The night over the Moscow region was one of the heaviest since the war began. Hundreds of Ukrainian drones flew toward the heart of Russian logistics, and by morning warehouses were burning in Podolsk and Domodedovo - a few kilometres from one of Moscow's main airports. The Russian Defence Ministry announced it had shot down 822 drones across the country overnight. When the side being attacked is the one quoting that figure, it usually means the real one is higher.

The heaviest damage is at the Wildberries depot in the Koledino industrial zone in Podolsk. That is not a random target: the complex is over 200,000 square metres and is the largest warehouse of Russia's largest online retailer. For weeks Kyiv has claimed that military goods also pass through that network, treating it as part of the economic machine keeping the war in motion.

The governor of the Moscow region, Andrei Vorobyov, confirmed that an 83-year-old man was killed, with several more injured in Podolsk. Moscow mayor Sergei Sobyanin said 600 drones flew toward the region, 201 of them shot down over the region itself. If the air defence supposedly works that well, why are the warehouses and the houses burning anyway?

The war has returned to the rear

For four years Moscow sold the story that the front is far away, somewhere in Donbas, and that life in the capital can carry on as normal. Last night that argument lost another warehouse. Drones are no longer a symbolic incident wiped away with a single statement - they are systematically hitting the infrastructure that pays for the war.

Even after this night the Kremlin gave no official comment on the strikes themselves, and the information comes from local governors, Russian channels and Ukrainian sources that cannot be independently verified. That is the standard picture of a war in which both sides count enemy losses and round their own down.

For a reader in the Balkans the scene is not unfamiliar. We know what it looks like when the official statement and what people on the ground can see describe two different events. The difference is that here the chaos is measured in thousands of drones and warehouses of two hundred thousand square metres - but the logic of the silence is the same.