 20 km away from the wires, were put on city routes. A supermarket and a warehouse in the city caught fire in the same attack.

The day before, Ukrenergo reported consumers cut off in Odesa, Mykolaiv, Kharkiv and Kyiv regions and published no numbers. In Kharkiv region on August 29 the tally ran to power lines at Chervona Poliana, power infrastructure at Cherkaska Lozova, a warehouse at Zolochiv, civilian enterprises at Chuhuiv and Liubotyn, a shopping centre and two petrol stations, with two killed and 11 injured. In Kherson region a shop, a gas pipeline and a mobile phone tower were hit across 34 settlements, killing one and wounding 26.

This is the pattern set out when Russia began aiming at the grid rather than at generation alone, and it is arriving earlier in the year than in previous winter campaigns. Kherson lost the last of its heat and power generating equipment three days ago. Mykolaiv is the second regional capital in a week to be worked over before the heating season starts.

Grain on the road to Izmail, and a ship that did not arrive

Shahed drones hit lorries carrying grain in the Safianivka hromada of Izmail district, Odesa region, in the early hours of August 29. Five lorries were destroyed and three damaged, about 125 tonnes of grain was damaged, a 50-year-old man was killed and three more injured. The district administration said transport infrastructure facilities were damaged, not port infrastructure. Russia's defence ministry claimed it struck a tanker parking area and fuel unloading points at Izmail port, which no Ukrainian source corroborated.

The quantity is small and the illustration is not. With the deep-water terminals under sustained attack, grain that used to leave through Odesa now moves by road and river to the Danube ports, which puts it on open ground in lorries inside drone range. It is the same shift that closed off both countries' grain exports at once earlier this summer and turned the ports themselves into the main front of the drone war.

It reaches the water too. The cargo ship Progress IV, flying the flag of the Dominican Republic and carrying sugar and peas from the Ukrainian Danube port of Reni to Turkey, caught fire in Romania's exclusive economic zone about 15 nautical miles off Sfantu Gheorghe on the evening of August 27, and subsequently sank. All 12 crew, eight Ukrainians and four Azerbaijanis, were rescued. Acting defence minister Radu Miruta said the vessel had reported being hit by a drone. President Nicusor Dan was careful: "The ship was hit, and it seems to have sunk, but for the moment we don't know by whom." Romania has opened a criminal investigation and nobody has been named.

Agriculture minister Vysotskyi told a briefing on August 28 that Russia has destroyed 90% of Ukraine's modern storage facilities, while saying there is no threat of hunger. Ukraine exported 1.42mn tonnes of agricultural products between August 1 and 26. Traffic runs the other way as well: Russia's biggest grain terminal at Novorossiysk has said repairs could take four months, and Ukraine's military intelligence chief Oleh Ivashchenko, in a report published by President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, claimed internal Russian documents show certain export categories down 80% this month and that Black Sea fleet ships are effectively blocked in Novorossiysk and unable to escort commercial or shadow-fleet vessels. Ivashchenko said Moscow is considering fitting civilian ships with small arms, electronic warfare gear and military personnel. Both claims come from Ukrainian intelligence and are unverified.

Heavy industry is going the same way. Five ballistic missiles struck the Zaporizhstal steelworks on August 27, hitting the blast furnace shop, power and transport infrastructure, a plant that had already stopped work after a strike on August 11 that killed eight and injured 26. Metinvest, its owner, stresses that Zaporizhstal makes pig iron and rolled steel for pipes, appliances and car parts, and is not a military facility. MP Musa Magomedov warned that Ukraine may be left without a steel industry by spring. Both of Ukraine's biggest steelworks have now been halted by missile strikes inside a fortnight, and the economy ministry has cut its growth forecast for this year from 1.3% to 0.5%.

Weapons and technology

Volume first. Ukraine's air force said Russia launched 267 strike drones, one Iskander-M and one Oniks from 18:00 on August 28, and that 233 drones were downed or suppressed by 08:30, with hits at 15 locations and debris at four. That is 87% of the drones, in line with the four preceding nights, which ran between 83% and 87%. It is not a record night: the standing record is about 1,484 drones and missiles in a single day on May 13 to 14, so Friday's package was less than a fifth of it. The Oniks is worth flagging on its own. It is an anti-ship missile, and it has now been fired at land targets on three of the past four nights.

Interception rates are the thing to watch, because one of the two numbers has gone missing. Ukraine's air force stopped publishing how many ballistic missiles Russia launches in early August and the change is still in force. Spokesman Colonel Yurii Ihnat explained that when the force posts a result of 28 to zero, "all our media write 'The Air Force did not shoot down a single missile'", which is then amplified nationally and repeated by Russian outlets. Oksana Romaniuk, who runs Ukraine's Institute of Mass Information, warned that the vacuum fills with suspicion. The practical consequence is that no ballistic interception rate can be calculated for any night in this window, and any percentage quoted for one is invention. The July baseline the defence ministry published was 87% of drones and cruise missiles and 15% of ballistic missiles, or 29 of 195, under what it called a critical shortage of interceptors, a shortage this publication has tracked since the spring.

On the night of August 27 to 28, half of the 164 drones launched were jet-powered. The Geran-4 flies at 500 km/h and the Geran-5 at 600 km/h against 185 km/h for the piston-engined Geran-2, and Ukrainian military intelligence assesses Russian output of the jet models at about 3,000 a month. Jet production overtook piston production this month. Against the older drones Ukraine was achieving about 95% by May; against these it is achieving 87%.

Militarnyi reports that Russia plans to build about 10,000 Dan-T cruise missiles for strikes on Ukraine next year, a 500 km weapon with a 135 kg warhead. That is a production plan, not a capability.

On new types, Ukraine's military intelligence disclosed on August 27 that Russia has used a longer-range Iskander variant, the 9M723-2 or Iskander-1000, against Kyiv, with a stated range of up to 550 km against about 390 km for the current missile. Recovered debris marked 9M723-2 has been published, but the directorate dated the use only to "summer 2026", so the disclosure is firm and the date is not. Specialist analysts note no detail was given on where or when the components were recovered. It follows evidence that Chinese components are behind Russia's Iskander production surge. Ukrainian intelligence also says Russia has converted up to 17 S-400 launchers to fire a surface-to-surface missile, the RM-48U, with a 150 kg to 180 kg warhead, usage rising from about 15 a month in the first half of the year to 46 in the first 20 days of July, which the directorate attributes to it costing less than an Iskander-M.

The Starlink question needs care, because a misleading version of it is circulating. Russia says a system called Volna Kupol Garant can disrupt Starlink by aiming a narrow radio beam at the satellites themselves and that it has entered mass production, and a wave of Spanish-language coverage on August 28 presented this as Ukrainian forces losing Starlink. The underlying reporting says close to the opposite. The jammer throws a roughly 20 sq km bubble over a fixed site in Russia's own rear to stop Starlink-guided Ukrainian long-range drones; Serhii Beskrestnov, an adviser to Ukraine's defence minister, told Reuters about ten had been detected, and a Ukrainian drone commander said that once his unit struck one installation its Starlink-equipped drones "flew without problems". The system jams one satellite at a time against a constellation of more than 10,000. The Institute for the Study of War assesses it as largely stationary at $1.5mn a unit and reads the publicity as an argument aimed at Washington against giving Ukraine Starlink over Russian territory, a view echoed in Kyiv. Ukraine has destroyed these installations at least three times since June.

Two other announcements should not be read as capabilities. Ukraine unveiled the Magura MV11 uncrewed surface vessel on August 24, which its maker says can stay at sea a week, carry 2,200 kg and launch up to 18 interceptor drones; it has not been used in combat. And leaked documents published on August 28 show a Russian manufacturer working on the UBB-M, a folding-wing interceptor drone ejected from a 160 mm mortar container with a 20 km radius and about 10 minutes of flight, single-sourced to a partisan group. Interceptors are the contested ground now, and Russia is late to it: Ukraine put its first jet-powered interceptor drone into service on August 21, and Chinese manufacturers are reported to be moving into cheap 3D-printed interceptors for export.

On range, nothing in these two days approached the year's marks. Yaroslavl was about 700 km. Ukraine's longest one-way drone strike this year reached Omsk, about 2,500 km away, in July. No hypersonic weapon was used by either side in the window. Russia did test an intercontinental ballistic missile from Plesetsk on August 28, which is signalling rather than warfighting and is normally scheduled long in advance. The broader arithmetic is unchanged: Russia's missile arsenal is expanding faster than Ukraine's ability to intercept it, and the jet drones are why the gap widened this month.

Major strikes and targets

Strikes on targets in Russia

Date	Target	Weapon	Region	Damage
3 Jun	St Petersburg oil terminal	Drones	Leningrad region	Hit on the opening day of Russia's SPIEF investment forum
7 Jul	Omsk refinery	Drones	Omsk	Largest refinery hit to that point and the deepest strike into Russia
16 Jul	Salavat refinery	Drones	Bashkortostan	Key units hit; about 3% of national refining capacity
18 Jul	Wildberries warehouse	Drones	Tambov region	Seven killed; opens the campaign against retail and logistics
4 Aug	Wildberries hubs near Moscow and St Petersburg; a refinery	Drones	Russia	Warehouses hit; refinery ablaze
7 Aug	Wildberries warehouse, Yekaterinburg	Drones	Sverdlovsk region	2,000 km from the border
12 Aug	Novorossiysk Grain Plant terminal	Drones	Krasnodar Krai	Loading equipment damaged; company puts repairs at one to four months
14 Aug	Last working Novorossiysk grain terminal	Drones	Krasnodar Krai	All three of the port's grain terminals out of service
17-18 Aug	Five bulk carriers	Sea and aerial drones	Novorossiysk and Tuapse	First large-scale strikes on ships carrying grain
19-25 Aug	Refineries at Ufa, Nizhnekamsk, Perm, Novokuybyshevsk, Afipsky and Novoshakhtinsk	Drones	Russia	Perm and Novoshakhtinsk suspended processing
22-24 Aug	Ozon warehouses at Chapayevsk (Samara), Orenburg, Makhachkala (Dagestan), Enem and Adygeysk (Adygea), Nevinnomyssk (Stavropol)	Drones	Samara, Orenburg, Dagestan, Adygea, Stavropol	Four warehouses hit and set ablaze, with injuries at Chapayevsk and Makhachkala; operations suspended. Adygeysk and Nevinnomyssk evacuated on a drone threat but undamaged. Ozon shares fell 28%
24 Aug	Astrakhan gas processing plant; Kamensky Combine	Drones	Astrakhan and Rostov regions	Two gas separation units hit
25-26 Aug	Lukoil-Nizhegorodnefteorgsintez, Kstovo	Drones	Nizhny Novgorod region	Crude processing suspended; every major Lukoil refinery in Russia now offline
26 Aug	Wildberries logistics centre, Kotovsk	Drones	Tambov region	Three of 19 drones got through; more than 100,000 sq m burned, complex destroyed, two injured
27 Aug	Ozon logistics centres at Ufa (Bashkortostan) and Orenburg	Drones	Bashkortostan and Orenburg region	Ufa warehouse suffered minor damage and closed for inspection; Orenburg facility evacuated on a drone threat and resumed work soon after
27 Aug	Bashkir Soda Company, Sterlitamak	Drones	Bashkortostan	Smoke over the industrial zone; target identified by open-source analysts, not confirmed officially
27-28 Aug	Shchastia thermal power station	Drones	Occupied Luhansk	Fire at the plant; blackout across occupied Luhansk and Donetsk, restoration time not given
28 Aug	Slavneft-YANOS refinery, Yaroslavl	FP-1 drones	Yaroslavl region	Fire recorded; eighth strike on the plant this year; damage not yet assessed
28 Aug	Magnit hypermarket, Pavlovsky Posad	Drone	Moscow region	Store hit; 46 windows shattered in the adjacent clinic; no casualties; first reported strike on one of the chain's hypermarkets
28 Aug	Power transmission line	Drones	Voronezh region	Two villages and a farmstead cut off
26-28 Aug	21 substations and gas distribution stations in occupied territory	Drones	Occupied Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson, Zaporizhzhia and Crimea	Ukrainian Unmanned Systems Forces claim; no damage detail and no Russian confirmation
29 Aug	Ozon logistics facility	Drones	Rostov region	Small fire extinguished; operations suspended for inspection, per the company; site placed at Aksay by some accounts and Rostov-on-Don by others
29 Aug	DNS warehouse, Aksay	Drones	Rostov region	Reported ablaze by open-source channels; the governor confirmed only drone debris on the site
29 Aug	Chizhik supermarket warehouse, Leninskoye	Drones	Rostov region	Reported struck by a single Telegram channel; no official confirmation

Strikes on targets in Ukraine

Date	Target	Weapon	Region	Damage
15 Jun	Odesa ports	Missiles and drones	Odesa	Export infrastructure damaged; first sustained pressure on the sea corridor
6 Jul	Crimean power grid	Drones	Occupied Crimea	Peninsula-wide blackout
14 Jul	Togo-flagged merchant ship, Odesa port	Missile	Odesa	Three crew killed
19 Jul	Kyiv and other cities	Missiles and drones	Ukraine	Largest bombardment of the war to that date, in response to the Tambov strike
27 Jul	Drone-industry exhibition	Missiles	Kyiv region	At least 10 killed
31 Jul	US-owned drone factory	Missile	Ukraine	Plant destroyed
5 Aug	Kyiv	24 ballistic missiles	Kyiv	Air defences unable to respond; interceptor stocks reported near exhaustion
18 Aug	Kryvyi Rih thermal power station	Drones	Dnipropetrovska oblast	Damaged beyond the ability to generate
20 Aug	Antonov aircraft plants; drone and cruise missile component sites; three retail chains' warehouses	About 75 missiles, 23 ballistic or hypersonic	Kyiv	18 killed, 42 injured, 90,000 customers cut off; no ballistic missile intercepted
21 Aug	Largest shopping centre in Kryvyi Rih	Drone	Dnipropetrovska oblast	16 killed, 140 injured, three missing
22 Aug	Ukrzaliznytsia rail depots and repair works, Darnytskyi district	11-13 ballistic missiles	Kyiv	Extensive fires; air defences inactive
22-25 Aug	DTEK energy assets; Odesa and Chornomorsk ports; Rozdilna rail junction; two Epicentr stores; fuel depots	Missiles and drones	Odesa region	Six ships damaged in Greater Odesa between 18 and 24 August
25-26 Aug	Power distribution across five regions	162 Shahed-type drones, some jet-powered	Kharkiv, Sumy, Chernihiv, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia	Consumers cut off in five regions; Ukrenergo published no numbers
26-27 Aug	Kherson combined heat and power plant	Five guided bombs over two nights	Kherson	All remaining heat and power generating equipment destroyed weeks before the heating season
27 Aug	Odesa port infrastructure and a grain elevator	Missiles and drones	Odesa	Seven-hour attack; elevator and port damaged, three injured; trains delayed more than 17 hours
27 Aug	Warehouses and distribution centres of Roshen, Comfy, Avrora, Budynok Ihrashok, Fora, KOLO and Epicentr	258 drones, two Oniks and Iskander-M/KN-23 ballistic missiles	Kyiv region	Roshen, Avrora and Budynok Ihrashok centres destroyed; third strike on Fora logistics in August
27 Aug	Industrial plants and an energy facility, Kremenchuk and Myrhorod districts	Drones	Poltava	Seven settlements cut off
28 Aug	Nova Poshta warehouse at Sviatopetrivske and terminal in Sumy	Drones; four guided bombs at Sumy	Kyiv region and Sumy	Warehouse struck twice more while crews fought the fire; Sumy terminal hit and three lorries damaged; a Kyiv region sorting centre destroyed
27 Aug	Zaporizhstal steelworks	Five ballistic missiles	Zaporizhzhia	Blast furnace shop, power and transport infrastructure hit; plant already halted since the 11 August strike that killed eight
27 Aug	Cargo ship Progress IV, out of Reni with sugar and peas	Reported drone strike, unattributed	Black Sea, Romania's economic zone	Caught fire and sank; all 12 crew rescued; Romania has opened a criminal investigation and named nobody
28 Aug	Fozzy hypermarket and production facilities, Vyshneve	Drones	Kyiv region	Operations halted, scale of damage being assessed; no casualties
28 Aug	Epicentr hypermarket, Zaporizhzhia	Drone	Zaporizhzhia	Fire over about 2,000 sq m; four injured; the chain's last operating store in the city
28 Aug	Hypermarket, Pavlohrad	Not stated	Dnipropetrovsk	Store burned; a 17-year-old killed and seven injured; the chain was not named by officials
28 Aug	Petrol station, Kharkiv	Geran-4 drone	Kharkiv	Fuel dispensers and operator's building burned; one woman killed and four men injured
28 Aug	14 warehouse premises across five districts, including a book warehouse at Sviatopetrivske	Shahed-type drones	Kyiv region	Publishing stock destroyed; Readeat suspended shipments
28 Aug	Warehouses of a private company, Myla	Drones	Kyiv region	Prolonged detonations; M-06 highway closed over 17 km; more than 200 evacuated; prosecutors opened an inquiry into the storage of explosive materials
28 Aug	Cargo lorries	Drones	Zhytomyr	Four lorries and three semi-trailers burned
28 Aug	Power facilities in four regions	Not stated	Odesa, Mykolaiv, Kharkiv and Kyiv	Consumers cut off; Ukrenergo published no numbers
29 Aug	Lorries carrying grain, Safianivka	Shahed drones	Odesa, Izmail district	Five lorries destroyed and three damaged; about 125 tonnes of grain damaged; one killed and three injured
29 Aug	Energy infrastructure, Mykolaiv city and two districts	Shahed-136 drones, Banderol cruise missiles, one Iskander-M	Mykolaiv	More than 300,000 consumers cut off; trams and trolleybuses suspended
29 Aug	Supermarket and a warehouse, Mykolaiv	Drones	Mykolaiv	Both caught fire; no casualties reported
29 Aug	Warehouse at Zolochiv, enterprises at Chuhuiv and Liubotyn, power lines at Chervona Poliana and Cherkaska Lozova, a shopping centre and two petrol stations	Four missiles, guided bombs, 11 Molniya drones, one FPV and 83 unidentified drones	Kharkiv	Cherkaska Lozova cut off; two killed and 11 injured across the region
29 Aug	A shop, a gas pipeline and a mobile phone tower	Not stated	Kherson	34 settlements struck; one killed and 26 wounded
29 Aug	Logistics company building, Pavlohrad	Not stated	Dnipropetrovsk	Building destroyed; two wounded

Strikes on economic infrastructure since 1 June 2026. Compiled from publicly available sources, including our own reporting and the Centre for Eastern Studies' war reports. Dates are of the strike where known and of first report otherwise; the list is of significant strikes on economic targets and is not exhaustive.

Both populations are now paying at the counter

Twelve months ago the tables above were a list of refineries, substations and ports. This week they hold a grocer's hypermarket outside Moscow, an electronics warehouse in Rostov, a DIY store in Pavlohrad, a book warehouse in Bucha district and a petrol station in Kharkiv. Both sides have worked through the industrial targets and moved to the retail and distribution layer, which is cheaper to hit, harder to defend and immediately visible to the public.

That visibility is the point, and this week is the first in which it can be measured on both sides at once. A Russian driver finds petrol at fewer than a third of stations and pays nearly 20% more than in January. A Ukrainian shopper finds a six-item cap on sugar and pasta at the country's biggest chain. Neither is a collapse. Both are the civilian population being handed the bill.

The exchange still runs on a two-day clock. Ukraine burned Ozon warehouses in Bashkortostan and Orenburg on August 27 and Russia destroyed seven Kyiv-region distribution centres the same night. Ukraine hit a Magnit on August 28 and Russia hit an Epicentr, a Fozzy and a Pavlohrad hypermarket within hours. Ukraine hit Ozon and DNS in Rostov overnight and Russia took the lights out in Mykolaiv. Neither government is getting the result it describes: Russia cannot rebuild refining capacity faster than it is losing it and cannot export the crude instead, because the terminals and the ships are being hit too, while Ukraine cannot move its grain, cannot replace generating plant before winter and has lost both its biggest steelworks. What changed this week is only who notices.