Drones hit logistics centres belonging to Ozon, Russia's second-largest online retailer, across the country's south early on Monday. RIA Novosti reports fires at the company's warehouse in Makhachkala, in Dagestan, where operations stopped and routes were being redirected, and at its complex in Krasnodar, where staff were evacuated. It says attempts on facilities at Adygeysk and Nevinnomyssk left neither workers nor goods harmed, with those warehouses closed and emergency services on site. Ozon's own count, reported by The Moscow Times, is four logistics centres targeted.
The casualty picture depends on which place is being described. RIA says the Krasnodar Ozon complex came through without casualties, and that several people were hurt at the Makhachkala site with their lives not in danger. Separately, The Moscow Times reports that Russian officials said at least three teenagers were killed in the Krasnodar region, and that the children's rights commissioner, Maria Lvova-Belova, said six more children were hospitalised; local officials said drone debris fell on a private children's centre. Those are different locations, not competing counts of the same one.
The market read it as a company story. Ozon shares fell by as much as 28 percent on the Moscow Exchange after the news, The Moscow Times reports, and shares in its largest shareholder, the private equity group AFK Sistema, by more than 13 percent. Ozon had already suspended operations at a logistics centre in the Samara region after a strike on Saturday.
There is a pattern behind the target. Ukraine began striking Ozon warehouses this weekend, after more than a month of attacks on facilities belonging to its biggest competitor, Wildberries — which officials in Kyiv have accused of supplying the Russian military with drone parts and other equipment. Videos circulating on social media, The Moscow Times reports, showed drones flying into the Dagestan warehouse and men with rifles trying to bring them down.
Why it is on the board
Third on RIA Novosti's most-read list when we collected and eighth in the Russian search trends, at more than a thousand searches — two lenses.
One thing about the source is worth recording plainly. The RIA report carries, in the body of the news item and not marked as comment, the sentence that unlike the enemy the Russian army strikes exclusively military infrastructure and is capable of destroying any target in Kyiv or anywhere in Ukraine. It is not attributed to anyone. That is what the most-read Russian account of this morning contains.
확인: РИА Новости · The Moscow Times