Eight hundred kilometres. That is how far the Wildberries warehouse in the Samara region is from the most forward Ukrainian military positions. Last night a drone came down there.

The Russian defence ministry announced it had shot down 635 Ukrainian drones during the night. Even if the figure is inflated in its own favour, it is in itself an admission of scale. Nobody announces 635 downed drones if this is an isolated incident.

The target is logistics, not the front

Wildberries is Russia's largest online retailer, often called the Russian answer to Amazon. Since 18 July, Ukrainian forces have struck around ten of its sites. That is not a randomly chosen target. It is a systematic attack on the supply chain of a state that spent years selling the image that the war is being fought somewhere far away while life at home carries on normally.

The logic is direct. If you cannot move the front, you move the economy behind it. In recent months Ukraine has increasingly struck targets deep inside Russia, particularly economic and energy infrastructure, to weaken Moscow's ability to wage a war that has now lasted more than four years.

The list from one night

According to regional officials, at least eight people were killed in the attacks. In the Saratov region, two people died in a strike on a residential building in Engels. The Ukrainian military said it had hit a refinery in Saratov and a military air base in Engels, where fires broke out, as well as an oil depot in the Kaluga region. Three people were killed and two injured in the attack on Udmurtia. In the border region of Belgorod, three people were killed and five injured. In Bashkortostan, a drone was shot down over the industrial zone of Ufa, where a fire broke out.

The other side of the same night: the Russian defence ministry announced it had hit two ships carrying military cargo in the Ukrainian port of Mykolaiv, plus a vessel transporting military equipment across the Black Sea. In Zaporizhzhia, Russian guided bombs killed one person and wounded 21, said regional governor Ivan Fedorov.

The war that does not end from exhaustion

The fourth year. Over that period we have cycled through several waves of expectation that everything would be resolved by negotiations, by sanctions, by one big summit. None of it held. What is changing is the technology: from artillery to drones, from the front line to warehouses and refineries eight hundred kilometres deep.

The Balkans know this phase from their own history, when a war stops being a clash of armies and becomes the wearing down of everything that keeps a state running. It is the phase that lasts longest and is hardest to leave.