A wave of Ukrainian drone strikes across Russia has killed at least three people and caused separate fires at a major oil refinery and a warehouse belonging to Russian e-commerce giant Wildberries.
Russia’s Ministry of Defence said on Wednesday that its air defence systems intercepted and destroyed 426 Ukrainian drones overnight, including over Russian-occupied parts of Ukraine.
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Tambov Governor Yevgeny Pervyshov said that the Wildberries logistics centre was “completely destroyed by fire”. He said earlier that about 100,000 square metres (1.1 million square feet) of the facility were set ablaze, the equivalent of 14 football pitches.
One person was injured in the strike, he wrote on the Telegram messaging app. He did not say if the fire had been extinguished.
The overnight strike targeted the Wildberries logistics centre in Kotovsk, about 500 kilometres (310 miles) southeast of Moscow.
Another industrial facility in the Nizhny Novgorod region was also damaged in a drone attack, according to the regional governor. He did not give any further details, but the Ukrainian General Staff said the country’s military struck Lukoil’s NORSI oil refinery in the region overnight. The strike caused a fire at the site, and the extent of the damage was being assessed, the General Staff said on Telegram.
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said that Ukraine hit 16 targets in Russia over the past day, including oil facilities and logistics sites. He added that the targets also included airfields, a missile unit, a military enterprise and infrastructure that Moscow uses to launch attacks against Ukraine, without naming the specific sites.
“The war must return to where it came from,” he said in a post on X.
In the Lipetsk region, a man and a 14-year-old were killed in a fire lit by a falling drone, while a woman was killed in a drone attack in the Belgorod region bordering Ukraine, the Reuters news agency quoted local authorities as saying on Telegram.
Ukraine has been hitting Wildberries facilities since mid-July, and it has also targeted the retailer’s main rival, Ozon, in recent days.
The two companies dominate one of the fastest-growing segments of the Russian economy, which is otherwise close to stagnation after four and a half years of Russia’s war on Ukraine.
Ukraine has accused Wildberries of having a role in Russia’s military supply chain. Moscow and the company say its facilities are used for civilian purposes.
Meanwhile in Ukraine, a Russian guided aerial bomb attack seriously damaged a combined heat and power plant in Ukraine’s southern city of Kherson, the plant’s owner, Ukrainian energy company Naftogaz, has said. The extent of the damage will be assessed as soon as the security situation allows, Naftogaz said.
Both Moscow and Kyiv have repeatedly denied targeting civilians since Russia launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022. But strikes on both sides of the front have intensified in recent months, causing a growing number of civilian casualties.
