On the night of August 29, the Rostov region came under a massive drone attack. According to Governor Yury Slyusar, seven people were injured, including two children. In Aksay, an Ozon logistics center and a DNS warehouse were hit.

Ozon confirmed that one of its logistics centers in the Rostov region had come under a drone attack. Employees had been evacuated in advance, so none of them were injured. A small fire broke out on the premises and was quickly extinguished. Operations at the facility have been temporarily suspended: it is not currently accepting shipments from sellers, while parcels already in transit are being redirected to other facilities. Another Ozon center located nearby has also been temporarily closed. According to the company, its employees were evacuated as a safety precaution, but the drone did not directly hit the building.

Both centers are located in Aksay. Ozon’s logistics center is on Novocherkassk Highway, next to the DNS warehouse. A fire broke out on the DNS premises during the attack. The monitoring channel Exilenova+ reported a strike on the DNS warehouses, while ASTRA analyzed videos posted online and used geolocation to identify the location of the fire. It matches the site of the DNS warehouse.

There were also reports of an attack on the Midel shipbuilding plant in Aksay. According to unconfirmed reports, one of the vessels at the plant may have caught fire. There has been no official confirmation of this information so far.

In Rostov-on-Don, two apartment buildings were damaged in the attack. Four people — two adults and two children — were hospitalized, with one child in serious condition. Three more people sought medical assistance in Aksaysky District. Private homes were damaged in Bagayevsky District, but there were no casualties there. Russia’s Defense Ministry said that air defenses had destroyed and intercepted 313 drones over several regions of the country during the night.

The attack on Aksay was the latest in a series of strikes on the logistics infrastructure of Russian online marketplaces. Since August 22, several Ozon facilities have come under attack in different regions of Russia. Over the past week, Ozon’s logistics network in Dagestan, Adygea, Stavropol Krai and the Rostov region has been affected by attacks or evacuations prompted by drone threats.

Against the backdrop of the series of attacks, Vladimir Putin signed a decree on August 24 allowing the state to temporarily take control of critical infrastructure facilities if, in the authorities’ assessment, their owners have failed to ensure security, including by failing to effectively protect the facilities from drone attacks or restore operations in a timely manner after damage. The measure explicitly applies, among other things, to logistics facilities.

The government may impose temporary control on the basis of an order from the president, without a court ruling. Under the decree, the state receives the powers of an owner with regard to a company’s property, securities, stakes and property rights. The authorities formally describe the measure as temporary control rather than nationalization. However, experts view the mechanism as de facto or “hybrid” nationalization because it allows the state to unilaterally take control of privately owned assets.