A photo supplied by the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense purports to show a Wildberries warehouse on fire after a drone attack in the Moscow region on Sunday. The Kremlin said it shot down nearly 1,500 Ukrainian drones during an overnight attack. Photo courtesy Ukrainian Ministry of Defense
Aug. 16 (UPI) — Ukraine on Sunday launched one of its heaviest drone assaults so far against Russian targets according to the Kremlin, which claimed its forces shot down nearly 1,500 of the aerial vehicles in a single day.
Russian defense officials said Sunday’s activity marked the highest number of Ukrainian fixed-wing drones ever destroyed in one day at 1,478, the state-owned RIA Novosti news agency reported.
It was just the latest in a series of large-scale Ukrainian drone assaults on Russia this month as the top five days for Russian drone destruction have all happened in August, according to the Russian Ministry of Defense.
Those totals include 1,328 unmanned aerial vehicles shot down on Saturday, 1,158 on Aug. 2, 1,155 on Aug. 6 and 1,150 on Thursday, officials said.
Since the beginning of this year, Russian air defense forces have destroyed more than 100,000 Ukrainian UAVs as Kyiv ramps up its airborne attacks on Russian targets, the news agency calculated.
Andrey Vorobyov, the governor of the Moscow region, said the city “was subjected to one of the most massive drone attacks in recent times” overnight into Sunday morning.
Air defense and electronic warfare units shot down or neutralized 187 UAVs across a host of areas in and around Moscow, he said in a Telegram post.
An 83-year-old man died in the Ramenskoye district and three people in the Koledino district were injured, Vorobyov said.
The strike in Koledino caused a fire at a Wildberries warehouse — a favorite target of Kyiv’s as the Ukrainian military seeks to disrupt daily life in the Russian capital by hobbling the nation’s largest e-commerce merchandiser.
Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense said Sunday it has now taken seven of Wildberries’ 10 largest logistics hubs out of operation.
“On Sunday night, following a large-scale drone attack on the Moscow region, the company’s logistics hub at the Koledino industrial park also ceased operations, alongside the warehouse in Domodedovo,” the ministry said in a post on X. “It was Wildberries’ largest warehouse by area — 250,000 square meters.”
The warehouse strike caused a massive fire, witnesses reported.
