The night of August 23 to 24 was a coordinated lesson in what happens when one side decides to dismantle the other's eyes first. Ukraine's Unmanned Systems Forces commander Robert Brovdi, callsign Magyar, reported his forces struck a Russian MiG-29 fighter jet and a Ka-52 helicopter at Millerovo Air Base in Rostov Oblast, two air-surveillance radars and an air-defense sensor in the same region, and an air-surveillance radar plus a reconnaissance-drone crew shelter in occupied Crimea — with geolocated footage confirming the MiG-29 hit published within hours. [1][4] This was not opportunism. It is a suppression-and-destruction campaign against Russian air defenses, conducted nightly, and it is working down a list.
The e-commerce war escalated in parallel, and the scale jumped. Sunday's edition documented Ukrainian drones striking Ozon warehouses deep inside European Russia, when a single burning logistics center counted as a strategic oddity. Overnight the campaign went national: drones struck four Ozon fulfillment centers simultaneously across Makhachkala in Dagestan, Nevinnomyssk in Stavropol, Enem in Adygea, and Krasnodar Krai, with Ozon itself confirming fires at its facilities on Monday. [2] One warehouse was news; four, from the Caspian to the Kuban, is a targeting program aimed at the delivery spine of Russian consumer life.
Connect the target sets and the design shows through. The same night Ukraine's drones killed radars that guide interceptors and aircraft that hunt drones, it also burned the distribution network that moves civilian goods — because both belong to one system now. Russia runs its war on an economy whose commercial logistics double as military supply lines; Ukraine has concluded that the radar mast and the parcel warehouse are the same target wearing different roofs. [1] The Unmanned Systems Forces also reported hitting a solid rocket fuel plant near Kamensk-Shakhtinsky and an oil depot at Yeysk, extending the night's work from sensing to fuel to munitions. [3]
Moscow answered with its own familiar arithmetic. Russian forces launched two Onyx anti-ship missiles, six Kh-31P or Kh-59 guided missiles, and one hundred forty-three strike drones against Ukraine overnight, knocking out power across six oblasts. [1] The exchange rates tell the strategic story better than any communiqué: Ukraine spends hundreds of cheap drones and loses power grids it is learning to patch; Russia loses irreplaceable radars, trained crews' shelters, aircraft on the ground, and now retail infrastructure that took a decade to build. Governors performed the ritual minimization, describing drone debris and minor damage in language designed for people who have not seen the satellite passes. Milblogger rage ran the other direction entirely — fury at air defenses leaking enemy drones deep inside supposedly safe territory, aimed upward at the Ministry of Defense rather than outward at Kyiv. [1]
The night's work also compounded the weekend's. Ukraine's General Staff reported that Saturday-to-Sunday strikes had already damaged Su-33 and MiG-29 jets and an Orion reconnaissance drone in Krasnodar Krai, part of a two-night sequence in which Ukrainian forces claimed eleven of fourteen engaged targets including an S-400 division in Gelendzhik, a Pantsir system at Yeysk, and eight radar complexes across three regions. [5] Two nights do not make a doctrine; a third week of them does. The pattern across both — sensors first, shelters second, fuel and logistics alongside — reads as someone working through Russia's integrated air-defense architecture in the order an attacker would, dismantling the eyes before blinding the hands.
The second-order effect nobody in official Moscow will name is seasonal. Four fulfillment centers serve millions of ordinary deliveries — groceries, parts, medicine — across regions where winter makes alternative logistics brutal. A consumer economy can absorb one smoking warehouse as an incident. It cannot absorb a sustained campaign against its fulfillment spine and still call itself functioning by December, which is presumably the point: Ukrainian planners are not just destroying buildings, they are scheduling Russian inconvenience for the coldest months of the year. [2]
Watch two numbers from here. How many radars come back online in southern Russia — because every gap in that coverage widens the corridor for the next strike wave — and whether Ozon's pickup points stay stocked in the struck regions. Air defense is measurable in sorties survived; consumer confidence is measurable in shelves. Between those two ledgers, the war's real scoreboard is being kept in places no general mentions.
-- KATYA VOLKOV, Moscow