223 drones on refineries and Wildberries — Ukraine is pressuring Russian military logistics in 2026

The most unpleasant figure for Moscow this week is not the number of downed drones, but the geography of the fires. On the night of July 23, Ukrainian strikes targeted not only the usual military facilities near the border but also a refinery in the Ulyanovsk region, a pumping station in Bashkortostan, and yet another logistics hub of Wildberries in Voronezh. If the data about 223 drones from Ukrainian and Russian monitoring reports is fully confirmed, we are not looking at a separate spectacular action, but a mature campaign of operational-economic pressure.

It is important not to fall into the temptation of cheap triumphalism. One fire at a small refinery does not stop the Russian army. One warehouse of an online retailer is not equivalent to an army arsenal. But the war of large numbers is arranged differently. It does not require every strike to be decisive. It is enough for dozens of strikes to force the enemy to secure warehouses, change routes, shift rotations, break down supplies, delay shipments, and spend scarce air defense resources on targets that were considered civilian infrastructure just yesterday.

From fuel to dual-use warehouses

According to Kyiv Independent on July 23, after the alleged Ukrainian strike, a large fire was observed at the NS-Oil Refinery in the village of Novospasskoye in the Ulyanovsk region. The plant is small by Russian standards — about 600,000 tons of raw materials per year, which is less than one percent of national processing. But its distance from the Ukrainian border, approximately 650 kilometers, is more important than its absolute capacity. It shows that Kyiv is increasingly operating not only against the "near oil base" but against a distributed network of processing and pumping.

The second episode is the smoke over Tuymazy in Bashkortostan, where, according to the same reports, a pumping station may have been hit. For a military economist, this is a more interesting target than a beautiful flame over a tank. A pumping station is a bottleneck in logistics, not just a tank of fuel. The Russian army, like the Soviet one before it, is strong when the railway, pipeline, and road delivery work as a unified system. If one link starts to fail, the lack of fuel may manifest not in Moscow, but in a queue of fuel trucks near Belgorod or in the delay of diesel supply to an artillery brigade.

Against this backdrop, strikes on Wildberries appear less strange than they seem to a civilian observer. Al Jazeera reported on July 22 that the company evacuated its logistics centers in Krasnodar and Nevinnomyssk after new attacks, while local authorities spoke of injuries, and Tatyana Kim confirmed the cessation of operations at the facilities. Zelensky directly called these centers sites related to the supply of components for drones, navigation equipment, and supplies for the Russian army. This statement requires caution: public verification of the contents of a specific warehouse is still limited. But the very type of target is logical. A modern army consumes not only shells and diesel but also commercial quadcopters, batteries, optics, cables, armor plates, first aid kits, and cheap electronics.

Why civilian logistics became a military target

After 2022, the Russian supply system partially returned to the late Soviet habit — officially denying shortages while actually closing them through informal channels. In Afghanistan, this was called "getting it through acquaintances." In Ukraine, it became a marketplace, volunteer collections, and parallel imports. The difference is only in scale. While a Soviet sergeant searched for a spare part in the warehouse of a neighboring unit, today's battalion can order a thermal imager, antenna, or controller through a civilian platform. Therefore, a strike on such a platform does not necessarily have to destroy a secret military cargo. It is enough to disrupt the commercial infrastructure that has become a backup lifeline for the front.

Reuters, BBC, Al Jazeera, and Ukrainian sources have independently reported in recent days the fact of repeated strikes on Wildberries and the acknowledgment of losses by the company or local authorities. The official Russian line is predictable: to speak of "terrorist attacks" and minimize the military function of the facilities. This reflects an old bureaucratic reflex. What is not on the Ministry of Defense's balance sheet seems to have no relation to the war. But the war has long since gone beyond balance sheets. If private logistics transports goods that ultimately support units, it becomes part of the military economy, even if it legally remains civilian.

With fuel, the situation is even more straightforward. The Russian General Staff can compensate for individual losses of equipment but cannot change the physics of consumption. A tank battalion on the march, an artillery group, mobile air defense, evacuation vehicles, and communication generators daily convert diesel into combat capability. Reports of gasoline shortages in several Russian regions, export restrictions, and queues at gas stations do not automatically mean the army will collapse. The military consumer will always take precedence over the civilian. But that is why the civilian market is the first to show the system's tension. When the state pushes the population out of the queue for fuel, it is not a sign of surplus but a sign of administrative distribution of scarcity.

The operational meaning of long-range strikes

The Ukrainian campaign is gradually shifting from symbolic strikes on prestigious targets to a more mundane but military logic — nodes of processing, pumping, storage, sorting, and delivery. This resembles not classic "strategic bombings" of World War II, but rather the late Soviet theory of defeating the command and rear system, only executed with cheap drones. Soviet textbooks loved the word "disorganization." It usually sounded empty. Now it unexpectedly describes what is happening with precision.

Long-range Ukrainian drones do not have to penetrate every Russian air defense system. Their strength lies in the economy of exchange. Russia is forced to defend refineries, pumping stations, marketplace warehouses, ports, airfields, oil depots, substations, and administrative centers across the expanse from the Black Sea to the Volga. Ukraine chooses the point of attack, and Russia must stretch its defense across the entire map. This does not negate Russian offensives near Kupiansk or in the Zaporizhzhia region, as reported by the Russian Ministry of Defense on July 22. But it changes the cost of every kilometer of advance.

There is also a political layer. Strikes on oil infrastructure hit regional budgets, tax flows, and the everyday confidence of the Russian citizen, who has heard for four years that the war is far away. Strikes on Wildberries are painful also because the company is a symbol of the new Russian everyday life: a marketplace, fast deliveries, private entrepreneurial activity embedded in the state military machine. When such a symbol burns, the propaganda formula "the front is separate, normal life is separate" begins to crack.

Limits of the effect

It must be said honestly: Ukraine does not yet have the density of strikes comparable to a full-fledged NATO air campaign. The Russian oil system is large, redundant, and knows how to operate in emergency mode. Wildberries has hundreds of distributed facilities, and the Russian state knows how to compel businesses to quickly restore operations. Moreover, some reports about targets and damage are based on Telegram videos and statements from the parties, which means they require subsequent verification. The drone war creates a lot of smoke — literally and analytically.

But this is where the line between news and trend is drawn. If the strikes from July 18 to 23 remain a single series, Moscow will experience them as an expensive but tolerable episode. However, if they become a rhythm — refinery, pumping station, logistics center, port, again refinery — the Russian military machine will face not a sudden catastrophe but a chronic increase in the cost of war. In Russian history, this is almost always more dangerous than a loud defeat: the system continues to march, but each subsequent step costs more than the previous one.

The main conclusion is simple: Kyiv is no longer just trying to repel the Russian mass at the front line. It is learning to strike at the civil-military links that feed, fuel, and supply that mass.

My prediction with the usual caveat: in the coming months, Russia will retain the ability to advance in certain areas of the front, but the cost of that ability will rise faster than Moscow acknowledges. Ukrainian long-range drones will not replace artillery and infantry; however, they are gradually transforming the Russian rear from a space of confidence into a space of risk management. For an army built on heavy logistics, this is not a trifle. It is the beginning of a different accounting of war.