July 24 2026 - Day 1,612c - continued

Ukraine Bombards Russia

The reports came fast and furious all week, the Ukrainian long-range strike campaign has not let up, and its main news this week is that it expanded targeting to attack Wildberries and a few other monster retail warehouses in western and central Russia. On Friday, it was the turn of a pair of warehouses outside St. Petersburg, because of the excellent summer weather and northern light conditions it produced some of the most striking strike results images of the entire war.

As of Monday, the Russian consumer product losses due to Wildberries strikes was calculated at 1.2 billion dollars, and if know small-scale trading and Russian business, at least half of that was actually not damaged but written off and now is swamping second-hand markets from Minsk to Magadan.

A classic Russian bureaucratic Catch-22 has emerged for the small-scale traders whose stock was partially burnt in a Wildberries warehouse: the Wildberries management has announced it cannot be responsible for the safety of goods stored in the warehouse, but its loading docks are so jammed, that booking a time to receive goods from the warehouse is impossible, so the trader’s goods must stay in the warehouse, and even once they are burnt the traders still must pay for their storage.

There also was one clear, strategic, military production-targeted strike, a salvo of Flamingo missiles, possibly three, that hit an air defense radars factory in Kirov. Fires and damage reported, but the (for Russia) frightening thing is, this is the second Flamingo salvo in as many weeks.

Here’s the unofficial strike list for the week. The 18th you saw last week but as last Saturday continued there was a flood of strike reports, it turned out to have been one of the most damaging days of the war so far. Another 400+ drone raid. Besides the actual damage, a thing to bear in mind is the degree to which Russian air defenses are torn up: for all these attacks to have taken place — and they are confirmed — think about all the Russian air space they crossed to do it.

In a drone sense, it’s not really correct to say Ukraine has air superiority over Russia. But freedom of operation, demonstrably the ZSU has achieved that. I wish I had known back in 2022 this was going to happen.

• 827.Moscow, Wildberries logistics center, multiple fires, July 18, 2026

• 828.Moscow, Noginsk fuel storage base, multiple fires, July 18, 2026

• 829.Tambov, Wildberres base Kotovsk, fires, July 18, 2026

• 830.Berdyansk, military fuel site, July 18, 2026

• 831.Crimea, Sevastopol, Gvardeyskiy airfield, aircraft parking, July 18, 2026

• 832.Crimea, Feodosia, main power transformer station, July 18, 2026

• 833.Stavropol, Mikhailovsk oil base, fires, July 18 2026

• 834.Crimea, Yalta, power substations, July 18 2026

• 835.Crimea, Sudak, power substation), July 18 2026

• 836.Crimea, Kerch, RR station, fires, July 18, 2026

• 837.Crimea, Krasnoperekopsk, RR station, fires, July 18 2026

• 838.Crimea, Sevastopol, military warehouses, fires, July 18 2026

• 839.Crimea, Simferopol, Gvardeyskiy airfieled, Shahed launch site, 20 drones 8 (!) hits, July 18 2026

• 840.Moscow region, Lvovskaya oil storage base, July 19 2026

• 841.Moscow, Domodevdovo/:Podolsk district, Wildberries warehouse, July 19 2026

• 842.Moscow region, Yuzhnie Vrata logistic park, vic. Belie Stolbi village, major fires, July 19 2026

• 843.Moscow region, industrial park Grivno, fires, July 19, 2026

• 844.Samara region, Yeysk military airfield, July 19, 2026

• 845.Crimea, Yalta, explosions, Darsan mountain, July 19, 2026

• 846.Crimea, Alushta, power substation, July 19 2026

• 847.Crimea, Simferopol, PUD logistics center, July 20 2026

• 848.Lipetstk, power station?, major fire, July 21, 2026

• 849.Lipetsk, logistics base, major fire, July 21, 2026

• 850.Lipetsk, metals factory, UNK, Flamingo missiles? July 21 2026

• 851.Belgorod, power substation, power loss, fires, July 21 2026

• 852.Mariupol, UNK, massive fire that started small, July 21, 2026

• 853.Novorossiysk, Kazakh tanker hit loading, July 21, 2026

• 854.Krasnodar, Anapa, probably SEAD, July 21 2026

• 855.Rostov, unknown explosion, July 21 2026

• 856.Luhansk, troop quarters, explosion, July 21 2026

• 857.St. Petersburg, Ladoga industrial park, major fire, possibly not drones, July 21 2026

• 858.Crimea, Yalta, power substations, July 2022 2026

• 859.Crimea, Alushta, power substations, July 22 2026

• 860.Stavropol Krai, Nevynnomyssk, Wildberries warehouse, giant fires, July 22 2026

• 861.Krasnodar region, Armavir, oil storage and processing facility, big fire, July 22 2026

• 862.Voronezh, Wildberries warehouse, fires, July 23, 2026

• 863.Ulyanovsk, Novospasskiy region, NS-Oil refinery, July 23, 2026

• 864.Bashkorstan, Tuimazi, Transnef-Ural oil terminal, July 23 2026

• 865.Crimea, Feodosia, power substation, July 23, 2026

• 866.St. Petersburg, Shurshay Wildberries warehouse, July 24, 2026

• 867.St. Petersburg, Ozon warehouse, July 24 2026

• 868.Tver, warehouse, July 24 2026

• 869.Simferopol, warehouse, July 24 2026

• 870.Kirov, Aviatek factory, air defense radars and ejection seats, Flamingos, fires, July 24 2026

• 871.Kirov, power substation, same neighborhood, fire, July 24 2026

The Ukrainian internet is having a field day publishing images of burning refineries and Wildberries warehouses and poking fun at local Russian officials’ sticking to the party line and pretending all the fire and explosions was just an industrial accident and all the Ukrainian drones were shot down. I saw a good one from Lipetsk.

Lipetsk, Russian Federation. Operators reported limited problems at the Lipetsk thermal power plant after some precision-guided drone debris hit the premises.

Middle-Strike and particularly Operation МоЛоЧКа/MoLoChKa

Brovdi says the acronym for the operation МоЛоЧКа (Molochka — a diminutive meaning more or less “a bit of milk”) against shipping in the Azov and NE Back Sea is a big secret, for fun.

Therefore, for fun, here is my official guessed decode of Brovdi’s secret acronym: “Морська Логістика Чорного моря та Крим”. I bet someone reading this knows if that’s right. There are couple of other possibilities but I think that’s the best fit.

As to Brovdi’s middle-strike operations for the week, on the Molochka/maritime front the news for Russia was bad to disastrous. I know this sounds like rah rah Ukraine, but really, this is like reporting on the Imperial Japanese Navy’s operations in the first half of 1941, every success seems to have two other successes competing with it.

According to SBS sources, drone operations over the Sea of Azov and the northern Black Sea have cut all ship movements in half and ferry traffic between Crimea and the Russian mainland by 75 percent. We have heard about these vessels before, but as of Wednesday this situation was, five ferries total as of June one. Now two of them, Yeysk and SKS one have been destroyed or so badly damaged they cannot return to service. A third ferry, Maria, is disabled and although technically reparable she can’t move and so is much more likely to be battered into scrap in follow-up strikes.

There are two ferries currently operating between Crimea and Russia: the “Lavrenty” and “Panagia”. Due to engine damage they are not self-propelled and are moved by tugboats. In this mode they have only a quarter of their normal carrying capacity.

As a result, June one, four ferries could normally carry 180–250 “units of transport” (roughly, the equivalent of a 20-foot container) per day. As of now, the capacity is about 35–50.

According to satellite imagery, the Kerch roads have been just about emptied of ships with most vessels fleeing to the Don River and upstream to the city Rostov, where local residents are irate because dozens of oil tankers just anchored in the river running through the city, which uses Don water and whose residents often take summer dips from Don beaches. As a result of the tight anchorage, regular ship traffic up and down stream from Rostov reportedly is stopped. A recent satellite photo showed 32 vessels, most tankers, in the middle of the city.

The last published numbers on cargo/tanker ships it, dated to July 18, are: 172 Russian vessels between 6 July and 18 July, 118 vessels in the Sea of Azov and 54 vessels in the Black Sea. I have not seen reports of drone strikes against ships in Rostov.

On Thursday a stat emerged via the SBS’ 1st Center unit: Since early June when the SBS started going after Russian semi trucks moving to and from Crimea, more than 1,000 trucks have been hit and either burnt or destroyed.

On the Kerch electricity front, the two-three day outages centered on Armyansk and Perekop spread this week with reports of day- or more black- and brown-outs in central Crimea outlying Simferopol, and along the resort coast in Yalta and Alushta. The number of substations hit in the past three weeks, my estimate, is well over 50 in just Crimea. We are seeing a concerted effort by Ukraine to demolish the Crimea power grid before winter.

According to fresh (early Friday) evening SBS data, just in the past 48 hours, SBS pilots hit 19 energy nodes, (of which 17 were in Crimea 17), and from July 01–24 the count was 36 energy targets across the peninsula — Yalta, Gurzuf, Feodosia, Yevpatoriya, Sudak, Simferpol, Armyansk, Perekop, Bakchiserai, etc. Etc. The grid across the whole peninsula is being cut to pieces.

The chatter on the SBS unit channels and from Brovdi himself is without exception positive and upbeat. Although I can’t say I’ve watched the strikes, the video jibes with the reports from Russia which jibe with the Ukrainian mil-bloggers which jibe with the SBS unit information feeds — the picture is an air operation well in progress and the participants seem quite confident they are winning.

Brovdi in some recently-published commentary said that Ukraine is going to win, Russia will be ejected from Crimea because what his aircraft and pilots are doing, Russia can’t stop. He said that Russia’s big error was going to war against Ukraine rather than with Ukraine on its side, and claimed Russia never won a war without Ukrainian assistance.

The Polish-US statement Zbigniew Brzezinski is credited in his 1997 book Grand Chessboard for saying: “Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be a Eurasian empire”. Now we have an ethic Hungarian-Ukrainian — Brovdi — predicting that Russia must lose a war against even a small neighbor, if Russia doesn’t have Ukraine on its side, and the small neighbor has allies. Bold words. But the man has a record for delivering on promises.