Drones are burning Ozon's warehouses across southern Russia: logistics has become the front line

Three days in a row, three different regions, the same target. The logistics centres of Ozon - Russia's second largest online retailer - are burning from Samara to Stavropol, and the drone strikes are clearly no accident. When one and the same company loses warehouses in five regions in seventy-two hours, that is no longer a run of bad luck, it is a list.

It started on 22 August in the Samara region, where a warehouse fire forced more than 500 people outside and left some injured. The next day it was the Orenburg region's turn - work stopped after more than 300 employees were evacuated. On 24 August the strikes became simultaneous: Krasnodar, Adygea and the Stavropol region, all on the same day.

The figures that show the real scale

The damaged logistics centre in Krasnodar burned in a major fire. The facility in Enem covers 91,200 square metres, the one in Nevinnomyssk 93,514 square metres - both burned down. At every affected location work has stopped, orders are cancelled and money is being refunded.

Before Ozon, the same campaign spent weeks hitting the warehouses of Wildberries. The change of target says more than any statement: if they hit the largest retailer first and then the second, the objective is not one company - the objective is the chain that supplies the entire country with everything from toothpaste to spare parts.

A war no longer fought only at the front

This is the phase of the war in which logistics is the front line. Not barracks, not bridges, not refineries - warehouses. Places where parcels get packed. It is a strike measured not in kilometres captured but in days when somebody will not receive what they ordered, and in trust slowly coming apart towards a system that promised everything works normally.

How long can an economy run while its warehouses burn one after another? That question is not officially asked in Moscow. But the hundreds of evacuated employees from Samara and Orenburg already know what the answer looks like at their workplace.