A Russian overnight strike heavily damaged a German-owned car-parts plant in Zhytomyr Oblast, forcing it to halt production, the company said. No workers were hurt, but the destruction was extensive. One of the region's major employers now has no restart date.

A German plant knocked offline

Russia struck Zhytomyr Oblast overnight into 9 August and hit the Kromberg & Schubert plant, which reported the attack on Facebook. Its production lines and infrastructure took heavy damage. 

"The most important thing for us is that no employees were hurt in the attack," the statement said. 

With the damage so severe, the plant suspended operations for an indefinite period. A restart depends on a technical assessment and the full scope of repairs, the company added.

Kromberg & Schubert is a civilian manufacturer with 100% German investment. It has run in the Zhytomyr region for 11 years and employs about 3,500 people. The plant makes the wiring harnesses that thread through cars, supplying European automakers.

Vitalii Bunechko, head of the Zhytomyr Oblast Military Administration, called it one of the region's budget-forming enterprises. He said the administration and local authorities are working to help the strategic investor and keep the plant running.

Part of a wider overnight assault

Bunechko reported that Russia had launched a massive strike on the oblast overnight. The attack also damaged civilian infrastructure, he said. State Emergency Service crews contained the fires, and investigators began work at the site. 

Russia has repeatedly struck Zhytomyr Oblast during the war, stepping up its drone strikes on northwestern Ukraine, often exploiting Belarusian territory.

Russia is trying to knock out Ukraine's gas production before the cold comes. Russia carried out massive strikes on the assets of the Naftogaz Group in eastern, western, and central Ukraine, the company reported.

The strikes target Ukraine's ability to produce the gas it needs for winter. The Russians aim to inflict maximum damage on Ukrainian production and other critical infrastructure to make preparation for the heating season impossible, acting Naftogaz chairman Serhii Fedorenko said, calling the intensity of attacks on oil-and-gas infrastructure sharply higher in recent days.

The strikes hit extraction across the country

Russia targeted the sites where Ukraine pulls gas from the ground. On the night of 9 August, the extraction assets of Ukrnafta and a company drilling site came under massive attack, with Russian forces using dozens of strike drones against the extraction infrastructure.

The damage stopped production. There is substantial destruction at the site; part of the equipment has been put out of commission, and the asset's operation has been halted. However, safety measures meant that workers at the attacked facilities were unhurt.

Fuel stations and production sites were also hit

The campaign extended to Naftogaz's retail and production network. On 7 and 8 August, seven UKRNAFTA filling complexes in Dnipropetrovsk, Zaporizhzhia, and Mykolaiv oblasts came under drone attack, and a worker at one station was injured and is in hospital receiving care.

Central Ukraine was struck, too. On 8 August, Russia attacked Naftogaz production facilities in the central part of the country with jet-powered drones, and the facility suffered serious destruction, though staff were in shelter at the time of the strike.

The target is the heating season

The strikes match the warning from First Deputy Prime Minister and Energy Minister Denys Shmyhal, who has said Russia's aim this winter is to destroy the systems Ukrainians need to survive the cold, from power to water, Politico reported. Damaging gas production now, months before winter, is meant to leave Ukraine unable to heat itself when temperatures drop, turning the coming season into another front against civilians in Russia's war.

Satellite imagery has confirmed that Ukraine's Defense Forces destroyed a Russian electronic-warfare system built to jam Starlink at Gelendzhik in southern Russia, the Ukrainian defense outlet Militarnyi reported. Ukrainian drones hit the machine on the grounds of a Russian border-guard base during their sweep of the Black Sea coast. It is one more of these costly jammers Russia has lost, even as Ukraine's long-range drones cannot use Starlink over Russia.

Satellites caught the before and after

Satellite images published by the OSINT community Dnipro Osint show the site cleared at Gelendzhik, in Russia's Krasnodar Krai. The Volna Kupol Garant complex is gone. Researchers called it the third destruction of this jammer recorded in open sources. The strike landed on the grounds of military unit 2156, the Novorossiysk border detachment of Russia's FSB Border Service.

Ukrainian drones likely hit it alongside a 7 August strike on cargo ships near Novorossiysk and Gelendzhik. Geolocated photos from residents point to a repeat strike on the base on 8 August.

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The Volna Kupol Garant is built from trailers carrying satellite antennas. It tracks a passing Starlink satellite and beams a strong signal that scrambles the terminals below across up to 20 km². Starlink is the SpaceX satellite-internet network that Ukrainian drones rely on to reach their operators. Each unit costs about $1.8 million. A same-named firm registered in occupied Simferopol builds it. The developer also makes the Volna 3M jammer that Russia has fitted to Mi-8AMTSh helicopters to block drone satellite navigation.

Ukraine has knocked out these jammers before. The 422nd Unmanned Systems Regiment, the Security Service of Ukraine's (SBU) Alpha special-operations center, and other Ukrainian units have struck such systems, including in occupied Crimea. The complex's weakness is its own power: beaming enough energy to reach a satellite makes it loud and easy to find. 

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And deep inside Russia, there is little Ukrainian Starlink to jam — SpaceX geofences the network to Ukrainian territory, and Elon Musk has refused Kyiv's push to use it for strikes into Russia so far.

The wider hunt

Ukraine's drone crews have spent 2026 tearing into Russia's air defenses and rear. The same run of Black Sea strikes that wrecked this jammer also burned a Russian S-400 air-defense system on the Gelendzhik coast. 

Russian forces struck a residential high-rise in Kharkiv's Saltivka district on the morning of 9 August 2026, killing two people and injuring more than 20 others, according to city and oblast officials. The strike collapsed several upper floors and trapped residents inside. Firefighters carried people down from the top stories while a second strike hit a neighboring building.

A missile through the upper floors

Kharkiv Mayor Ihor Terekhov reported the strike on Saltivka shortly after 07:00. He said Russia had hit a multi-apartment residential building. Minutes later he confirmed the blast destroyed floors 7 through 10, with wounded people inside.

Oleh Syniehubov, head of the Kharkiv Oblast Military Administration, first described a Russian drone strike that killed two. His administration later clarified that a missile hit the high-rise, and that Russia also struck an office building nearby.

Residents were trapped behind the collapse, and crews began a rescue operation. Firefighters brought seven people down from the upper floors, the State Emergency Service reported. The destroyed ceilings sat between the seventh and tenth floors.

As the rescue got underway, Russia struck again. Terekhov said a neighboring high-rise was hit, writing that Russia "is deliberately striking residential buildings" and urging people to shelter. A third impact followed in one of the district's parks.

Russia regularly employs the double-tap tactic — striking a site, then hitting it again once rescuers arrive — to maximize casualties among first responders.

Two dead, 21 wounded, a boy of five among them

Terekhov counted a dozen wounded at first, then confirmed two people killed at the site. Syniehubov gave the fuller account: two men, aged 50 and 66, killed, and at least 21 people injured.

Among the wounded was a five-year-old boy. 11 people suffered blast injuries and two had carbon monoxide poisoning. Another eight, including a child, had acute stress reactions, and medics hospitalized four.

By late morning, Syniehubov said crews were still clearing the collapsed floors to be sure no one remained underneath. Specialists would then judge whether the building could still be used.

A day of strikes across the oblast

Over the past 24 hours, Russia struck Kharkiv and 12 settlements across the oblast, killing three people and wounding or shocking 25, the regional administration said.

In Izium, shelling injured eight people. Russia killed a 68-year-old man in Kivsharivka, near Kupiansk, and wounded a 47-year-old woman in Mykhailivka. In Lozova, a 60-year-old woman was hurt, and a transit evacuation point there took in 227 more people.

Russia can’t refine its way out of its fuel crisis, so it is changing who controls the already existing fuel. Months of Ukrainian drone strikes on refineries have driven shortages and rationing across much of the country. The government’s answer isn’t more fuel—it is a different market.

Faced with the shortage, the Kremlin had options. In June, analysts urged it to raise the exchange quota to push more fuel onto the open market and toward the regions running dry.

It did the opposite. The mandatory share of gasoline that producers must sell on the open exchange was cut from 15% to 10%, with the majors pushing for 2%, and the exchange was closed to anyone but buyers who will use the fuel themselves, shutting out traders who bought to resell.

That choice adds no fuel. It moves distribution off the exchange that set prices for a decade and into direct contracts between the big producers and the buyers they pick—handing the majors the chain from refinery to pump. Part of the package came straight from proposals Rosneft head Igor Sechin sent to President Vladimir Putin.

Winners and losers

The winners are the big, vertically integrated oil companies, which refine up to three-quarters of Russia’s oil. Direct deals let them keep the margin that once went to middlemen and choose who gets supplied; drop the quota to 2%, and about 5 million tonnes of gasoline a year move into their private channels.

The losers are the independent stations—60% to 72% of Russia’s roughly 25,000 gas stations, depending on who’s counting, and now unable to buy at the exchange price.

Alexander Moiseev, who owns the Kostroma Fuel Company, has been hauling gasoline from Surgut, 2,000 kilometers away, at 118 rubles a liter ($1.45) with freight, because the majors won’t sell to him wholesale. He works on a minimal markup. Rosneft, meanwhile, has multiplied sales at its own pumps.

What stabilization there is has been narrow. Prices eased mainly where supply was steered—Moscow, St. Petersburg, the big cities—while regions thick with independent gas stations stayed short, independent analyst Kirill Rodionov told Kommersant.

None of this is hidden. Facing the crunch, the government also let refiners sell banned Euro-2 gasoline again; online marketplaces pulled fuel listings; and Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak called the market “challenging but under control.”

In occupied Crimea it goes furthest: this week, the occupation authorities announced fuel sales were stabilizing, even as they capped each car at 20 liters and fixed the price of AI-92, the Crimean Tatar Resource Center reported.

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The market goes dark

As the exchange shrinks, its prices no longer reflect the market, and the state publishes less information on output, stocks, and regional supply. The people who most need to see where Russia’s fuel balance is breaking—regulators at home, and the sanctions monitors and energy analysts abroad who read that data—are left with less to look at, market participants told Kommersant. The market is going dark.

Whether the change sticks is contested. Some read the cuts as a passing emergency. Others expect the market to keep sliding toward closed, bilateral deals—less transparent, harder for newcomers, the independent stations ever more tied to the majors, Viktoria Trifonova, Senior Analyst at Yakov & Partners, told Kommersant. The state has reached for limits, subsidies, and hands-on redistribution ever since the 2018 price crisis.

Keeping the independent gas station chains alive was never the goal, NEFT Research’s Dmitry Prokofiev wrote in Kommersant—it was to keep fuel flowing to the big cities of European Russia and, above all, to the priority government sector.

Since the evening of 6 August, Russia has attacked Ukraine with various types of drones, including decoys, the Ukrainian Air Force Command said. Although 114 of those 147 were shot down, some hit their targets, killing at least 2 people and injuring more than 10.

The Russian military has repeatedly used drone decoys to distract Ukrainian air defenses from real targets. By overloading Ukrainian air defenses, more drones reach their targets, which often include Ukrainian civilian infrastructure. In particular, attacks on post offices have become increasingly targeted.

Strike on Sumy Oblast

A Russian drone struck a market in Bilopillia community, Sumy Oblast, on the morning of 7 August, injuring 10 people. Two of them are in serious condition, head of Sumy Oblast Oleh Hryhorov said.

Overnight into 7 August, Russia attacked Sumy Oblast with aerial bombs and various types of drones, Hryhorov said. The attacks damaged infrastructure, non-residential buildings, vehicles, and private homes. Two civilians were injured, but their condition is not serious. One was a 57-year-old man wounded after one of two aerial bombs struck near his home, Sumy City Military Administration Head Serhii Kryvosheienko said. A drone also struck a post office in the Hlukhiv community.

Over the past 24 hours, Russian forces struck 34 settlements across Sumy Oblast in 48 attacks, injuring 13 people, including a child, Sumy Oblast police reported.

Strike on Dnipropetrovsk Oblast

At the same time, Russia attacked five districts of Dnipropetrovsk Oblast with artillery and various types of drones, with no casualties reported initially, Dnipropetrovsk Oblast Head Oleksandr Hanzha said. He added that the strikes damaged private homes, an administrative building, vehicles, and infrastructure. In Nikopol district, a post office and a gymnasium were damaged in the Russian attack.

Russia continues to strike civilian infrastructure

On the night of 7 August, Russian forces also struck Zaporizhzhia. A drone damaged an office building, causing a fire.

On 6 August, a Russian Banderol cruise missile struck a Ukrposhta sorting depot and a base for mobile post offices. Two Ukrposhta employees were killed, and a mechanic was injured in the strike, Ukrposhta CEO Ihor Smilianskyi said.

“The enemy wanted to stop our movement here, but we will not let them do it. All backup schemes are already working. Pensions, medicines, parcels and letters are being delivered on schedule,” Smilianskyi said.

Russia destroyed a Bosch warehouse in Ukraine overnight into 5 August, the German manufacturer said. The strike wiped out its stock of household goods and industrial technology. No Bosch employee or worker for its logistics partner was injured.

The strike was part of Russia's intensified attacks on the warehouses and distribution centers that supply Ukraine. Destroying these facilities eliminates stored goods and disrupts the delivery of food, parcels, equipment, and other essential products. Recent attacks have hit both Ukrainian companies and international brands operating in the country.

Bosch said the warehouse premises belonged to its logistics partner. The company's preliminary assessment found that all Bosch products stored there had been destroyed. It did not disclose the location.

Bosch and its logistics partner are now assessing the damage. They are also seeking ways to maintain operations and meet commitments to customers and business partners.

Russia launches anti-ship missiles on stocks

The Bosch loss came during the same overnight barrage that devastated warehouses and production sites across Kyiv and the surrounding region. Russian strikes destroyed facilities used by Rozetka, Nova Poshta, and Epicentr. The three companies distribute parcels, household goods, and construction supplies across Ukraine.

That attack killed 17 people and wounded 44. Ukraine intercepted none of the 24 ballistic missiles or four anti-ship missiles Russia launched, according to Ukrainian officials.

Ukraine is looking for ways to protect its businesses

The same night, a strike burned down the central Ukraine warehouse of German automotive-products maker Liqui Moly. All employees escaped injury, and the company said it would continue operating.

Two nights earlier, a Russian drone attack outside Dnipro set food warehouses ablaze. On 1 August, another Russian drone hit a Rozetka warehouse where 270 people were working, killing one employee.

The campaign comes as Russia launches more missiles than Ukraine can reliably stop. Moscow fired 376 missiles in July, including 126 ballistic weapons, Euromaidan Press previously reported.

Ukrainian presidential adviser Serhii Beskrestnov said Russia had intensified attacks on warehouses and production sites. He warned businesses to disperse their stocks. Russia can sustain about 100 ballistic-missile launches a month and locate commercial targets using cheap local informants, he said.

Occupation officials in Sevastopol and occupied Crimea are telling residents the fuel crisis is easing—and this week they resumed “free sale” at a handful of named stations. From 6 August, every grade would again be sold openly on the TES network, occupation governor Mikhail Razvozhaev said, and AI-92, he noted, has been cut and fixed at no more than 100 rubles per liter ($1.23).

The catch is in the same announcement: no more than 20 liters per car, volumes the governor himself called small, and—at ATAN’s seven stations the same day—no filling canisters.

In occupied Crimea, the ATAN network capped diesel at 30 liters per customer and charged 119 rubles per liter ($1.46), the Crimean Tatar Resource Center reported.

Occupation authorities blame logistics and promise the caps will loosen and prices will fall once supply stabilizes. But shortages, high prices, and rationing show that the peninsula’s supply problems are far from solved, the center said. Crimea is caught in a shortage that now stretches across Russia, from filling stations to farms.

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None of this is new. Sevastopol restricted fuel sales on 22 May, Crimea on 29 May, and for weeks drivers have been buying by QR code. Through the summer, Ukraine’s drone campaign has been draining the seaborne lifeline that feeds the peninsula. The worsening supply of fuel, power, and water is a natural consequence of the war and the occupation, Ukraine’s military intelligence said.

Ukraine's latest deep strike drone is one of a kind. The Triada Robotics Bravo features a "blended wing body" design that's rarely seen on a drone. The special platform maximizes lift and minimizes drag, helping the drone fly farther for a given speed and payload than a conventional "tube and wing" drone can do.

A stubby jet drone appeared fleetingly in a video shot from the ground during a strike on the Ufa refinery cluster in Bashkortostan on 2 August, more than 1,700 km from the Ukrainian border. Ukrainian forces hit the three Bashneft plants at Ufa on 1, 2, and 5 August.

No official body has identified the aircraft in the footage. Online observers compared the silhouette to the American F-117 Nighthawk; the outline is also consistent with the renders Triada publishes of the Bravo. The clip runs a few tenths of a second.

Everything that has reached that deep into Russia until now has been propeller-driven, plodding along at less than 200 km/hr. A jet Bravo cruising at 600 km/hr covers the same 1,700 km in under three hours instead of nine and a half. That is the difference between an air defense network with all morning to work out where a drone is going and one with a couple of hours.

Exactly what the drone in the video was aiming for, and whether it struck its target, is unclear. But that's not stopping Russian observers from panicking. "Shooting down a drone is practically impossible," one Russian blogger moaned.

It's untrue. Motoring along at 600 km/hr—Triada claims around 800 km/hr in the final phase of flight—the jet-propelled Bravo is neither the fastest Ukrainian deep strike munition nor the slowest. If Russian air defenses can take down 950 km/hr Fire Point FP-5 Flamingo cruise missiles, they can take down Bravos, too. Detecting one is a separate question: Triada says the Bravo's composite airframe reduces its radar cross-section.

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But invulnerability surely wasn't the main goal when Kyiv-based Triada Robotics designed the Bravo over the past couple of years. Efficiency was the objective. Which is probably why the firm chose the blended-wing-body arrangement for the one-way explosive drone, which it lists at around 174,000 euros—roughly $200,000.

The blended shape "provides many different aerodynamic benefits over conventional aircraft design," Oliver Johnson and Sam Dakka wrote in a 2019 article in International Journal of Aviation, Aeronautics and Aerospace.

Most drones, like most manned aircraft, have the same layout: a tube-shaped body and separate wings jutting from the body. These tube-and-wing aircraft are the easiest to conceptualize and the most straightforward to assemble, as the fuselage and wing can be built independently and attached during production.

The problem is drag, especially at the junctures between body and wing. A draggier airframe suffers a range and speed penalty compared to a less draggy airframe.

Alternative shapes

There are alternatives to tubes and wings. Flying wing aircraft such as the US Air Force's B-2 and B-21 stealth bombers, both built by Northrop Grumman, are all wing—and have neither an identifiable fuselage nor horizontal or vertical stabilizers. They look like boomerangs.

At subsonic speed, that shape is less draggy than a tube and wing shape is, and thus more efficient for long-range flight. At the same time, a flying wing's lack of sharp angles reduces its radar reflectivity. In short, it can be very stealthy and hard to detect on radar.

The downside of a flying wing is that it's unstable and requires sophisticated flight controls to keep it in the air.

A blended wing body shape is a kind of compromise between a flying wing design and a tube and wing design. There's a fuselage and a wing and stabilizers, but the fuselage and wing blend into each other. A blended wing body isn't as stealthy as a flying wing is, but it's easier to control.

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And it's still less draggy than a tube-and-wing type. "The improvements increase the overall lift to drag ratio providing a higher performance aircraft saving 27% fuel burn per passenger mile that of the modern conventional configuration," Johnson and Dakka wrote.

That benefit is apparent in the Bravo's performance specifications. The drone reportedly ranges 2,000 km with a warhead of 100 to 200 kg and AI-assisted targeting, flying as high as 5,000 m. It's unclear how the Bravo navigates, but it's probably via some combination of satellite and inertial systems.

It's an impressive set of stats. A $50,000, propeller-driven Fire Point FP-1 ranges slightly farther—2,300 km—but the FP-1 cruises at just 180 km/hr and packs a 60-kg warhead. The Bravo is more than three times as fast and carries at least half again as much explosive, and possibly triple, while still flying far enough to reach deep inside Russia.

Yes, the Bravo costs four times as much as the FP-1 does, probably in part because of the jet propulsion, but that could change if Triada Robotics can scale up production. Co-founder Artem Veselov has said the company aims for a first pre-series batch of 100 by the end of the year. For now, the Bravo is a rarity. But it may become much more common in the sky over Russia in the coming months.

Ukraine reached one of Russia's largest refineries and hit its coast guard in occupied Crimea in one operation. The Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), together with the Defense Forces, struck the Slavneft-YANOS refinery in Yaroslavl, over 700 kilometers from Ukraine's border, the SBU reported.

The refinery is a major node in Russia's fuel supply to its capital region. The Yaroslavl refinery is one of the five largest oil-refining enterprises in Russia, with a capacity of nearly 15 million tons of oil per year, producing gasoline, diesel, aviation kerosene, and other strategically important products for central Russia and the Moscow metropolitan area.

The refinery took multiple hits

The strike set several parts of the plant on fire. At least six explosions were heard on the refinery's grounds, and fires broke out in four different parts of the plant.

The damage hit both storage and processing. According to preliminary information, four crude oil tanks were damaged, resulting in a spill. Two tanks were engulfed in fire, and key processing units were also damaged and set alight. Striking both the tanks that hold the crude and the units that refine it degrades the plant's ability to produce fuel, not just store it.

The Kerch strike hit FSB coast guard ships

The second target was in occupied Crimea. Drone strikes on the port in Kerch damaged two Project 10410 "Svetlyak" patrol ships of the FSB coast guard, the "Balaklava" and the "Kerch".

Hitting the FSB's patrol vessels chips at Russia's ability to guard the waters around occupied Crimea and the Kerch Strait, the same maritime chokepoint Ukraine's shadow-fleet campaign has targeted.

The strikes fit the campaign against Russia's war economy

The operation extends Ukraine's sustained effort to drain Russia's fuel revenue and military logistics. The SBU said it consistently works to reduce Russia's military-economic potential, and that military sites, fuel-and-energy enterprises, and other legitimate targets working for Russia's aggression will keep coming under fire.

On 4 August, Kazakhstan’s Trade and Integration Minister, Arman Shakkaliyev, confirmed that Russia’s largest online retailer is building 260,000 square meters of warehousing space in Almaty and Astana.

In the same appearance, he told Kazakh shoppers to favor domestic marketplaces instead. Take the construction money, steer the customers away: that is Astana’s answer to a war that has driven Wildberries to look abroad for shelter.

The warehouses aren’t new—they’ve been under construction for years. And officially, the ministry says, Wildberries hasn’t asked to move its Russian operations to Kazakhstan at all. Astana is drawing a careful line: a Russian company can build here, but it cannot relocate its business here to escape the drones.

The wariness predates the strikes. Kazakhstan already taxes foreign marketplaces at 12% and can block those that fail to register. Of marketplace complaints logged in 2024, 73.7% concerned Wildberries, even as home-grown Kaspi held more than 70% of the market to Wildberries’ 17.2%. Astana was fencing the platform in before the first drone struck.

The bill reaches the neighbors

Kazakh sellers put their losses at roughly 2 billion tenge ($4.2 million) by one count, and the Ecommerce-KZ association estimates more than $2.1 million—neither figure has been confirmed, and the minister has told people not to trust the numbers circulating online.

More than 120,000 Kazakh entrepreneurs were on the platform at the end of 2025, and Wildberries says it is repaying them in stages, working with the ministry and the business chamber Atameken.

Kyrgyzstan is hit harder. Its garment industry leans heavily on Wildberries, and individual producers have lost between 1 million and 100 million soms ($11,400 to $1.14 million) each—enough that Bishkek offered a tax holiday to garment firms through year-end.

What Wildberries wants sheltered is not neutral cargo. Ukraine says it strikes the retailer because the platform is used to trade body armor, drones, and their components that reach Russian forces.

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That leaves Kazakhstan exposed: it has spent the past year tightening dual-use export controls to avoid Western secondary sanctions, and now a company that sells to the Russian military wants to move its logistics onto Kazakh ground.

For now, the shelter barely exists. Wildberries wants to rent about 100,000 square meters—close to every empty warehouse Kazakhstan has—and the complexes it is building will not open until 2027. By then, Astana may have made up its mind about how much of Russia’s retreat it actually wants on its soil.

Ukrainian drone strikes have forced Russia to import gasoline—shipping cargoes from as far as Morocco to an Arctic port—and to pay for the damage twice over. Moscow now subsidizes both the refineries the drones keep setting on fire and the foreign fuel replacing what those refineries can no longer produce.

Russia caps fuel prices at home below what refiners could earn abroad, and the budget pays them the difference—so they keep supplying the domestic market rather than exporting everything. The payments, together with related reimbursements, reached 1.221 trillion rubles ($15 billion) from April through July, Finance Ministry data show—close to the full annual budget of Moscow Oblast, the region ringing the capital.

Those monthly payments have roughly halved since spring, to about 190 billion rubles ($2.4 billion) in July, as lower oil prices narrowed the gap the subsidy fills.

Russia cannot keep its refineries running

Russian crude processing fell to 3.6 million barrels a day in July, its lowest since 2002 and roughly a third below the seasonal norm. Ukraine has hit at least 24 of Russia’s 34 largest refineries in some 50 strikes.

Fuel shortages and rationing now affect 50 million people—about a third of Russia’s population—according to a Financial Times analysis. Russia runs the world’s third-largest oil-refining industry, so the lost output has tightened diesel and gasoline supply beyond its borders. With less capacity to refine at home, Russia has had to export more raw crude and less high-value fuel.

With its refineries down, Moscow is now paying a second subsidy—this time to the importers bringing gasoline in. Gasoline is arriving by rail from Belarus and Kazakhstan and by sea from India and, in mid-July, Morocco: a cargo loaded at the port of Tangier and discharged at Murmansk, on the Arctic coast.

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Ukraine has already named the import route as a target. In early July, presidential sanctions commissioner Vladyslav Vlasiuk called Russia’s new reliance on imported fuel a fresh vulnerability and said Kyiv had raised a response with the European Commission—though the EU’s next sanctions package, now in preparation, is so far built mainly around other measures.

A country that ships crude out of the Arctic is now shipping gasoline in through it.

Ukrainian drones struck one of Russia's five largest oil refineries in Yaroslavl on the morning of 6 August, setting off several fires across the site, monitoring channels reported. Open-source analysts placed the blazes on the refinery grounds, while the region's governor claimed his air defenses downed the entire raid. The strike continued a months-long campaign that has pushed Russian oil refining to its lowest level in more than two decades.

Fires break out across the refinery

Ukrainian monitoring Telegram channel Exilenova+ first reported the attack around 4:00, later sharing footage that showed thick black smoke rising from several points on the site. Fire Point, the Ukrainian company that builds the FP-1 long-range drone, said Ukraine's Defense Forces hit the plant with the domestically made FP-1s. Open-source analysts geolocated one blaze to the refinery grounds. Astra, a Russian news Telegram channel, reported one fire on the plant's territory and a second it had not yet located.

One of Russia's biggest refineries

Slavneft-YANOS, also called the Novo-Yaroslavl refinery, ranks among Russia's five largest and is the biggest in the country's central regions. It processes about 15 million tonnes of crude a year into gasoline, diesel, aviation kerosene, jet fuel, lubricants, and bitumen. Rosneft and Gazprom jointly control 99.7% of its parent company, Slavneft. The plant's fuel feeds central Russian industry, airports, the Northern Railway, and military sites. It sits more than 700 kilometers from Ukraine's border.

Russia claims it downed every drone in the region

Yaroslavl Governor Mikhail Yevraev first reported the region was under drone attack around 3:00 and closed the highway toward Moscow. He later claimed the region had repelled its most massive drone raid, downing all 88 drones with no casualties. Yevraev stated that a detached house burned, windows were shattered in several apartment blocks, and residents' cars were damaged. 

Russia's Defense Ministry claimed it destroyed 605 drones over several regions overnight.

The plant has burned repeatedly in 2026, catching fire on 28 March, 26 April, 8 and 22 May, and 6 and 16 July before the latest hit. That made 6 August the seventh strike on the refinery this year. In the 16 July attack, an FP-1 struck the plant's tank farm.

Russia's refining in retreat

Ukraine has sharply expanded its FP-1 deep strikes on refineries this year, knocking out around 26 plants. By late July, only eight had fully restarted and at least 11 partly. Seven refineries stayed idle. Russian refining fell to 3.6 million barrels a day, its lowest since May 2002. 

Earlier, Moscow banned fuel exports, boosted gasoline imports from Belarus 25-fold, and turned to India and Morocco. It also let refiners sell Euro-2 gasoline, a grade banned in Russia since 2013, through 1 July 2027.

Russia's overnight barrage burned down the Ukrainian warehouse of a German household brand. The strike on the night of 5 August destroyed the central warehouse of Liqui Moly Ukraine, which supplies motor oils, lubricants, and automotive chemicals, the company reported on Facebook.

The strike hit a foreign company's civilian supply hub, part of a widening campaign against Ukraine's warehouses.

"This night, as a result of an enemy strike, our central product warehouse in Ukraine was completely destroyed by fire," Liqui Moly said, adding that all employees were safe and no one was hurt.

Founded in 1957, Liqui Moly develops and produces its motor oils and additives in Germany, where it has been named the best brand in the lubricants category for years, and sells its products in about 150 countries. Its Ukraine warehouse is the local distribution center for a global consumer brand, the kind of ordinary commercial infrastructure now being hit.

The company plans to keep operating

Liqui Moly said the loss will not stop its business. Despite significant material damage, the distributor does not plan to halt operations and is already working to restore supplies, rebuild its logistics processes, and launch new delivery routes.

That response mirrors what Russia's warehouse campaign is forcing on businesses across Ukraine: decentralizing storage and rerouting deliveries to survive.

The strike fits a documented campaign

Hitting a motor oil warehouse continues Russia's pattern of striking civilian storage and logistics. Presidential adviser Serhii Beskrestnov has said Russia has intensified attacks on warehouses and production sites, including food, retail, and construction materials, and that this trend will hold.

Russia finds such targets cheaply, Beskrestnov has said, through local informants paid to watch trucks and stock rather than through satellites. A distribution warehouse for a consumer brand is exactly the sort of soft, easily-located civilian target that a campaign hits, damaging the supply of ordinary goods while endangering the workers inside.

Russia has the ballistic missiles to keep hitting Ukraine every month at the current pace. Russia can launch about 100 ballistic missiles at Ukraine each month, technology specialist and presidential adviser Serhii "Flash" Beskrestnov said on 5 August.

The estimate sets the scale of a threat that Ukraine's air defenses cannot fully answer.

The current density is higher because Russia wants a demonstrative reaction and is attacking partly from reserves, but going forward, the attacks will run at around 100 ballistic missiles a month, Beskrestnov said.

Against a weapon that only the Patriot reliably stops, and with Ukraine short of Patriot interceptors, roughly 100 ballistic missiles a month is a sustained lethal pressure the country will have to endure.

The target is Ukraine's warehouses

Beskrestnov said Russia has intensified strikes on a specific set of civilian targets. Moscow has stepped up attacks on various warehouses and production sites, including those for food products, construction materials, and retail, and this trend will continue for now.

The pattern matches recent strikes. Russia has hit the warehouses of the retailer Rozetka, killing a worker, and food storage across the country, part of a campaign against the civilian logistics that keep daily life supplied, which has forced businesses to decentralize storage and reroute deliveries.

Russia finds the targets with cheap informants

The chilling part is how easily Russia locates these warehouses. It takes little effort because warehouse data is completely open and requires no satellites or intelligence channels, Beskrestnov said.

"A person is hired, a traitor for a few thousand hryvnia, who watches what happens at the warehouse, the movement of trucks, the volume. Then this information reaches Russia, and a decision is made about a strike," he explained.

He said his own house was targeted the same way in April, when he had just returned from a work trip and was wounded in the strike.

His advice to businesses

Beskrestnov urged businesses to adapt. He advised entrepreneurs to diversify storage, avoid concentrating large quantities of goods and vehicles in one place, and, where possible, seek subleased small warehouse spaces.

Spreading stock across many small sites makes each one a poorer target, not worth a ballistic missile, and denies the local informants an easy, high-value warehouse to point Russia toward. It is a war-economy adaptation forced on Ukrainian business by a bombing campaign that now reaches the supply chain itself, as Beskrestnov suggested.

Ukraine's Security Service (SBU) says it has struck more than 100 strategic military and industrial targets inside Russia and occupied Ukrainian territories during a 40-day campaign approved by President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

The coordinated 40-day campaign combined long-range strikes deep inside Russia with frontline operations, aiming to simultaneously erode Moscow's military production, logistics, fuel supplies, air defenses, and combat capabilities rather than focusing on a single target set. 

In a statement on 4 August, the SBU said the operation targeted Russia's military-industrial complex, air bases, air defense systems, command posts, oil refineries, transport and military logistics infrastructure, as well as vessels from Russia's sanctions-evading "shadow fleet."

The agency said Zelenskyy has also approved a new series of operations proposed by SBU chief Maj. Gen. Oleksandr Poklad.

Campaign targeted air bases, oil facilities, and shadow fleet

According to the SBU, one of the campaign's main objectives was degrading Russia's military aviation and air defense capabilities.

The agency said it struck the Saky, Hvardiiske, Belbek, Bagerovo, Engels, and Khanskaya air bases, as well as the Yevpatoria aviation plant. It claimed the attacks destroyed one Tu-95MS strategic bomber, damaged two Su-35 fighter jets and two L-39 trainer aircraft, and hit hangars housing Su-24, Su-30, and Su-30SM aircraft, Shahed drone storage facilities, and airfield fuel infrastructure.

The SBU also reported strikes on Russian air defense assets, including a Nebo-U radar, the 92N6E engagement radar of an S-400 system, Tor-M2 and Pantsir-S2 air defense systems, a Pole-21 electronic warfare system, and several Podlyot-K1 and Kasta-2E2 radar stations.

The agency said it also struck 14 oil refineries, dozens of oil depots, pumping stations, terminals, and storage facilities, naming refineries in St. Petersburg, Yaroslavl, Nizhny Novgorod, Perm, Volgograd, and Ufa among the targets.

It further claimed attacks on the tankers Blue, Louise 1, Banda, and Avero, along with two cargo vessels already under international sanctions, as part of efforts to disrupt Russia's "shadow fleet."

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SBU reports thousands of battlefield targets hit

Alongside its long-range operations, the SBU said its frontline units struck more than 21,000 items of Russian military equipment, weapons, and infrastructure during the same 40-day period, while killing nearly 5,000 Russian troops.

According to the statement, those strikes included 24 tanks, 63 armored vehicles, 124 artillery systems, 22 multiple-launch rocket systems, 40 air defense systems, and 14 aircraft and helicopters.

The agency also said it destroyed more than 11,000 enemy drones and ground robotic systems, including 176 Shahed attack drones, and struck 712 drone crews together with their launch sites and equipment.

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Part of Ukraine's broader deep-strike campaign

The figures add to a series of increasingly ambitious Ukrainian long-range strikes targeting Russia's military infrastructure, oil industry, and logistics network.

Over recent months, Ukraine has claimed attacks on strategic bomber bases, air defense systems, oil refineries, and vessels involved in transporting Russian oil despite Western sanctions. 

Kyiv says the campaign aims to reduce Russia's ability to sustain its war against Ukraine by degrading both its military capabilities and the economic infrastructure supporting them.

Russia has found a way to make a Ukrainian winter deadlier than power cuts alone. Russia's new goal is the targeted destruction of Ukraine's water systems, First Deputy Prime Minister and Energy Minister Denys Shmyhal said in an interview with Politico published on 4 August.

Water is the one utility people cannot outlast. Last winter, Russia targeted electricity and heating, which people could survive with gas and water, but without water and sewage, it is hard to survive more than three days.

Destroying water systems could turn a winter blackout from an ordeal into a threat to life itself.

The energy grid is already devastated

The water warning comes on top of damage that has gutted Ukraine's power generation. Before 2014, Ukraine produced 54.5 gigawatts of electricity. The full-scale war cut that number to 32 GW, and after last winter's strikes, Ukraine was generating only about 12 GW, a shortfall of 6 GW that forces rolling blackouts nationwide.

The cumulative toll is staggering. Russia has destroyed or damaged more than 80% of Ukraine's power-generating capacity, the minister said. Ukraine now produces less than a quarter of the electricity it produced before Russia's war began.

Ukraine is racing to fund resilience before the cold

Shmyhal put numbers on what Ukraine needs to get through the winter. Ukraine requires $585 million from Western partners to boost its energy resilience before winter, and an additional $468 million to help the state gas company, Naftogaz, recover from Russian attacks, with Kyiv hoping for Canadian support.

Meanwhile, Ukraine is answering Russia's energy war with its own. Its long-range strikes have knocked out about 40% of the Kremlin's main refining capacity, causing fuel shortages across Russia, and Kyiv hopes those strikes and allied sanctions push Russian leader Vladimir Putin to end the war this fall, Shmyhal said. If that fails, Ukraine faces a repeat of last winter, with water systems now in the crosshairs.

Footage from a recent Ukrainian strike on a Russian oil refinery captured an unidentified drone resembling the US F-117 Nighthawk stealth jet, though on a far smaller, drone-sized scale, according to RBC-Ukraine. Online observers suspect a new Ukrainian jet-powered strike drone, or a test of an allied foreign one, but no official body has confirmed what the aircraft is. If the guesses hold, Ukraine may be fielding a faster, longer-reaching class of weapon for hitting targets deep inside Russia.

Ukraine has spent the past year turning Russia's interior into contested space, sending long-range drones ever deeper toward the oil, defense, and logistics sites the Kremlin once treated as untouchable. Each new type that surfaces marks another step from short-range drones toward missile-like machines.

An unfamiliar silhouette over the refinery

The drone appeared during a 2 August Ukrainian drone strike on a refinery near Ufa, more than 1,300 kilometers from the Ukrainian border. The clip shows an aircraft shaped unlike most Ukrainian long-range drones, likely powered by a jet engine. The open-source monitoring channel Clash Report, which first shared the footage, believes it may be the Bravo drone or a modified version.

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What the Bravo could do, and why it would matter

If the aircraft is indeed a Triada Robotics product, the company describes Bravo as a single-use, jet-powered drone intended for long-range strike missions. According to the developer, its range exceeds 2,000 km (about 1,240 miles)—enough to reach much of the refinery and defense-industrial infrastructure Russia keeps far from the front lines.

Triada Robotics says the drone cruises at about 600 km/h and can accelerate to roughly 800 km/h (around 500 mph) during the final phase of flight. The company also lists a warhead weighing more than 100 kg (220 lb), a payload that could threaten facilities such as fuel depots or refineries.

The developer pitches it as a cheaper stand-in for a cruise missile—long-range reach at a fraction of the cost—so Ukraine could fly more strikes at distant targets.

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Why observers compare it to the F-117

The comparison rests on the drone's silhouette. Watchers noted its outline echoes the F-117 Nighthawk, the US jet built with radar-evading shaping. A similar shape, though, does not prove full stealth. Such geometry can also sharpen aerodynamics or dodge only certain radar types. Even so, the aircraft's identity stays unconfirmed, and its edge rests on the maker's claims rather than proven use.

Ukrainian drones struck across four Russian regions before dawn on 4 August, setting fires at a Rosneft oil refinery and targeting two logistics hubs of Russia's largest online retailer, Militarnyi reported. The raid reached Samara, Leningrad, Moscow, and Nizhny Novgorod oblasts, hitting both the fuel that powers Russia's military and the warehouses that Kyiv says supply its army. Russian regional officials confirmed damage while claiming air defenses repelled much of the attack.

Syzran refinery burns again

Ukrainian drones attacked the Syzran oil refinery in Samara Oblast overnight more than 800 km from the war zone in Ukraine, and Militarnyi geolocated the rising smoke to the plant. A drone-danger alert went up in the region after 1 a.m., and residents then reported explosions in the city before a column of smoke climbed over the refinery.

The plant belongs to Rosneft and processes more than 8.5 million tons of crude a year, more than 3% of Russia's national total. It turns out gasoline, diesel, aviation kerosene, and bitumen, and supplies fuel to Samara, Saratov, and Penza oblasts as well as parts of central Russia. It also feeds airfields and military units of Russia's Central and Southern military districts. The refinery sits more than 800 km from Ukraine's border.

Ukraine's Defense Forces have hit this refinery many times before. Drones struck it overnight on 11-12 July, starting a large fire that analysts assessed reached every primary crude-processing unit. Samara Oblast Governor Vyacheslav Fedorishchev said a fire from the attack in the region was being extinguished.

Astra says residents of Kstovo in Nizhny Novgorod Oblast reported a fire after the attack, though the struck object there stayed unclear. The city is home to a Lukoil oil refinery about 800 km from Ukraine.

Warehouses near St. Petersburg and Moscow

In the morning, Ukrainian drones hit a logistics compound near Krasny Bor in the Tosnensky district of Leningrad Oblast, roughly 820 km from Ukraine's northern border. Eyewitnesses filmed a heavy fire, and Wildberries confirmed a blaze at its facility there.

Its Krasny Bor site covers 154,000 square meters, one of the retailer's largest surviving logistics hubs in the region. Ukrainian drones burned two others in Leningrad Oblast on 24 July.

Leningrad Oblast Governor Alexander Drozdenko claimed air defenses downed 17 drones overnight and confirmed damage to the warehouse zone near Krasny Bor. An OSINT analyst at the Russian Telegram channel Astra, reviewing eyewitness video, placed the smoke over a site holding two complexes: the Wildberries hub and a Lenta depot of 70,000 square meters. The analyst said the damaged complex could belong to either.

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Drones also struck Chekhov near Moscow, about 400 km from Ukraine, where Astra identified the likely target as a Wildberries warehouse. Moscow Oblast Governor Andrei Vorobyov confirmed the strike and claimed five people were killed and six injured. 

Why the warehouses

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has previously explained that Ukraine strikes what he calls "Russia's AliExpress" because the marketplace supplies occupying forces with sanctioned components for drones and navigation equipment. Ukraine's military command lists Wildberries among its long-range targets as a retailer that also moves non-lethal military gear.

Ukraine's Defense Forces began striking Wildberries logistics sites on 18 July. The company tightened rules on 3 August, allowing warehouse staff only button phones without cameras, after employees filmed the strikes and shared the footage.

Russia's biggest online retailer is trying to stop its own workers from filming air defenses. From 3 August, Wildberries has allowed warehouse employees to bring only button mobile phones without cameras to work, a decision taken after staff began filming drones and the aftermath of their strikes and spreading the material, Russian Telegram channels reported.

The ban is a reaction to Ukrainian strikes. On 31 July, employees received a message stating that photo and video recording during air-raid alerts at the warehouses supposedly poses a security threat, could reveal the location of air-defense forces, and violates Russian law, according to "Ostorozhno, novosti".

Wildberries said that after workers were allowed to bring smartphones onto warehouse grounds, cases of filming drones and their attacks, and sharing that footage, were recorded.

The camera ban follows a month of burning warehouses

The timing ties the ban directly to Ukraine's campaign. Ukrainian drones destroyed eight Wildberries warehouses in July, about 15.4% of the marketplace's total storage, killing one employee at its Elektrostal facility.

Workers inside those facilities filmed the strikes as they happened, and the footage spread across social media, documenting the fires and the damage in real time. The camera ban is Wildberries' answer to remove the phones that turned its own employees into witnesses.

The stated reason is security, the effect is silence

Wildberries framed the ban as protection. To "eliminate such risks," from 3 August, only button phones without cameras are allowed at logistics centers, the company said, adding that such devices let workers stay in touch with family while meeting security requirements.

The security rationale doubles as information control. Footage of burning warehouses is evidence of a campaign hurting a flagship Russian company, and by stripping cameras from the workforce, Wildberries removes the most direct source of that evidence. The move is a quiet admission of how much the strikes have landed: a company does not confiscate its workers' phone cameras over attacks that are not doing damage.