223-Drone Raid Hits Russian Regions, Sparking Fires at Oil and Energy Facilities

Ukraine launched another wave of long-range drone strikes across Russia overnight, with reported attacks targeting multiple oil facilities, and key pipeline infrastructure.

Russian monitoring channels reported a series of explosions over Voronezh during the early hours of Thursday, July 23.

“Voronezh is under a massive unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) attack. One of the likely targets could be the Wildberries logistics hub,” the Ukrainian monitoring Telegram channel Exilenova+ reported.

However, the Astra outlet said it had not confirmed reports of a strike or fire at the Wildberries warehouse in the Novaya Usman district.

Voronezh Governor Alexander Gusev confirmed that the overnight attack caused casualties and what he described as “serious consequences,” but did not specify which facilities had been hit.

“Dear Voronezh residents! Air defense forces repelled an enemy attack on civilian facilities throughout the night. Unfortunately, there are casualties and serious consequences. We will provide details after emergency services complete their work,” Gusev wrote.

In a later update, the governor said air defense forces had shot down 36 UAVs overnight over Voronezh and six districts across the region.

“As a result of a UAV crashing in a suburb of Voronezh, a fire broke out in a private home, where, unfortunately, a three-year-old boy was killed. His parents sustained injuries of varying severity,” he wrote.

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Colonel Joby Rimmer said Russian weapons have already crossed into Romania and Moldova, striking civilians.

Gusev added that a 19-year-old man in the same municipality suffered minor injuries but did not require hospitalization.

“The roof of a marketplace warehouse and the façade of another warehouse were damaged. In addition, windows were shattered in nine private homes, while roofs and outbuildings were also damaged. Fifteen apartments in five residential buildings will require window replacement and utility repairs.”

He added that shrapnel also damaged around a dozen vehicles.

The reported attack comes after Wildberries previously suspended overnight operations at the Voronezh warehouse, from midnight until 6 a.m., following earlier Ukrainian strikes on the company’s logistics network.

On July 22, Ukrainian drones struck Wildberries logistics centers in Krasnodar and Nevinnomyssk, sparking major fires. Exilenova+ published overnight images indicating that the blazes were still burning.

Earlier, on July 18, two of the company’s largest warehouses – in Elektrostal near Moscow and Kotovsk in the Tambov region – were also hit.

Following those attacks, Wildberries founder Tatyana Kim announced the start of compensation payments to affected sellers.

“We are beginning the first payments to sellers whose goods were damaged in the burned warehouse in Elektrostal,” she wrote on Telegram.

According to Kim, priority will be given to more than 88,000 of the company’s smallest sellers, who are expected to receive payments within 24 hours. The company also confirmed that compensation for destroyed goods would be paid “as soon as possible.”

Meanwhile, Astra, citing open-source intelligence analysis, reported that the NS-Oil refinery in Russia’s Ulyanovsk region was attacked overnight.

Residents reported explosions, while Governor Alexey Russkikh confirmed that a fuel and energy facility in the Novospassky district had come under attack, triggering a fire.

According to Astra’s analysis of eyewitness footage, the targeted facility was the NS-Oil refinery in Novospassky.

Open-source data shows that NS-Oil is a small refinery processing up to 30,000 tons of crude oil annually into refined petroleum products.

Exilenova+ also reported a strike on the Subkhankulovo Linear Production and Dispatching Station (LPDS) near Tuymazy in Russia’s Bashkortostan republic, claiming one of the oil storage tanks caught fire after at least eight reported impacts.

The reported strike was later confirmed by Serhiy Sternenko, an adviser to Ukraine’s former defense minister.

According to Sternenko, the Subkhankulovo LPDS is one of the key nodes in Russia’s Transneft pipeline network, managing oil flows from Western Siberia and Bashkortostan to refineries and export pipelines.

Linear production and dispatching stations are critical components of Russia’s oil transportation system, where crude oil from multiple fields is received, blended, and pumped into trunk pipelines.

Disabling such facilities can disrupt fuel supplies to several refineries simultaneously and is generally more difficult to repair than damage to an individual refinery.

For that reason, Ukrainian forces have increasingly targeted pumping stations alongside refineries, aiming to disrupt Russia’s fuel logistics and military supply chain.

According to the Russian Defense Ministry, air defenses intercepted and destroyed 223 Ukrainian fixed-wing drones between 8 p.m. on July 22 and 8 a.m. on July 23 over the Belgorod, Bryansk, Volgograd, Voronezh, Rostov, Ryazan, Samara, Saratov, Tver, Tula, and Ulyanovsk regions, as well as over the Moscow region, occupied Crimea, Tatarstan, and the Sea of Azov.

Ukraine has not officially commented on the reported strikes.