Ukraine and Russia exchanged their heaviest overnight strikes in weeks on August 11-12, with Ukrainian drones and missiles hitting Russia's Novorossiysk grain terminal, a Wildberries logistics hub and an Orenburg oil refinery, while a Russian missile barrage on Zaporizhzhia killed six people and wounded dozens more. The exchange is the latest escalation in a Ukrainian strike campaign that Kyiv says has now cost Russia more than $8bn in confirmed damage since it was formally approved by President Volodymyr Zelenskiy on June 25.

Forty days of strikes, tallied

Ukrainian drones have struck more than 100 strategic targets inside Russia and occupied territory over the past 40 days that Zelenskiy gave Russian President Vladimir Putin to come to the negotiating table last month. in addition, 201 ships and 201 energy facilities have been hit, according to a Ukrainian military tally. The 40 days is significant as in Eastern Europe, tradition has it that a person’s soul only leaves their body after 40 days, after they die. Zelenskiy’s deadline was an implicit death threat.

The $8bn figure covers only confirmed losses and excludes the cost of repairing 26 damaged oil refineries or the knock-on losses from disrupted maritime logistics; Ukraine's General Staff separately estimates Russia's total losses from Ukrainian strikes at $13.5bn for the year from August 2025 to August 2026.

The campaign's cumulative effect on Russia's economy is becoming harder to hide: oil refining has fallen to its lowest level in 24 years, fuel shortages have spread to almost the entire country, grain exports are down 37.6% in a single month, and occupied Crimea has spent the past 40 days under emergency conditions.

Zelenskiy has continued approving new operations - on August 11 alone, Ukraine's Defence Forces struck the Orsknefteorgsintez oil refinery in Russia's Orenburg region, while a separate fire broke out at a refinery in Komsomolsk-on-Amur, more than 6,000km from the front line.

Novorossiysk, a Wildberries warehouse and 43 targets in Crimea

Russian authorities reported a large-scale drone attack involving "several hundred" Ukrainian drones on Krasnodar Krai overnight, with Telegram channels and satellite fire data showing blazes at Novorossiysk's port, an oil terminal and its naval harbour; regional governor Veniamin Kondratyev said Novorossiysk, Anapa, Gelendzhik and the Temryuk district all came under attack.

Zelenskiy said Ukrainian forces used domestically developed Neptune missiles, Palyanytsia jet-powered drones and naval drones to strike one of Russia's largest grain terminals at Novorossiysk during the barrage, part of a wider pattern of both sides now targeting each other's port and civilian-economy infrastructure.

Separately, Ukraine's Unmanned Systems Forces commander Robert "Madiar" Brovdi said his forces struck a Wildberries logistics warehouse in Voronezh the same night, alongside the Orsknefteorgsintez refinery - which has a processing capacity of around 6mn tonnes of crude a year - and military and energy targets at 43 locations in Russian-occupied Crimea and southern Ukraine, including a Buk-M3 air-defence system, an ammunition depot and a shadow-fleet cargo vessel sunk in the Black Sea which has become a special focus of Ukrainian attacks.

The Voronezh strike is the latest round in Operation Wildberries, Ukraine's months-long campaign against the Russian e-commerce giant's logistics network, which Reuters reports has now hit more than 20 Wildberries facilities, destroyed roughly 1.18mn square metres of warehouse capacity and cut the retailer's turnover by about a quarter.

A Russian military blogger account and RBC separately reported, citing the Krasnodar Krai governor, that an eight-year-old child was killed and eight other people injured in the overnight Novorossiysk attack, with drone debris damaging 21 residential buildings - an attributed, Russian-sourced claim not independently verified by Western or Ukrainian sources at the time of writing.

North Korean missiles enter the game

Russia's overnight barrage on Ukraine was itself part of a wider attack that used Zircon anti-ship hypersonic missiles, Iskander-M and the first confirmed reports of North Korean-made KN-23 ballistic missiles, and around 120 Shahed-type drones against Kyiv and Zaporizhzhia.

Ukrainian officials say Moscow is increasingly targeting the personnel behind Ukraine's own weapons programmes alongside its energy and logistics infrastructure.

Zaporizhzhia took the heaviest damage: Zelenskiy said Russian forces struck the city with North Korean ballistic missiles, Zircons and FAB glide bombs in what he called "a vicious attack, calculated to inflict maximum damage specifically on civilian infrastructure," killing six people and wounding 19. The strike also disrupted operations at the Zaporizhstal metallurgical plant, killing seven of its workers and injuring 21 more.

In Kyiv, Russian strikes damaged an infectious-diseases hospital building and a gas pipeline and destroyed a warehouse; Kherson and Kharkiv both suffered power outages after Russian strikes on electricity substations.

Ukraine's National Police put the broader toll across Zaporizhzhia region at 938 Russian strikes on 58 settlements over 24 hours - 651 drones, 23 air strikes, 247 artillery strikes and seven multiple-launch rocket attacks - killing six people and wounding 52 across the region as a whole. Vadym Skibitsky, deputy head of Ukraine's HUR military intelligence directorate, said Russia is now fulfilling its monthly missile-production plan at 110-120% and aims to produce 11,000 attack drones by the end of August, underscoring why interceptor supply - not missile production - has become the binding constraint on Ukraine's air defence.