MOSCOW, Aug 4 (Reuters) - Ukrainian drones hit three warehouses in Russia in overnight attacks that killed five people, local officials said on Tuesday, as the strikes intensify pressure on the operations of online retailer Wildberries.
Often described as Russia's answer to Amazon, Wildberries has become a frequent target of Ukrainian attacks in recent weeks, part of what Kyiv says is a campaign to bring the war home to ordinary Russians.
The company said fire crews were containing a blaze after the latest attack struck one of its warehouses near St Petersburg. In the Tver region, northwest of Moscow, drones damaged another Wildberries facility, local authorities said. Local authorities reported no casualties in either of the strikes.
But in the Moscow region, a drone attack on the city of Chekhov set another warehouse alight and damaged an electrical substation and another building, killing five people and injuring 10, the governor, Andrei Vorobyov, said. He did not say which company the site belonged to or specify exactly where the deaths had occurred.
Since launching its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Russia has repeatedly struck Ukrainian logistics hubs as well as other infrastructure.
Ukraine has expanded its own long-range drone strategy, targeting close to 20 Wildberries sites since July 18. The strikes have inflicted significant damage on a company that has become a driving force in Russia's retail sector, processing millions of orders a day through vast warehouses spread across the country.
All stock at a large Wildberries warehouse in the Samara region was destroyed after a strike on Sunday sparked a fire that gutted the facility, state news agency TASS quoted regional official Denis Gurkov as saying on Tuesday.
"Of its 180,000 square metres, 160,000 burned down," he said. That is roughly equivalent to 22 soccer pitches.
On Monday, hundreds of firefighters worked to put out a 100,000-square-metre fire at a Wildberries warehouse in the Vladimir region. Only part of its stock was saved, the company said, without giving further details.
Wildberries has not given an estimate of the financial losses resulting so far from the attacks, which founder and CEO Tatyana Kim has described as "acts of terrorism."
The company, which also operates in Central Asia and the Caucasus, is building 260,000 square metres of warehouse capacity in neighbouring Kazakhstan, the Kazakh trade minister said on Tuesday.
(Reporting by Reuters; Writing by Alessandra Prentice and Lucy Papachristou; Editing by Mark Trevelyan and Hugh Lawson)