Russia and Ukraine’s tit-for-tat missile and drone war escalated further over the weekend of August 1-2, with another brutal Russian attack on Kyiv that is driving tens of thousands residents into the metro stations every weekend. This attack killed at least nine people and injured dozens more.
“Russian strikes injured at least 51 people across five Ukrainian regions in the past day,” Kevin Rothrock, managing editor of Meduza, wrote on social media, citing regional officials. “Two more people were killed, one in Kherson and one in the Zaporizhzhia region. Homes, schools, clinics, a gas station, and a grain warehouse were damaged.”
Russia is striking back even harder than in previous weeks as both sides expanded their “punishment strategy”: it fired a record 376-377 missiles at Ukraine in July, more than double June’s total, according to official Ukrainian figures cited by the Kyiv Post. The targets are overwhelmingly civilian, but not exclusively – both sides are also hitting military-industrial and logistics targets, ports and energy infrastructure, in a campaign that has widened well beyond the front line.
Ukraine’s air defences have intercepted more than 445,000 Russian aerial targets since the full-scale invasion began in February 2022, Acting Defence Minister Evgeniy Khmara said on Ukraine’s Air Force Day, August 2, including over 38,000 combat sorties that destroyed more than 12,000 threats. But the interception rate is deteriorating fast where it matters most: Ukraine shot down just 29% of the ballistic missiles Russia fired in July, against an 87% intercept rate for drones, Khmara said, a gap driven by the country’s chronic shortage of Patriot interceptors. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy admitted at the weekend Kyiv only has one interceptor missile left.
Kyiv: a worse night for fewer missiles
Russia launched 35 missiles, including 27 ballistic missiles, and 185 attack drones at Ukraine overnight into August 2, Zelenskiy said, with Kyiv the primary target and further strikes hitting the Dnipro, Sumy, Kharkiv and Poltava regions. Only one ballistic missile was intercepted, Zelenskiy said, “simply because there are no interceptors for the Patriot systems.”
Social-media mapping account AMK Mapping put the Kyiv-directed portion of the barrage at roughly 10 Iskander-M ballistic missiles and four Zircon hypersonic cruise missiles, with two further Zircons striking Poltava Oblast; it reported no sign of Ukrainian Patriot activity, consistent with Zelenskiy’s account.
In Kyiv, nine people were killed and at least 28 injured, including four children, according to Anton Gerashchenko, advisor to Ukraine’s Minister of Internal Affairs and founder of the Institute of the Future. Zelenskiy said seven districts of the capital were affected, with 18 residential buildings, a school, the Lithuanian Embassy and other infrastructure facilities damaged. In a new direction design to terrorise residents, Russian strikes also hit Kyiv’s medical transport service, Kyivmedspetstrans, destroying five ambulances and severely damaging 20 more medical vehicles and four buildings, Gerashchenko said, while a separate strike hit an industrial facility in Bucha, in the Kyiv region.
The attack compares unfavourably with the previous large-scale strike on the capital on the night of July 18-19, which Zelenskiy called one of the largest Russian ballistic missile attacks of the war to date – roughly 40 missiles and 120 drones, in what analysts read as retaliation for Ukraine’s destruction of a Wildberries’ warehouse on July 17 outside Moscow a day earlier. That attack killed one person and injured 16 in Kyiv and the region.
This weekend’s barrage used fewer missiles but killed nine times as many people, underlining how much faster Ukraine’s interceptor shortage is deteriorating than the scale of Russian attacks is growing. A July 24 daytime strike on a defence-industry drone exhibition in Kyiv Oblast, which killed at least 10, was another escalation specifically targeting non-combatants.
Beyond Kyiv ports, publishers and a first hit on Rozetka
The weekend’s strikes extended well beyond the capital and beyond military targets. In Odesa, Russia carried out what a pro-Russian milbloggers described as its largest-ever attack using Russia’s new Banderol cut-price cruise missiles that made their debut on the battlefield this summer; at least 12 operating as a group, alongside dozens of Geran-2 and jet-powered Geran-3/4 drones, two Oniks supersonic cruise missiles and two Kh-59/69 cruise missiles; the claims could not be independently corroborated. Separately, jet-powered Geran-5 drones struck two tugboats in the Port of Mykolaiv, according to the milblogger Military Summary.
The Russia-Ukraine drone war has increasingly shifted toward crippling ports and shipping infrastructure on both sides of the Black Sea in recent weeks.
And in a new direction, books are now being actively targeted. A Russian drone strike set fire to a 10,000 square-metre warehouse belonging to Ukrainian publishing house Ranok in Kharkiv on August 1. That destroyed more than 1.5mn Ukrainian books in July alone, according to the Ukrainian Book Institute; one person was injured.
Separate strikes on Kharkiv and Mykolaiv early on August 2 injured at least six people, including three children, with Kharkiv’s mayor citing the use of a Molniya loitering munition. Another pro-Russian milblogger claimed strikes on Kramatorsk, a key city in the so-called Donbas Fortress Belt, and on the Burevestnik marine-instrumentation plant and the state-owned defence sector company Ukroboronprom facilities in Kyiv; these claims could not be independently verified.
In the first direct retaliation for the ongoing destruction of Russia’s biggest e-commerce company Wildberries, Ukraine’s own leading online marketplace, Rozetka, was hit for the first time over the weekend.
Wildberries hit for the twelfth time
Ukraine kept up its own campaign against Russia’s civilian economy, which both sides have now been targeting for weeks, striking the Wildberries logistics hub in Novosemeykino, Samara region – a 178,600 square-metre complex that opened in April 2025. That is twelfth strike on the company’s logistics and the second time this facility has been hit in the campaign. Video showed the facility, one of Wildberries’ key distribution sites for the Volga region, engulfed in flames and expected to burn down completely, according to the milblogger NOELreports.
The Wildberries logistics hub in Novosemeykino, Samara region, ablaze after a Ukrainian drone strike, August 1-2. Source: Exilenova+ via social media.
Wildberries founder Tatiana Kim addressed the strikes directly in a video message on July 31, describing the campaign – which has hit at least a dozen of the company’s warehouses since mid-July, most recently in Volgograd and Tatarstan – as a “terrorist attack”. She also repeated that the company was not legally obliged to compensate sellers for losses, which is becoming an increasingly sore point amongst the Russian public. Kim claimed Wildberries sellers in Russia and partner countries including China and Kazakhstan had “suffered losses amounting to billions.” The Kyiv Post reported on August 2 that the campaign has destroyed roughly 38% of the company’s major warehouse capacity over the past two weeks.
The 23 largest Wildberries warehouses in Russia by floor area, according to a Russian Telegram infographic circulating alongside the strikes – unverified as to which sites have actually been hit. Source: t.me/supernova_plus.
Ukraine also struck Russia’s energy infrastructure over the weekend. Drones hit the Saratov oil refinery – the fifteenth such attack on the plant since the start of the full-scale war, according to the Russian milblogger Astra – setting fire to its ELOU-AVT-6 processing unit at a facility with roughly 7mn tonnes a year of capacity; the nearby Engels-2 air base was also reportedly struck. A refinery cluster in Ufa, Bashkortostan, with a combined capacity of 23.5mn tonnes a year, was hit for a second consecutive day. Ukraine’s General Staff also confirmed strikes on the Lyudinovskaya oil depot in Kaluga region, a drone storage and launch site near Navlya in Bryansk region, and drone command posts in Russia’s Kursk region and in the Ukrainian regions of Donetsk, Dnipropetrovsk and Zaporizhzhia.
The cumulative effect of the expanding campaign is visible in occupied Crimea, where residents of the town of Massandra were reduced to queuing for hot meals at a field kitchen on July 31 after Ukrainian strikes on power plants, refineries and supply chains left much of the peninsula in the dark and without fuel this summer, Reuters reported.
A widening war of attrition
The newly appointed Ukrainian Prime Minister Serhiy Koretskyi ordered an urgent nationwide inspection of civil defence shelters on July 30, demanding every facility be properly maintained and freely accessible “as the war approaches its fifth year”. But in a sign of how effective the Ukrainian retaliation has been and its effort to bring the war into the living rooms of ordinary Russians, Sobyanin ordered the publishing of official bomb-shelter maps on July 30 for the first time. That is a collapse of Putin’s efforts to shelter the public from the effects of the conflict and increases the political risks for him at a time when the tensions between the doves and the hawks in the Kremlin are growing. According to IntelliNews interlocutors in Moscow, the public is beginning to panic, with many people planning to spend the summer at the dacha at a minimum, or leave the country completely at the maximum.
Neither side shows signs of scaling back. With Ukraine’s Patriot interceptor stocks still critically low and Russia’s missile production running at a wartime high the civilian casualties will continue to mount on both sides.