Wholestory

On August 10 Ukrainian drones reached two of the furthest targets of the campaign and, at one of them, produced its heaviest civilian toll on Russian soil. At Nizhnekamsk in the republic of Tatarstan, roughly 1,200 kilometres from the border, drones set fire to Tatneft's TANECO refinery — one of Russia's largest and most advanced, with a capacity Ukraine's Unmanned Systems Forces put at about 13 million tonnes of crude a year — and the Tatarstan administration acknowledged the strike. Local authorities said at least 13 people were killed, including a child, and up to 75 wounded; Russian investigators opened a case they called a terrorist attack, saying residential areas had been struck. It is among the deadliest single Ukrainian strikes inside Russia of the war. The same night the General Staff reported hitting the Tobolskneftekhim petrochemical plant at Tobolsk, in Tyumen Oblast about 2,200 kilometres from the border, damaging a gas-fractionation unit rated at some 6.6 million tonnes of feedstock a year. The distance is the furthest the campaign has been placed by the border measure; the toll is the change. A campaign that has for months burned tanks and processing units at range has now, at a refinery ringed by a Soviet-era city, killed civilians in the numbers Russia's own strikes on Ukraine routinely do.

Russia's overnight package into August 11 combined ballistic and quasi-ballistic missiles — Iskander-M, a North Korean-provided KN-23 and Zircon anti-ship missiles on ballistic tracks — with 120 drones, of which Ukraine downed 98, and it struck industry and hospitals rather than the grid directly. A ballistic missile hit a children's hospital in Kyiv, damaging a gas pipe and the building's glazing; in Zaporizhzhia the steel and iron producer Metinvest confirmed a ballistic strike on its Zaporizhstal works killed seven employees and injured 21, halting coke and blast-furnace production, with the city's wider toll put at at least six dead. The following night brought a further Iskander-M, a Kh-31P and cruise missiles alongside 138 drones, 112 of them downed. What is no longer on the record is how many missiles Russia fired and how many were stopped: Ukraine's Air Force has stopped publishing missile launch and interception counts, a change it described as a security measure, so silence about downed missiles can no longer be read as a failure to intercept. The best independent gauge of the defence — the share of ballistic missiles stopped — has gone dark just as Russia leans on the ballistic weapons Ukraine can least often catch.

The cumulative bill on Russian refining, measured from outside and conceded from inside, deepened across the week. The Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air reported that Russian oil-product export loadings fell 23 percent in July to 4.7 million tonnes — the lowest on record and less than half the 9.6 million tonnes loaded a year earlier — as fossil-fuel export revenue slid 12 percent month on month to 683 million euros a day, with seaborne oil-product revenue down 45 percent. Moscow's own answer confirms the strain: the government renewed its ban on gasoline and diesel exports to run from August 1 to January 31, 2027, longer and broader than the end-of-2026 gasoline extension its deputy prime minister had signalled, and the average petrol price has climbed 19 percent since the start of the year. The refineries kept falling. The Orsk plant near the Kazakh border suspended operations after a strike, with the Orenburg governor estimating repairs could take six months, and overnight into August 13 drones hit the Gazprom Neftekhim Salavat complex in Bashkortostan, which processes up to 74 million barrels of crude a year — the fourth refinery struck in three days. These are the effect the campaign's planners said they were after: not a burning tank but a national fuel market that can no longer export what it makes.

The refinery campaign kept its August pace across three nights. On the night of August 5-6 Ukrainian drones set a large fire at the Slavneft-Yanos refinery in Yaroslavl, one of Russia's largest at about 15 million tonnes of crude a year and roughly 700 kilometres from the border; the Security Service said it hit four RVS-2000 storage tanks and the ELOU-1 and AVT-3 refining units, ISW cited geolocated footage of the blaze, and Yaroslavl Governor Mikhail Yevrayev acknowledged storage-tank damage. The same night Ukraine struck the Bashneft-Novoil refinery at Ufa (about 1,200 kilometres out, 7.1-7.3 million tonnes a year) — at least the third strike on that plant since August 2, the restrike-before-repair signature the campaign has settled into. On the night of August 7-8 it hit two more: the Ilsky refinery in Krasnodar Krai (about 6.6 million tonnes a year, 160 kilometres from the border), which the Krasnodar operational headquarters conceded had caught fire, and the Syzran refinery in Samara Oblast (about 8.5 million tonnes a year, 700 kilometres out), geolocated and acknowledged by Governor Vyacheslav Fedorishchev. None of these matched the July 25 Tyumen depth record; the news is the tempo. And the outside numbers are now catching up to the striking side's claims: the Kyiv School of Economics' oil tracker put Russian refinery runs at 3.8 million barrels a day — 1.6 million below a year earlier — and oil-product exports at a record-low 1.6 million barrels a day, with oil-export revenue down five billion dollars month on month to 15.8 billion; Russia's gasoline and diesel imports from Belarus hit record highs in July, per Reuters as relayed by ISW; and the April export bans have pushed retail gasoline prices up 15 to 25 percent across Central Asia, the Carnegie Endowment reports, since the region's cheapest supplier can no longer spare the fuel.

The warehouse campaign against Wildberries, Russia's largest online retailer, is now being counted in money rather than buildings, and the counting is coming from the Russian side. A Russian insider source, cited by ISW, put the damage at up to 400 billion rubles — about 4.82 billion dollars — across at least 21 struck facilities representing up to 22 percent of the company's space between July 18 and August 5, and said the company had bought no insurance on any of them, which leaves it carrying the full liability. Reuters, working from satellite imagery, calculates that the strikes have destroyed at least 1.18 million square metres of warehouse space, a fifth of Wildberries' total capacity. The company confirmed a fresh strike in Yekaterinburg on August 7 and, the same day, raised its own product-insurance rates by 40 percent, to as much as 5.6 percent of a consignment's value. The wider damage is financial: a source close to the Kremlin told Reuters the strikes will set off a wave of bankruptcies among the small and medium retailers who stored goods with Wildberries, that no entity in Russia has the capacity to prevent it, and that officials are weighing state-bank loans, tax breaks and subsidies; Ukraine's Center for Strategic Communications reports retailers are increasingly seeking debt restructurings, adding to the strain on Russian banks whose asset quality was already deteriorating. It is the clearest corporate-distress accounting the campaign has produced — a measurable effect stated, in this case, by the side absorbing it.

Russia's campaign is pivoting back toward the target it worked all last winter: Ukraine's power grid. Ukraine's Center for Strategic Communications, citing US intelligence, warned on August 8 that Russia is preparing a large-scale strike campaign against Kyiv's energy infrastructure before Ukraine's Independence Day on August 24, drawing on its strategic reserve of ballistic missiles — roughly a month earlier than its 2025 winter campaign began, in ISW's reading an attempt to disrupt Ukrainian repairs and to exploit the interceptor shortage before it can be fixed. The overnight packages already point that way. Into August 7, Russia sent 147 strike and decoy drones, of which Ukraine downed 114; Ukrenergo reported outages across five oblasts, Ukrnafta reported seven facilities and four filling stations hit, and Naftogaz said its sites had been struck 287 times in 2026 — more than in 2025 and the first three years of the full-scale war combined. Into August 8 came six Iskander-M and S-400 ballistic missiles and 151 drones; 135 drones were downed, several missiles missed, and no clean missile-interception figure was released. A double-tap drone strike at Pukhivka, in the Kyiv region's Brovary district, killed a grandfather, grandmother and their three-year-old grandson; one more person was killed in the capital by ballistic missiles. And the maritime half of Russia's campaign is now measurable at the far end: after strikes on Black Sea grain ships — the Liberian-flagged EMIL, hit twice as its crew evacuated, and the wheat-carrying Mera Queen — Ukraine's agriculture ministry forecast that farm exports could fall 54 percent in the 2026-27 marketing year, with wheat down 53 percent and grain storage full by early November, according to Bloomberg.

On August 3 a drone struck a beach near the Russian Black Sea resort town of Gelendzhik, in Krasnodar Krai. Governor Veniamin Kondratyev said six people were killed, including three children, and about 40 injured, and blamed Ukraine; other Russian officials put the toll higher, at seven dead. Ukraine's military did not comment. BBC Verify geolocated the footage to the beachfront but corroborated only that a drone struck there — the casualty figures are the governor's account, not independently verified. The beach lies about 40 kilometres from the Russian naval base at Novorossiysk, reported as the likely intended target, which raises the possibility of an errant strike. It is the campaign's second civilian-beach toll of the war and marks, if the account holds, a change in what the maritime campaign is hitting near a defended naval port.

On August 3 drones struck the Cameroon-flagged roll-on/roll-off cargo vessel Nadezhda as it approached Russia's Novorossiysk port from Samsun, Turkey, injuring three to four crew, according to Turkish officials and Russian opposition media relayed by the Institute for the Study of War. Russian opposition sources distinguished the vessel from a separate Russian-flagged dry-cargo ship of the same name that Ukraine has sanctioned. The strike extends the maritime campaign to third-country-flagged commercial shipping on the route into Novorossiysk, and lands the same day as the Gelendzhik beach strike a short distance away — both close to the naval base the port hosts.

On August 4 Ukraine's Security Service (SBU) announced that in a 40-day operation begun June 26 its drone operators had conducted more than 100 strikes across a wide Russian target set — 14 oil refineries and other oil-infrastructure sites, defence-industrial plants, air bases (Engels in Saratov Oblast, Khanskaya in Adygea and bases in occupied Crimea), command posts, air-defence assets, two cargo ships and two shadow-fleet tankers — and claimed to have destroyed a Tu-95MS strategic bomber, two Su-35 fighters and two L-39 trainers. Zelenskyy said he had approved a further SBU operation without specifying its scope. The figures are the striking service's own account of its own operation, relayed by the Institute for the Study of War without independent per-item geolocation, and are recorded as such — a self-tally in a different category from the Unmanned Systems Forces' running substation counts, not a revision of them.

For the first time the strike campaign's cumulative effect on Russian refining is quantified by a party with no stake in the claim. Bloomberg reported on August 3, citing the consultancy EA Analytics, that Russian refineries processed an estimated 3.6 million barrels of crude a day in July 2026 — roughly a third below the 5.3–5.6 million barrels seen across the same months in 2020–2025, and the lowest refining rate since May 2002 — forcing Russia to export near-record volumes of unrefined crude. Bloomberg counted 30 attacks on oil infrastructure in July (18 of them refineries, including the Omsk plant more than 2,500 kilometres from the border, plus five tankers, five port sites and two pipelines), the second-highest monthly total after May's 32. The Institute for the Study of War, relaying Meduza, RBK and Deutsche Welle, separately put the degradation of Russia's refining capacity at "at least one third." These are outside estimates of outcome rather than the striking forces' counts of activity — the measurable effect the campaign's Ukrainian planners have said they are pursuing, now visible from the Russian-refining side. Bloomberg's own report is paywalled and reached here through The Moscow Times and ISW, and is attributed as relayed.

The maritime strikes are raising the cost of moving cargo through Russia's southern waters. RBK reported on August 4, citing Russian shipping and insurance sources, that Russian insurers have effectively stopped covering military- and terrorism-risk for cargo ships in the Black and Azov seas — after the Russian Defence Ministry issued a navigational warning for those waters from July 12 to 18 amid intensified Ukrainian vessel strikes — and that foreign insurers have raised war-risk rates. The account is RBK's, a Russian business outlet, relayed by the Institute for the Study of War. It is a third-party cost of the campaign, borne by shippers rather than by either combatant, and a market signal of the same maritime pressure the Nadezhda and Gelendzhik strikes made visible.

Overnight into August 5 Russia fired 28 missiles at Ukraine — 24 Iskander-M and S-400 ballistic missiles and four Zircon/Onyx anti-ship missiles on quasi-ballistic tracks — alongside 115 strike and decoy drones, with Kyiv and its region the primary target. Ukrainian forces intercepted none of the 28 missiles; air defences downed 98 of the 115 drones. At least 21 people were killed — 17 in the Kyiv region, the deadliest night the capital area has seen this year, three in Donetsk and one in Kharkiv — and dozens were injured. Zelenskyy said the strikes hit civilian warehouse and logistics facilities — naming Epicentr, Rozetka and Nova Poshta sites, a brewing company and construction-materials depots — along with a railway station and infrastructure in Odesa Oblast, and that the targets "had nothing to do with the war"; a strike on Kyiv's Holosiivskyi district caused a contained ammonia leak, and Kyiv authorities alleged cluster munitions were used. Russia's Defence Ministry said it had struck military logistics hubs and supply chains, and three cargo vessels near Odesa. What is not contested is the failure of the defence: Ukrainian Air Force data analysed by BBC Verify show missile-interception rates fell to 44.4 percent over July 6–August 5 from 66.7 percent a year earlier — 156 of 351 missiles downed, against 128 of 192 in the same 2025 window — even as Russian missile launches rose 83 percent year on year, while drone-interception rates barely moved (85.8 percent, against 88.4 percent). Zelenskyy said interceptor deliveries are running three times lower than in 2025 and that ballistic interceptors "could have saved the lives of those killed."

The domestic cost of the refinery campaign surfaced in a government decree. Russia authorised the production, import and sale of Euro-2, -3 and -4 (K2–K4) motor gasoline — grades banned in the country since 2013 — until July 1, 2027, to stave off a fuel shortage; Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak tied the step to drone strikes on refineries. The Moscow Times reported that gasoline output had fallen to about 65 percent of average domestic consumption by early July and that diesel output barely matched demand. Gasoline imports from Belarus surged roughly 25-fold year on year, to about 665,000 tonnes over January–July, with further imports from India, Kazakhstan and Morocco. A government relaxing its own fuel-quality law is a clean, dated effect stated by the side being hurt — the domestic-supply counterpart to the export bans already on the record, which addressed the other end of the same shortage.

The campaign against the logistics network of Wildberries, Russia's largest online retailer, widened: the Institute for the Study of War counts at least 19 of the company's warehouses struck across Russia since the first such strike on July 18. On August 4–5, geolocated footage and Russian governors' and company confirmations recorded fires at Wildberries facilities in Aleksin (Tula Oblast) and Krasny Bor (Leningrad Oblast, near St Petersburg). The cost has now crossed a second border: Belarusian entrepreneurs have petitioned Minsk for compensation, citing an estimated 22,000 Belarusian-owned products stored in the struck Russian warehouses — extending the third-country consequence first seen when the retailer began seeking warehouse space in Kazakhstan. Individual strikes on the chain are now routine; the finding is the cumulative count and the spread of the bill.

The August 5 barrage that Ukraine could not touch turns on a supply-side question: whether Russia can sustain zero-interception ballistic packages against Ukraine's depleted interceptor stocks. Ukraine's military intelligence (GUR), via Reuters, said on August 5 that North Korea has begun deploying a missile unit — about 90 soldiers, up to 120 ballistic missiles and six launchers — to Voronezh Oblast in western Russia; an earlier batch of some 40 KN-23/24 missiles and personnel had already arrived, and the North Korean missile used in Russia's July 29–30 strike came from it. The Institute for the Study of War notes Russia expended up to two-thirds of its planned annual Zircon production in the first 19 days of July, launching faster than it builds — so roughly 160 added North Korean missiles would let it keep or enlarge ballistic barrages without drawing down its own S-400 and Zircon stocks. The transfer itself is a weapons-supply development; what bears on this campaign is the balance it shifts — between Russia's capacity to keep firing and Ukraine's shrinking capacity to intercept.

Russia escalated its ballistic missile attacks on Kyiv, launching a barrage of 27 ballistic missiles at the capital. Ukraine was only able to shoot down one of the missiles, with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy explicitly blaming the low interception rate on a critical shortage of Patriot interceptors. The strikes killed at least nine people and injured dozens, partially destroying a five-storey residential building in the Solomyanskyi district and another building in the Darnytskyi district. Debris from the strikes also landed near the Lithuanian embassy, breaking windows and scattering across the compound, prompting Lithuania's foreign minister to announce they would summon the Russian representative in protest.

Ukraine continued its deep-strike campaign against Russian infrastructure and military assets. Ukrainian drones struck the Engels airfield in the Saratov region—a major base for Russian Tu-95MC and Tu-160 strategic bombers—as well as a major oil refinery in Saratov, an oil depot in Kaluga, and a drone launch site in Bryansk. The strikes killed at least nine people across the Udmurtia, Belgorod, and Saratov regions, including a drone strike on a car over 1,300 kilometres from the front line. Meanwhile, in the Black Sea, Ukrainian drones sank the 100,000-tonne Russian-owned container ship Yanina, which Zelenskyy characterized as sustaining the war effort, while Rosatom claimed it was carrying civilian goods. The campaign also struck two more Wildberries warehouses in the Samara region, continuing Ukraine's targeting of logistics hubs it says supply the Russian military.

Ukrainian drones struck warehouses belonging to Wildberries — Russia's largest online marketplace, which handles 52% of the country's online orders — in St Petersburg, the adjacent Leningrad region and Simferopol in occupied Crimea on July 24, the latest in a wave that began on the night of July 18–19 and has hit at least nine of the retailer's logistics sites. ISW geolocation independently confirmed fires at Wildberries hubs near Krasnodar City and Nevinnomyssk on July 21 and near Voronezh on July 23, and recorded earlier strikes in Moscow and Tambov oblasts. The struck sites cover about 552,000 square metres, roughly a tenth of the company's warehouse capacity; the Moscow research firm Data Insight put the destroyed merchandise at 170 billion roubles (about $2.2 billion), though the same firm's lead analyst told the Associated Press losses could run to about $3 billion while cautioning there is not enough data to assess. At least nine people have been killed. Most of the loss falls not on Wildberries but on the independent sellers whose stock burned — and the company changed its seller terms 11 days before the first strike to exempt itself from liability for goods destroyed by 'force majeure', explicitly including drone attacks. It has since begun payments prioritising more than 88,000 of its smallest sellers; one seller said he received 19,000 roubles against 4.6 million roubles of losses, 'less than 1% of the total'. After months of striking refineries and fuel infrastructure, the campaign marks a turn to the consumer logistics network that grew into the gap Western brands left after 2022 — the first phase of Ukraine's long-range war whose effects are felt directly in ordinary Russian households.

The long-range campaign reached its furthest point of the war and, for the first time on this record, measurably cost a third country. On July 25 Ukrainian drones damaged the Diesel Fuel Deep Purification Unit and the ELOU-AT-3 unit of the Antipinsky Oil Refinery near Tyumen — roughly 1,980 kilometres from the frontline — and the strike was confirmed from three directions: geolocated imagery published by ISW, Zelensky's own confirmation, and an acknowledgement by Tyumen Oblast Governor Alexander Moor, who reported a fire and called the site the Tyumen Oil Refinery. Overnight on July 26-27 Zelensky confirmed strikes on oil facilities in Yaroslavl Oblast and the Udmurt Republic, over 1,300 kilometres from the Ukrainian border, while the General Staff reported an export terminal hit at Rostov-on-Don, which Rostov Oblast Governor Yuri Slyusar also acknowledged. The two distance figures are not directly comparable: ISW measures the Tyumen strike from the frontline and the Udmurtia strikes from the border. Robert "Magyar" Brovdi, who commands Ukraine's Unmanned Systems Forces, put the July running total of Russian electrical substations struck at 154 on July 27, against 136 three days earlier — his own force's claim, unverified. Two consequences are now on the record. Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak said on July 25 that Russia will extend its gasoline export ban to the end of 2026 and consider lifting the diesel ban only "as the market recovers"; gasoline exports were suspended on April 1 and diesel on July 8 as strikes on refining capacity intensified. And ISW reported on July 27, relaying Reuters, that Kazakhstan's daily oil and gas condensate output more than halved to about one million barrels — against a June 2026 average of 2.16 million — after Ukrainian strikes forced the closure of its main Black Sea export terminal, with the Caspian Pipeline Consortium resuming on July 27 after a week's suspension. The output figure rests on a single anonymous industry source and is recorded as that; the resumption is attributed to Kazakhstan's energy ministry. A campaign aimed at Russian refining is now subtracting barrels from a neighbour that is not party to the war.

On the night of July 28-29 Ukrainian drones struck two of Russia's largest refineries at once. At Ryazan — about 465 kilometres from the international border by the ISW's measure, about 360 by the Kyiv Independent's — a fire broke out at the Rosneft plant that processes upwards of 17 million tonnes of crude a year, roughly 5 percent of Russia's refining output; Governor Pavel Malkov acknowledged a massive drone attack, fires in industrial areas and six people hospitalised, without naming the target. A Wildberries warehouse complex in the same city burned, and the retailer's press service confirmed it had evacuated the site and restricted access to it. And about 1,465 kilometres out, at Perm, Ukraine's Security Service claimed a strike on the Lukoil refinery that processes nearly 13 million tonnes a year, with the ISW citing geolocated footage of damage to its AVT-5 primary processing unit; Perm Krai's governor conceded only that drones had damaged an industrial facility. That single-unit aim point is the campaign's new signature. The Financial Times, citing Ukrainian military planners, drone operators and energy specialists, reports that the campaign has shifted from broad strikes on refineries to targeted strikes on components that are hard to replace, and now returns to the same equipment before repairs are finished. Unmanned Systems Forces commander Robert "Magyar" Brovdi says his forces have struck 164 energy infrastructure targets across the theatre since July 1, including thirteen substations in occupied Kherson, Crimea and Luhansk on this night alone — a count published by the striking force and not independently verified, and a broader category than the 154 substations he claimed three days earlier rather than a revision of that figure. The commercial consequences keep travelling outward: Kommersant reports that Wildberries is seeking warehouse space in Kazakhstan and will not lease any more in Russia because of the strike risk, while Reuters reports the Kremlin is weighing tax breaks and state-bank loans to keep the company standing.

Overnight into July 30, Russia fired more than 70 missiles — a significant number of them ballistic — and more than 280 attack drones at targets in at least ten Ukrainian regions. Ukrainian defences downed more than 260 of the drones; no interception figure was published for the missiles, so the share of the seventy-odd that were stopped is not known. At least eight civilians were killed. Six of them died in Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, where a ballistic missile destroyed a house at Radushne near Kryvyi Rih: a six-year-old girl and boys of 11 and 17 were killed along with their parents, and two more children were pulled from the rubble alive. Authorities have not confirmed the deaths of every child who was in the house, and the Kyiv Post reports that some victims will have to be identified from fragments, so the family's full toll is not established. Ballistic missiles hit Kyiv, killing a 31-year-old man and wounding two, setting a market alight in Obolonskyi district and a garage complex and a five-storey building ablaze in Sviatoshynskyi. Cruise missiles struck residential high-rises in Lviv on Paton and Vyhovskoho streets, where the count of injured climbed through the morning from 15, fourteen of them hospitalised, to 34 including children of 6, 13 and 15 — both figures given by the same regional official while the search went on, with Mayor Andriy Sadovy reporting that people were still trapped beneath the collapsed building on Paton Street. In Poltava Oblast drones killed one person at warehouse facilities and hit a Nova Poshta logistics terminal, the second postal terminal struck in twelve days. The Russian Defence Ministry said it had aimed at air bases, arms factories, drone plants, a missile plant, an aircraft repair plant and a chemical plant; power generation appears nowhere in the target list it published. Zelenskyy, who had warned hours beforehand that another mass assault was coming and pressed partners to move faster on Patriot interceptors, said his crews were "accomplishing truly incredible things" given "the critical shortage of air defense missiles from our partners", and that the house at Radushne had been "an ordinary home, blown (to) smithereens by a ballistic missile".

A Russian ballistic missile struck the grounds of a privately operated military training site in the Bucha district, 20 to 30 kilometres from central Kyiv, that was hosting a defence-industry event on July 24, killing at least 10 people and wounding nearly 100 according to Ukrainian government and industry officials. The Ukrainian Defence Industry Council, the country's largest association of private defence manufacturers, said industry representatives were at the site when it was hit; acting regional military administration head Ruslan Oliinyk reported 27 homes and 44 vehicles also damaged. The Ukrainian government imposed reporting restrictions on the attack, so the figures may be incomplete. Prosecutor General Ruslan Kravchenko opened two cases — a war-crimes investigation into the strike itself and, unusually, a separate criminal case over possible negligence by the event's Ukrainian organisers, with investigators to examine who approved its location, timing and format. The strike came a day after Zelenskyy met senior Raytheon representatives in Kyiv and said the maker of the Patriot system was ready to co-produce interceptors with Ukraine — a claim Raytheon has not confirmed — and Zelenskyy said afterwards that 'missiles for the Patriot systems are the top priority'.

Ukraine's drone interdiction campaign has begun to sever Russia's logistics to occupied Crimea from two directions. Unmanned Systems Forces commander Robert 'Magyar' Brovdi reported Ukrainian forces struck 183 vessels in the Black and Azov seas in July, destroying five ferries that handled roughly 80% of military transport from the port of Kavkaz to the peninsula and cutting the Kerch ferry crossing's capacity by about 75%. By July 20 the campaign had extended to the northern land route: ISW assessed that Ukraine's intermediate-range strikes have 'at least partially deprived Russian forces of a significant' ground line of communication — the M-14 (R-280) Rostov–Crimea highway — observing at least four strikes on it between July 1 and 20. ISW reported the campaign has forced Russia to divert elite Rubikon drone crews and air-defense units to guard shipping, and that the Black Sea Fleet ordered the evacuation of servicemembers' families from occupied Sevastopol. Vessel-strike tallies are Ukrainian claims; the Russian countermeasures and the GLOC assessment are ISW-reported.

On the night of July 18–19, Russia struck Kyiv and other cities with one of its largest ballistic missile barrages of the war — roughly 40 missiles, including Iskander-M/S-400 ballistic missiles, Zircon hypersonic missiles, and Onyx and Kh-59/69 guided missiles, alongside about 125 strike drones over a five-hour assault. Ukraine's Air Force downed 18 missiles and 108 drones, but at least one civilian was killed and up to 16 wounded in Kyiv, with at least six killed nationwide — including three at a Nova Poshta postal terminal in Kharkiv and a 16-year-old in Odesa — while a cruise-missile strike on the Guinea-Bissau-flagged bulk carrier Golden Leo near Odesa killed 10 — nine crew members, among them four Indian nationals, and a Ukrainian maritime pilot — the deadliest attack on a merchant ship of the war as Russia intensifies strikes on the Black Sea grain corridor. Zelenskyy said Russia had spent days stockpiling missiles for the strike and was exploiting a global shortage of Patriot interceptors, the munition best able to down ballistic missiles; the ISW noted Russia is now launching more ballistic missiles than it produces each month, drawing down its stockpiles while cutting drone volumes. Acting Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha called it "a brutal terrorist attack" and said "the coward in Moscow, who is afraid to meet with President Zelenskyy to end the war, continues to wage a war against civilians" — the barrage undercutting President Trump's July 15 prediction that Putin was "ready to reach a peace agreement soon."

On the night of July 19–20, a day after Russia's record barrage on Kyiv, Ukraine struck Moscow and the surrounding oblast with hundreds of drones — Russian officials said roughly 400 were aimed at the Moscow region. Geolocated footage confirmed drones hitting a Wildberries logistics warehouse in Domodedovo, while Russian opposition monitors and NASA fire-detection data placed a second strike on an oil depot in Podolsk; President Zelenskyy acknowledged hitting an oil depot and logistics facilities in Moscow Oblast. Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin and Oblast Governor Andrei Vorobyov confirmed the attack, which authorities said wounded at least 10 people. The same night Ukraine's Unmanned Systems Forces reported destroying six Russian air-defense systems — a Tor-M2 launcher and Kasta-2E2, Gamma-C1M and two Nebo-SV radars — in Krasnodar Krai, part of a sustained effort to peel back Russia's air-defense umbrella. The strike extended the tit-for-tat long-range exchange that has come to define the war with the frontline frozen.

Ukrainian drones struck sites deep inside Russia in one of the largest single-wave operations of the war, killing at least nine people and wounding more than 60, according to Russian officials. Two Wildberries logistics warehouses were hit — in Kotovsk (Tambov region) and in Elektrostal, roughly 50km east of Moscow — and an oil depot in Noginsk caught fire. Russia's Defense Ministry said it intercepted 379 drones over 19 regions. Zelenskyy said the targeted facilities supplied sanctioned components for Russian drone and navigation-equipment production. Independent Russian outlets later estimated the strikes damaged roughly 7–15% of Wildberries' warehouse capacity, with losses of around 100 billion rubles (~$1.28 billion).

Ukraine significantly scales up its Unmanned Systems Forces, leveraging domestic drone production and joint defense ventures with European partners. This shift aims to offset Russian artillery advantages through precision deep-strikes on logistics and infrastructure — the USF reported striking 90 Russian vessels in the Sea of Azov in the week of July 6-12 alone.

Ukraine carries out the world's first sea-drone-to-ground-robot assault mission on Russian-held positions at the Kinburn Spit, demonstrating highly advanced integrated unmanned tactics.