Russian drones destroyed the distribution centres of four Ukrainian retail chains in one night, while Ukrainian drones set fire to the eighth Russian refinery hit this month in the last two days.

The 48 hours to August 28 are the clearest run of the economic war yet. Ukraine is taking apart the refining and warehousing that earns Russia its cash and moves its goods, and Russia is taking apart the power stations and depots that keep Ukrainian shops lit and stocked. Kherson lost the last of its heat and power generation, every major Lukoil refinery in Russia went offline, and both countries spent the period hitting parcels, pallets and substations rather than obvious military targets.

Russia's has been targeting economic infrastructure as it tries to systematically destroy both Ukraine’s power and retail sector after Ukraine started targeting oil refineries and more recently Russia’s retail sector. Warehouses and logistics hubs, and the goods inside them, are now the most frequently struck category on both sides of the border.

Seven chains lose their warehouses in a night

Russia launched 258 strike drones, two Oniks anti-ship missiles and an unstated number of Iskander-M and KN-23 ballistic missiles on the night of August 26, and Ukraine's air force said it brought down 233 of them, Interfax-Ukraine reported. What got through landed almost entirely on the warehouse belt around Kyiv.

The confectioner Roshen that belongs to former President Petro Poroshenko lost its finished-goods warehouse at Chubynske and warned of "temporary supply disruptions for certain goods". The discount chain Avrora and the toy retailer Budynok Ihrashok both lost distribution centres, the latter almost completely, along with a significant share of its nationwide stock. The electronics retailer Comfy took a direct drone hit on its logistics centre. Warehouses belonging to supermarkets Fora, KOLO and Epicentr were damaged, Censor.net reported. For Fora it was the third strike on its logistics in August.

Varus, which owns KOLO, said its stores "remain open and operate normally" but that some may see delays in supplying certain goods. Fora and Novus ran short of fruit, vegetables, meat, dairy and eggs after an earlier round of strikes on cold stores around the capital emptied Kyiv's supermarket shelves in the middle of August.

More than 300,000 square metres of Ukrainian warehouse space has been damaged in the first six months of 2026, approaching the 400,000 square metres destroyed in Kyiv oblast alone in 2022, according to Censor.net.

The parcel network has also been targeted. Drones hit a logistics firm Nova Poshta warehouse at Sviatopetrivske in Kyiv oblast at 04:40 on August 28, then struck the same site twice more about an hour later while fire crews were still working. The company said four guided bombs also hit its terminal in Sumy, damaging three lorries, and that a sorting centre in Kyiv oblast had been destroyed. It promised full compensation for damaged shipments.

Ukraine’s attacks on Russian retail are focused on two companies – Wildberries and Ozon. Russia attacks are broad-based and targeting the entire economic infrastructure chain. The national railway company Ukrzaliznytsia reported trains delayed by more than 17 hours after the Odesa attack, and by the morning of August 28 more than 100 services were running late, the worst by 15 hours, with the operator warning the disruption would last at least another day.

Ukraine’s main port of Odesa has seen repeated attacks by drones and the Banderol missiles that have shut the port down and chocked off Ukraine’s grain exports. It was under attack for more than seven hours on August 27. A grain elevator and port infrastructure were damaged and three men were injured, the head of the regional military administration, Oleh Kiper, said. Infrastructure attacks have been crippling both countries' ports since June and now feeds directly into the food price shock building in the Black Sea grain trade.

Power and heat in the crosshairs

Kherson's combined heat and power plant was hit with a single guided bomb on August 26 and four more the following night. The second attack "completely destroyed and disabled all of the heat- and power-generating equipment that remained at the facility", the Naftogaz-owned operator said, Ukrinform reported. More than 60,000 people are still living in the city, including over 4,000 children, and the heating season starts in weeks.

"This attack has no military justification whatsoever," said Serhii Fedorenko, acting chairman of the board of Naftogaz. "Its sole purpose is to terrorize civilians and attempt to deprive tens of thousands of Kherson residents of a source of heat on the eve of the heating season." The plant supplies heat to a significant share of Kherson's residential blocks.

The grid took hits across the country either side of it. A raid of 162 drones on the night of August 25 cut supply in five oblasts and utilities company Ukrenergo asked households to shift consumption away from the evening peak. By the morning of August 27, the energy ministry counted outages in six regions. In Poltava oblast, strikes on industrial plants and an energy facility left seven settlements without electricity.

While the attacks are being reported, it has not been possible to assess the level of damage as energy ministry named six oblasts but gave no details, no damaged-equipment list and no restoration timeline; Ukrenergo did the same for its five attacks. Naftogaz called the Kherson plant totally destroyed without publishing a repair estimate. Disclosure is now being limited ahead of the winter campaign to freeze Ukraine into submission.

Russian oil refineries going dark

Russia’s second largest oil company Lukoil had its NORSI plant at Kstovo k knocked out. Russia's second-largest petrol producer suspended crude processing after a drone strike on August 26 that damaged several processing units and inter-unit infrastructure. With its Perm refinery shut since August 21 and Volgograd since July 31, that took every major Lukoil refinery in Russia offline at once. Perm has lost more than 80% of its primary refining capacity.

Ukraine's general staff confirmed a strike on the Slavneft-YANOS refinery at Yaroslavl on the night of August 28, and the manufacturer Fire Point said its FP-1 drones were responsible. It was the eighth strike on that plant this year and more than 700 km from the border. A fire was recorded; no shutdown has been confirmed.

Ukraine’s targeting of retail campaign continues. Nineteen drones went for the Wildberries logistics centre at Kotovsk in Tambov oblast on August 26, of which three got through, the governor Yevgeny Pervyshov said. Fire spread across more than 100,000 square metres and destroyed the complex, which had been built to hold 54mn items and opened only last year. Two people were hurt. The following night drones hit Ozon logistics hubs in Bashkortostan and Orenburg, more than 1,200 km from the border; Ozon reported minor damage, closed the first for inspection and had the second working again within hours.

The bill continues to grow. Sellers on the two platforms have lost up to RUB800bn ($10bn) between them, according to Data Insight analyst Sergei Semko, with at least seven of Wildberries' 10 largest warehouses knocked out and about 1.18mn square metres of storage damaged or destroyed, more than a fifth of its capacity. Ozon's combined losses run between RUB118.5bn ($1.5bn) and RUB169.5bn ($2.1bn), Kyiv Post reported. Operation Wildberries has been the most expensive front of the war.

Two other targets fell outside the usual categories. Drones left smoke over the industrial zone at Sterlitamak on August 27, where open-source analysts put the target as the Bashkir Soda Company, Russia's largest producer of soda ash and PVC, though no official source has confirmed it. And a strike on the Shchastia thermal power station in occupied Luhansk on the night of August 27 caused a blackout across occupied Luhansk and Donetsk with no restoration time given.

Jet drones make up 85% of the raids

Russia has upgraded its drones, retiring the Geran-2 drone, based on the Iranian-designed Shahed-136 loitering munition, and replacing them with the much more powerful jet propelled Geran-4 and Geran-5 cruise missile-lite varients.

Of about 140 drones Russia sent over in daylight on August 27, more than 100 were jet-powered, the Ukrainian air force said. That is over 85% of a single raid, against "over 50" of 217 on the night of August 21. 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 that Ukraine had learned to shoot down about 95% of the time. Monthly output of the jet models, at about 3,000, has now overtaken the Geran-2 at about 2,800 and production of the new variants surged 40% this year, according to reports.

Russia has been investing heavily into improving its cost-to-kill ratio as part of the drone arms race. In a new development, a Russian drone appears to have chosen its own target using AI. Ukrainian intelligence recovered an unencrypted Nvidia Jetson Orin computer from a downed Molniya missile that could read both its terrain imagery and its object-detection code, the New York Times reported. Operators set the route; the software picked what to hit, most likely propane tanks it had been trained to recognise at a filling station in Zaporizhzhia on July 6, killing three civilians. Kateryna Bondar of Center for Strategic & International Studies (CSIS) called it the first documented case of civilian deaths from fully autonomous Russian targeting.

At the expensive end, Ukraine's military intelligence confirmed the first combat use of the Iskander-1000 ballistic missile against Kyiv, a 9M723-2 with a range of up to 550 km and a warhead of about 500 kg, from a production order of just 18 rounds at roughly $2.5mn each. At the cheap end, Russia has converted up to 17 of its S-400 surface-to-air defence system launchers to fire the RM-48U at ground targets, and fired 46 of them in the first 20 days of July against about 15 a month over the first half of the year. Ukraine has received a small number of Patriot interceptor missiles and used them against the RM-48U, but these are much cheaper to make than the Iskander-M and the point of the switch seems to be precisely this: force the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) to use up its tiny stock of interceptors before bringing out the more powerful Iskanders.

News on Russia’s Kinzhal hypersonic missiles has gone quiet. Russia stopped producing it in April and last used it on May 14, according to Major General Vadym Skibitskyi, deputy head of Ukraine's defence intelligence, who said it lands within 30 metres or more where five to seven are needed. None of the hypersonic Kinzhal, Zircon or Oreshnik appeared in any strike package this week.

The interception picture is now dark as Ukraine's air force stopped publishing ballistic and hypersonic counts during August. Spokesman Colonel Yurii Ihnat defended the change by saying that publishing "28/0" produced headlines that Russian media simply copied, while conceding that "honesty and transparency in communication are what advantageously distinguished our Armed Forces from the Russian ones", Kyiv Independent reported. The last full month on the record, July, had 29 of 195 ballistic missiles intercepted, 187 of 265 cruise missiles and 5,142 of 8,653 drones, with the defence ministry describing a critical shortage of interceptor missiles. Ukraine's stock of PAC-3 MSE interceptor rounds, the only munition that reliably kill an Iskander-M in its terminal dive, ran dry around the start of July.

Russia's defence ministry said it downed 426 drones on August 26, 267 on August 27 and 512 into August 28, and separately claimed it had intercepted every one of 8,477 drones and 26 Flamingo cruise missile fired at it in the week to August 21. The record set this week was in Kyiv, which had 13 air raid alerts on August 27, the most of any day since the full-scale invasion began, that lasted 872 minutes.

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

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

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.