Drone strike kills two in Russia, Wildberries warehouse ablaze

MOSCOW

A woman walks past a residential building damaged in an air strike in the town of Izium, in the eastern Kharkiv, amid the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Two people were killed when a drone crashed into a house in southwestern Russia, while an attack by Ukrainian drones on a warehouse belonging to the e-commerce giant Wildberries triggered a fire, Russian authorities said on Aug. 26.

Wildberries, Russia’s largest online retailer, is regularly targeted by Kiev, which alleges the company supplies components to the Russian army.

A fire broke out at a Wildberries logistics center in Kotovsk, in the Tambov region, about 500 kilometers southeast of Moscow, overnight from Aug. 25 to Aug. 26 after Ukrainian drone strikes, regional governor Yevgeny Pervychov said on Telegram.

He said the fire covered an area of more than 100,000 square meters.

Videos posted on social media show the scale of the blaze, with flames and plumes of smoke rising into the sky. In addition to Wildberries, Ukrainian forces are now also targeting its competitor Ozon.

The logistics centers and warehouses of these companies, both compared to Amazon because of their dominance of e-commerce in Russia, are far less protected than military targets.

Ukrainian drone attacks have already caused damage amounting to billions of dollars, with several of these centers completely destroyed by fires.

The Russian Defense Ministry said air defense systems “intercepted and destroyed” a total of 426 Ukrainian drones during the night.

In the Lipetsk region, next to Tambov, a drone “crashed, causing a fire in a house,” governor Igor Artamonov reported.

“Unfortunately, two people died: A man and a 14-year-old child,” he said.

Four and a half years after the start of Russia’s large-scale offensive against Ukraine, strikes on both sides of the front have intensified in recent months, causing a growing number of civilian casualties.

Meanwhile, South Korea said on Aug. 26 that it had scrambled fighter jets in response to Russian military aircraft entering its air defense zone, the second such incursion in weeks.

The relationship between the countries has worsened since South Korea joined Western sanctions following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and since Moscow built stronger ties with North Korea.

Seoul’s Defense Ministry said multiple Russian aircraft had entered and then left its air defense identification zone over the East Sea, also called the Sea of Japan.

“South Korea’s military detected the Russian aircraft before they entered the zone and deployed Air Force fighter jets to prepare for any contingency,” it said, without giving details.

The Russian aircraft did not violate South Korean airspace, it said.

An air defense identification zone is not sovereign airspace but a buffer area where countries require foreign aircraft to identify themselves for security purposes.

In late June, more than 10 Chinese and Russian military aircraft entered South Korea’s air defense zone.