Ukrainian drones hit Wildberries warehouses near Moscow, killing one person and injuring 61. Meduza republishes an on-the-ground report filed as the fire burned.

A Ukrainian attack on Wildberries warehouses in Elektrostal and an oil depot in Noginsk killed one person and injured 61 others. Nine of the injured are in serious condition, and 31 are in moderate condition. Most were diagnosed with shrapnel and blast injuries, traumatic brain injuries, fractures, burns, and smoke inhalation. The strikes triggered fires that blanketed parts of the Moscow region in smoke visible even from an airplane. Preliminary estimates put the damage at more than 50 billion rubles, and up to 15 percent of all Wildberries warehouse space may have been affected. Merchants who sell on Wildberries say they have lost millions of rubles and worry about whether the company will compensate them. The independent journalism cooperative Bereg traveled to Elektrostal to see how the city is coping with the aftermath. Meduza is publishing the report in full.

Warning: this article contains adult language.

“The smoke goes all the way to Novokosino station — sounds like something really burned over there,” a passenger on a commuter train from Moscow to Elektrostal says into her phone, just as the train crosses into the Moscow region.

Sure enough, a pale gray, mottled cloud is visible through the window. The closer the train gets to Elektrostal, the darker the cloud grows — if not for its elongated shape, it could pass for a thundercloud. Journalists estimated that the smoke from the fire stretched 175 kilometers (109 miles).

“Well, what choice do they have? It’s going on five years now — they need to make a splash, they need more angry people,” the woman continues into her phone. “We sellers will be angry too if Wildberries doesn’t compensate us for our losses — but really, could it compensate that much?”

Gradually, the cloud outside the window sharpens into a billowing column of blue-gray smoke. Passengers press against the glass and film the aftermath of the attack on their phones. Whispers ripple through the car.

“It’s been burning since four in the morning!” a blond woman of about 50 says, cutting into an elderly couple’s conversation as she pushes a wheeled shopping bag toward the doors.

“Yes, we heard,” the elderly woman snaps, turning back to her companion. “Look — that’s Noginsk burning.”

A little farther off, a second column of smoke is indeed visible, though far less imposing. It’s the oil depot, which drones struck almost simultaneously with the Wildberries warehouses.

The passengers are visibly irritated: they resent that officials are “vacationing abroad” while people just outside Moscow choke on smoke because of drones that “fly wherever they want.” Just then, a video appears on Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin’s Telegram channel, tracing the drones’ flight path toward the capital. The elderly woman doesn’t buy it: she’s convinced the drones were launched from somewhere nearby.

At first glance, Elektrostal seems to be going about life as usual: teenage girls film TikToks near the train station, families with children line up for the rides at an amusement park, and couriers with boxy delivery bags zip along the sidewalks. But listen to the residents’ conversations, and it becomes clear that the attack on the marketplace’s warehouses has upended the city’s routine.

“It’s four in the afternoon, 27 degrees [81 degrees Fahrenheit] out, and I’ve been working this whole time — and when I finally get a day off, it’ll rain,” an employee at one of the city’s shopping centers complains to a friend as she finishes a cigarette. “On top of that, this [smoke] keeps drifting straight at my building: it’s hot, and I’ve shut every window I could.” Her friend nods sympathetically.

There’s almost no wind today, so the smell of burning isn’t carrying far across the city — but closer to the fire, it’s another story.

“No, I can’t smell anything yet!” a short-haired woman in a white T-shirt and a black polka-dot skirt shouts into her phone a few kilometers from the warehouses. A few hundred meters later, she revises her assessment: “Now I can smell it!”

Reporting on the Moscow region’s response to the Ukrainian strikes, Governor Andrei Vorobyov said that drone debris had damaged one of Elektrostal’s kindergartens, though no one there was hurt. The kindergarten is a couple of kilometers from the warehouses.

Crowds of onlookers usually gather near buildings hit by drones, but not here: the kindergarten is hidden from view by the trees that line its perimeter. The only signs that anything happened are a van marked “emergency service” parked nearby and a stretch of red-and-white barrier tape.

At one end of the apartment building next to the kindergarten, small shards of glass litter the ground. People walking beneath the windows hear the crunch underfoot and look up. Noticing nothing suspicious, they walk on, puzzled. Only from farther away can you see that the glass on one of the balconies is shattered. There are no traces of soot, though — the kind a drone leaves behind when it makes a direct hit.

“Hey, what the fuck!” a hoarse male voice bellows from one of the upper floors of an apartment building.

A tall man walks up to the entrance, tips his head back, and waves toward a wide-open window.

“If I hadn’t gone away for the weekend, I’d have burned up right here, fuck!” the man shouts, clearly addressing the voice in the open window.

“Nah, you wouldn’t have burned up — nothing happened here,” the neighbor rasps back.

On the way from the damaged kindergarten to the burning warehouses, a Bereg correspondent passes several more people animatedly discussing the attack. Some are furious that the city “blew a fuck-ton of money on fire hydrants that didn’t work when they were needed”; others are distraught over what they believe is a massive death toll — a rumor is going around town that several hundred people have died.

“When the bomb fell, they locked everyone inside — they wouldn’t let anyone out,” a stocky man of Asian appearance says, clicking his tongue.

“Officially, there’s only one confirmed death so far.”

“No, more like 500 people!”

“How do you know that?”

“A friend told me.”

“And how does he know?”

“He works there — he knows everything.”

The parking lot in front of a home-improvement superstore has become a lookout point. It offers the most striking view of the fire: a clear blue sky, a bright green field, a horizon lined with emerald woods — and a column of dark gray smoke standing over the warehouses.

“Let’s go!” says a boy of about 12, nodding toward the warehouses and impatiently jerking his bicycle’s handlebars.

“No — it’s dangerous,” his friend replies.

“Look, even girls are going over there! What are you, not a man?”

Without waiting for an answer, the boy leaves his friend in the parking lot and sets off toward the warehouses.

The road to the logistics center is blocked by a checkpoint: a single police car. The car is empty, and onlookers, taking advantage, stream right up to the blazing warehouse buildings.

Ambulances and Emergency Situations Ministry vehicles keep rolling past.

“No matter how you build it, it’ll burn in an attack — unless it’s made of concrete slabs,” muses a fair-haired young woman in a bright pink T-shirt. She and her companion are trying to figure out what Wildberries’ owners could have done to prevent a fire of this magnitude, but they come up empty.

“Oh, you’re here too!” says a young man walking back from the warehouses toward the city, smiling at the couple.

“Yeah, we decided to have a look at our old workplace.”

“So what are you going to do now?”

“Well, what can you do? All that’s left is [to go work at] Ozon.”

The rival marketplace’s nearest sorting center is in Obukhovo, 17 kilometers (11 miles) from Elektrostal.

Many of the people converging on the fire aren’t just onlookers but current or former Wildberries employees, some in the company’s signature purple T-shirts with the marketplace’s logo. Some have come to find out whether they can retrieve the belongings they left at work, but that seems unlikely: virtually every part of the complex is engulfed in flames, and it’s hard to imagine anything survived.

Others are pressing rescue workers to let them recover personal cars parked on the warehouse grounds. Some of the vehicles are already badly damaged: a few have melted, and others lie buried under heaps of twisted metal cladding.

To get a car out, its owner must hand the keys to an Emergency Situations Ministry worker, and rescuers will drive the vehicle out themselves — if they decide it’s safe. “If they’d stopped me from taking [my things], I’d have grabbed an angle grinder, cut a hole in the fence, and hauled everything out myself — I shit on their rules and their barriers!” a man in a beige T-shirt blusters — then falls silent when he spots the security guards.

“The owners come for their cars, and these rapid-response security guys are still checking trunks [before letting anyone leave] — what’s even left to check?” a man in a black jacket fumes.

“They’ve probably got their own pockets stuffed with gold,” the man in the beige T-shirt says with a grimace.

By evening, dozens of cars still sit near the warehouses. Onlookers speculate about why the owners haven’t come for them and settle on an explanation: if the owners haven’t come, it’s because they died in the fire.

Dozens of fire trucks and several helicopters have been brought into Elektrostal to fight the blaze. Even so, from the outside, the effort looks ineffective: the trucks simply stand along the roadside, and the helicopters periodically dump water scooped from nearby reservoirs, but the flames don’t recede. In several spots, jets of hydrant water shoot up from the middle of the inferno. It seems as though the firefighters are just waiting for everything to burn itself out.

Every so often, something rumbles deep inside the fire, and fresh billows of smoke surge skyward as the remains of the cladding and ceiling structures collapse. People guess which wall will fall next and where it will land: some of the walls are already leaning dangerously toward the road where the crowd has gathered. The metal frame creaks, and small pieces of charred cladding rain down.

Having had their fill of acrid smoke and of watching the fire devour the warehouses, dozens of people turn around and head back. By now, police officers have appeared at the checkpoint: they wave through anyone walking toward the city, no questions asked, but the way to the warehouses is closed.

“I live right there!” a red-haired young man on a bicycle says, waving toward the private homes near the warehouses.

“Yeah?” the officer asks, narrowing his eyes.

“Well, yeah,” the young man answers, not very convincingly.

“All right, then,” the officer says, waving him through.

A tipsy couple notices the exchange.

“So you can’t just walk through anymore?” a young man in a black tracksuit and cap asks the officer defiantly.

“No. The security services are working — orders are to stay out of their way.”

“You think they’re working? This is them working?” the young man’s companion cuts in.

“Move off the road.”

Not far from the checkpoint, two security guards — apparently from the superstore — stand smoking.

“So will they pay people [compensation] for the [burned] goods or not?”

“I’m sure they won’t.”

“Then I’m right to keep paying cash on delivery.”

In Elektrostal’s central square, display stands show photographs of the top employees at a local enterprise belonging to Rusnano, Russia’s state nanotechnology corporation. Beside the portraits are quotes: some employees share their dreams, others their life mottoes. “Treat people the way you want to be treated, and act with integrity,” reads the caption next to one portrait. “What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger,” reads another. “My dream? Just an ordinary dream — that there be no war on our Earth,” says a third. Above the stands looms a black column of smoke.