ANALYSIS: 100 strikes on warehouses since June, and Moscow takes its war to Kyiv’s shelves

One hundred versus fifty

ACLED’s count

ACLED has recorded about 100 Russian strikes, or series of strikes, on civilian warehouses in the Kyiv region since mid-June, against around 50 between February 2022 and mid-June 2026, according to an AFP analysis published on September 26.

Twice as many in three months as in more than four years.

ACLED, a monitor of armed conflicts, notes that its tally is not exhaustive. The real number may be different. The monitor says so itself.

A shopper watching his phone

At the end of that chain stands a 26-year-old man in a Kyiv supermarket. AFP met him.

He shops with one eye on the shelves and the other on his phone, watching for Russian drones over the city.

That is the unit of this text: the shelf. What is on it. What is missing.

A row of cans. A bin of potatoes. A gap between two brands. You notice it. You move on.

Phone first, shelves second.

Coca-Cola and potatoes

What’s missing from the shelf

His favorite drink is out of stock. “There’s absolutely no Coca-Cola left, not even the equivalent,” he tells AFP.

Last month, he says, his Silpo grocery store had no potatoes, no cereals, and few vegetables.

You can live without Coca-Cola. Potatoes, less so.

The little market nearby

He is not panicking. A small market has set up near his home. He sometimes buys the basics there, a little cheaper.

And if things get worse, he has already found a grower in the provinces for his potatoes.

One empty shelf. Then another. Then people adapt.

An empty shelf does not only say that a product is missing. It says a truck didn’t come. That a warehouse no longer exists. That someone chose to strike it.

One can is missing, and a whole network speaks.

The first 18 days of September

More than any month since March 2022

AFP’s analysis goes beyond warehouses.

During the first 18 days of September, the Kyiv region came under more bombardment than in any full month since the invasion began. One exception: March 2022.

March 2022 was the first full month of the invasion.

September 2026 is the suburban warehouse.

Eighteen days. Not even a full month. And already a record, with one exception.

Two-thirds since August

The pace picked up in early August, AFP writes. On August 5, warehouses and a logistics center belonging to the Epicentr chain were destroyed.

Over nine months, strikes on the region’s civilian warehouses have been three times as frequent as during the first four years of the war. Two-thirds of them came after the start of August, according to ACLED data through September 18.

A hundred in three months, 50 in four years.

September beats every month except the first.

What the number says

One reading

While Washington and Kyiv discuss a possible truce on strikes against energy, according to the Kyiv Independent, ACLED counts strikes on warehouses full of oil, salt and canned food.

Here is how I read this number. First and foremost, it says this: part of Russia’s air war has left the front to target the chain that fills the capital’s shelves.

What a strike is for shows in what it costs, and who pays. Here, the bill does not land on a trench. It lands on a grocery basket.

This is not an accusation of intent. It is a map. The Kyiv region is far from the front line, AFP notes. Strikes there intensified all summer anyway.

The war on the shelf

A burning power plant makes the front page. A burning warehouse, rarely. A shopping habit breaks in a day.

The warehouse is not the front. It is someone’s kitchen, three days later.

And yet it gets less attention than the power plants. A transformer makes headlines. A pallet of canned goods does not.

This number doesn’t count bombs. It counts shelves.

Epicentr, Varus, Fozzy, Pochaina

The stores that were hit

AFP also counted the region’s shops and markets. They were hit as many times in 2026 as in all the previous years of the war combined.

There was a Varus supermarket.

There was a Fozzy hypermarket, in Vyshneve.

There was the Pochaina book market, long known for its rare and antique books.

There were the Epicentr warehouses, on August 5.

There was the Epicentr store in Kharkiv, hit by a jet-powered drone on September 17, according to LIGA.net.

Seven shopping centers

In the first half of 2026, seven shopping centers in Ukraine were destroyed by massive Russian attacks, LIGA.net reports.

An antique book feeds no one. But no one strikes a book market to reach a barracks.

Stalls of worn books. Rare editions. Pages leafed through before paying.

From antique books to the hypermarket, everything was hit.

How the central warehouse works

Logistics hubs

Why the warehouse? Because Ukrainian retail works like ours.

The big chains rely on centralized logistics platforms. Ukraine’s food minister, Taras Vysotskyi, quoted by AFP, says the wave of strikes has “seriously disrupted, even rendered inoperative” those supply chains.

One big warehouse. Dozens of stores behind it. One strike is enough.

Decentralizing under the drones

The minister is asking brands to decentralize their logistics. To shorten supply chains. To use smaller warehouses, or ones in neighboring countries.

The Fozzy group, which owns the Silpo grocery stores, announced in early August that it was reorganizing its supply chains, according to AFP. The shelves filled up again. Without certain brands.

In other words, the war is redrawing an entire country’s logistics, one aisle at a time.

Companies are buckling too. On September 1, the company Zammler Sklad ceased operations, LIGA.net reports. The Zammler group, active since 2007, has 17 offices and eight warehouse complexes in Ukraine, according to the same source.

Eight complexes. Soon, one fewer.

A central warehouse is one roof over a thousand shelves.

September 27, Brovary

A Zammler warehouse

On September 27, the logistics company Zammler announced that one of its warehouses had been destroyed in the Kyiv region, according to LIGA.net. No casualties, the company says.

It does not say where. It does not say how bad the damage is. It asks that no photos or videos be published: that would help the enemy.

A warehouse burning, and a company asking for silence.

Where was it, exactly?

The fires degraded the air quality in Obukhiv and Brovary, NV reports.

The same day, according to the regional military administration quoted by NV, 21 civilian sites were damaged across five districts of the region. In Brovary district, two warehouses and two administrative buildings.

Black smoke, and ice cream

Elsewhere, in the Zhytomyr region, a warehouse belonging to Ukraine’s largest ice cream producer was destroyed, according to Ukrainska Pravda, cited by bne IntelliNews.

In the Kyiv suburbs, about 10 kilometers from our shopper’s supermarket, AFP watched firefighters work around a hulk of charred metal. The day before, it had been a warehouse for the ECO Market chain. Among the debris lay bottles of oil, packets of salt, a few tin cans.

Ice cream. Canned goods. Oil. Salt.

In the Kyiv region, three people died and eight were injured in the day’s Russian strikes, according to the head of the regional administration, Tymur Tkachenko, quoted by NV.

Brovary breathes the smoke of one more warehouse.

Moscow says military aid

The ministry’s claim

Here I have to set down what the number does not say.

Russia’s Defense Ministry claimed to have struck a Zammler logistics center in Krasylivka which, it said, stored Western military aid, bne IntelliNews reports, citing the TASS agency.

No Ukrainian official named the site, the same source adds.

The next day, according to the Associated Press, the Russian ministry also claimed gas stations in the capital and a Nova Poshta parcel sorting center in Odesa.

Gas pumps. A parcel sorting center. Ministry words for everyday places.

I cannot verify what that warehouse held. No one, working from this record, can.

A claim is not proof. Neither is a silence.

The limits of the count

ACLED does not claim to see everything. Its tally is not exhaustive, AFP notes. And the monitor warns, in its weekly tracker, that a single event can be counted more than once if it hits several types of infrastructure.

A tally can count the same fire twice. It can also miss one.

So it is possible that some of the warehouses hit were used for something other than salt and canned goods.

And yet a Varus supermarket, a Fozzy hypermarket, a book market and an ice cream warehouse are not being claimed as Western military aid.

Moscow names military aid. No one names the ice cream.

What the shelf doesn’t say

Kyiv is not going hungry

I also have to write down what tempers the finding.

Distributors have adapted, AFP writes. The shortages were brief.

And yet the first shortages were enough to set off a rush on certain products, the Kyiv shopper says. People wanted to stock up before winter.

The economist Oleg Pendzyn, quoted by the agency, points out that most Ukrainian families buy 45% of their products at markets each month, and 30% at neighborhood grocery stores.

Those stores get their supplies directly from domestic producers. For now, he says, that circuit rules out any risk of food shortages.

The supermarket of young city dwellers

Supermarkets, he adds, mostly serve the young urban population with comfortable incomes.

In other words, the war on the shelf hits the Coca-Cola aisle first, not the potatoes at the market.

That is true. And it does not change this: 100 strikes in three months forced an entire country to redraw the route its food travels.

No Coca-Cola is not a famine.

A thousand hryvnias in Boryspil

A vendor and her jars

In Boryspil, on the outskirts of Kyiv, a 35-year-old vendor runs a stall at the central market. She spoke to AFP.

With a thousand hryvnias, she says, she used to buy food. With a thousand hryvnias, meat. With a thousand hryvnias, treats for the kids.

A thousand hryvnias is about US$22.20, according to the agency.

“Now, you can hardly buy anything,” she says.

Smoke since August

Boryspil is ringed by warehouses. Since August, the smell of burning has hung over the small town, AFP writes.

In the evening, when the drones approach, she grabs her three children and heads down to the basement.

When the sirens start again at the market, she pushes her cart without looking up.

A cart. A siren above it. A basket that empties faster than before.

Three children. A basement. A cart. That is the war economy of a suburban market vendor.

And if winter…

A thousand hryvnias no longer fill a basket.

Eight point one percent

The bill

Ukraine’s central bank measured annual inflation at 8.1% in August, AFP reports.

Minister Vysotskyi warns that the logistics overhaul could push food prices up by another 2.5%.

It gets paid in hryvnias. It gets paid in points of inflation. It gets paid in billions.

Two and a half percent looks small on a line in a report. It is a lot on a basket that is already thin, at the start of a winter.

A hole in the state’s accounts

According to the economist Oleg Pendzyn, strikes of this kind have reportedly opened a deficit of about €1.3 billion for the Ukrainian state. That is his estimate. I report it as such.

His biggest worry is the strikes on the Black Sea ports. Ukraine depends on them for 90% of its exports, he says, and no land route can absorb such a volume.

The strike falls one evening. The bill arrives every month.

Inflation is the strike that comes after the strike.

Kharkiv’s gas pumps

Gas stations and depots

Warehouses are not alone on the map.

According to AFP’s analysis, as many gas stations and fuel depots were struck in the past nine months as in the first four years of the war.

In the Kharkiv region, near the front, gas stations and depots took six times as many strikes in 2026 as in all previous years combined.

One week in ACLED’s tracker

In its tracker for the week of September 12 to 18, ACLED counts 221 Russian attacks on civilian infrastructure, and 1,179 air and drone strikes.

Between September 10 and 17, according to the monitor, the Russian campaign hit at least 10 gas stations and transport facilities, including locomotives, in Kyiv and in the Zhytomyr, Rivne, Volyn and Odesa regions.

A gas pump hit means a pricier fill-up the next day. A locomotive hit means a freight train that doesn’t arrive. A warehouse hit means an empty shelf three days later.

Moscow strikes the warehouses. Moscow strikes the pumps. Moscow strikes the markets.

And tomorrow, which shelf?

The pump, the warehouse, the market: one map.

The winter war

Civilians more exposed

According to UN investigators cited by AFP, strikes on infrastructure are leaving civilians more and more vulnerable as winter approaches.

The Kyiv shopper thinks Moscow is trying to create “widespread panic.” That is his view. He says so to AFP.

It is not a barracks. It is not an anti-aircraft battery. It is not a line of trenches. It is a supermarket aisle.

A fifth winter

In the capital, on September 26, a drone hit a shopping center in Sviatoshynskyi district, a fire broke out near warehouses in Darnytskyi, and the Darnytsia pharmaceutical plant was struck for the second time in a week, according to the Kyiv Independent, cited by bne IntelliNews.

Medicine, now. Another shelf.

So here is what I take from this. The purpose of this campaign is not to take a village. It is to make every week a little more expensive, a little slower, a little more uncertain, for a capital entering its fifth winter of war.

I’ll admit something. I read the Coca-Cola story with a smile. Then I understood that I was smiling because my own grocery store is full.

Here, an empty shelf is a nuisance. There, it is news from the front, delivered through the back door.

The front is far away. The basket is not.

The shelf, not the front

What aid should count

ACLED counts strikes. AFP counts warehouses. The market vendors of Boryspil count hryvnias.

Three ways of counting the same campaign.

A suburban warehouse has no air defense battery of its own. It has a loading dock, pallets, a night watchman.

It also has a city behind it. Shelves, kitchens, lunch boxes.

That is the city ACLED’s numbers describe, without naming it.

The winter shelf

If we count in shelves rather than missiles, what should Western aid deliver this winter?

In Boryspil, the vendor lines up her jars of pickles and tomatoes.

“The main thing is that there’s food and water,” she says. “No Coca-Cola is not a disaster.”

A hundred in three months, and the shelf holds thanks to the markets.

Sources:

Primary Sources:

• AFP — analysis of ACLED data, strikes on Kyiv-region warehouses doubled in three months, September 26, 2026
• AFP — Kyiv and Boryspil shoppers under the strikes, inflation and logistics, September 27, 2026
• ACLED — weekly Ukraine conflict monitor, week of September 12 to 18, 2026

Secondary Sources:

• LIGA.net — strikes on Kyiv-region warehouses doubled, September 27, 2026
• bne IntelliNews — Russian claim on the Zammler warehouse and strikes of September 26 to 27, 2026
• NV — three dead, warehouses and a market damaged in the Kyiv region, September 28, 2026