Ukraine's government went looking for warehouse space to hand to companies bombed out of their own. Best case scenario: it can cover about a fifth of what business needs as the warehouse war goes into a new destructive total war phase, according to its own government experts. 

Russia has begun to systematically destroy Ukraine's retail system. Regional branches of the State Property Fund have surveyed more than 1.175mn square metres of state-owned warehousing since the bombing began in July, with returns from the western regions still coming in. The Asset Recovery and Management Agency, ARMA, is auditing a further 250,000 square metres of warehouses seized from sanctioned owners and criminal cases, of which about 60,000 square metres has been readied for transfer.

"Our task is to find a solution that will simultaneously meet the urgent needs of business and the principles of effective and legal management of seized assets," ARMA said, local press reports. Space will change hands through public tenders for management rights, and the agency's acting head Yaroslava Maksymenko has said the screening covers technical condition, access roads, ownership status and actual use, Interfax-Ukraine reported.

"We have wet warehouses, dry warehouses, cold storage facilities, and grain elevators," she said, describing a wait for business to tell the state which of those it actually wants.

A state that has to raid its own seized asset register to find somewhere for supermarkets to keep food is the clearest measure yet of what this phase of the war is doing. For three years the strike campaign went after generation and transmission - the attempt to freeze Ukraine into submission and the 750kV substations that hold the grid together.

What is being hit now is the commercial layer that sits on top of the grid, no longer just the physical warehouses, by the entire infrastructure of the retail sector that puts goods on shelves: sorting hubs, distribution centres, food and DIY warehouses, filling stations.

A third of the pre-war stock

About 920,000 square metres of Ukrainian warehouse space has been destroyed since 2022, 29.7% of everything the country had before the full-scale invasion, and more than 500,000 square metres of it in the last 12 months alone, NV reported on August 12. Kyiv oblast, the country's main distribution hub, has lost half its capacity.

Ukraine had roughly 3.2mn square metres of class A and B warehousing before the invasion and was down to about 2.6mn square metres by the end of 2022. The market then held steady from mid-2023 until Russia resumed large-scale strikes last summer, starting with Nova Poshta branches and terminals before widening out to everything else. Missile strikes have taken out 400,000-440,000 square metres of dry and refrigerated warehousing in Kyiv, Lviv, Odesa, Kharkiv and Dnipro over the past year, plus another 100,000-120,000 square metres of postal terminals, on the estimate of Oleksandr Bondarenko of the Bureau of Investment Programs group. He puts the destroyed logistics investment at about $300mn, with a further $50mn of Nova Poshta property on top.

More than 300,000 square metres went in the first six months of 2026 alone, against 65,000 square metres in the whole first nine months of 2025, and at least 40 attacks on logistics infrastructure were logged in the half-year. Analysts think the real figure is higher because companies have stopped announcing damage.

The target list reads like a shopping street. At least 20 major businesses were hit between late July and mid-August, 11 of them in a single night on August 5 - the supermarket chains NOVUS and Fozzy Group, the parcel carrier Nova Poshta, the online retailer Rozetka, the DIY chain Epicentr K and the lubricants distributor Liqui Moly Ukraine among them. Philip Morris lost a warehouse in July. The largest single strike of the past year took out the Amtel complex, 100,000 square metres holding goods for multiple tenants.

Commercial property consultancy UTG puts total damaged or destroyed commercial real estate at 1mn-1.5mn square metres and warehouse losses above 950,000 square metres, which it reckons is around 20% of the pre-war stock rather than NV's 29.7%. The two datasets are not reconciled, and neither side has published its methodology. Logistics and commercial property losses together run past $1.5bn.

Retail has a fuel counter too

The filling station is where this campaign stops looking like an energy story and starts looking like a retail one too. Russia destroyed 37 Naftogaz Group filling stations in the first seven months of 2026, the company said, and more than 200 Ukrainian petrol stations have been struck since June, roughly three a day.

Naftogaz counted 13 attacks on its facilities in a single week to August 17 and 293 since the start of the year, an intensity it says has more than doubled on previous years, with production halted at some sites, Ukrainska Pravda reported.

"Winter preparations are taking place amidst an unprecedented number of attacks on Naftogaz facilities," acting chief executive Sergii Fedorenko said.

The same logic runs down to the port gate. Deep-water terminals around Odesa have been shut, adding about $50 a tonne to grain export costs on the agrarian policy ministry's estimate and threatening $3bn of farm earnings, as the drone war shifted to crippling ports. Warehouses, hauliers, filling stations and berths are all links in the same chain, and all four are being worked on at once.

What a fifth buys

Even taking the SPFU's 1.175mn square metres and ARMA's 250,000 square metres at face value, only 60,000 square metres is actually ready to hand over - about 6.5% of the 920,000 square metres destroyed. Experts quoted by Ukraine Business News put the optimistic ceiling at roughly 20% of what business needs, and that is before anyone asks whether a seized grain elevator in Dnipropetrovska oblast is any use to a Kyiv supermarket chain that has lost a chilled distribution centre.

Suppliers hit in the Kyiv region have put through increases of 15-20% to cover losses and higher operating costs, and the shrinking pool of space could push rents up 10-12%. The warehouse war has started to empty supermarket shelves, which is the point of it - this is the same civilian-economy targeting both sides now practise, catalogued as Ukraine’s Operation Wildberries that is attempting to take out the ecommerce business that accounts for around 10% of Russia’s retail turnover.

Ukraine kept its lights on through three winters of attacks on the grid because a power station can be repaired and a transformer can be imported. A distribution network is harder: it is buildings, racking, refrigeration, trucks, staff and leases, spread across a country where the safest regions are the ones furthest from the customers. The state has now looked at everything it owns or has confiscated and found it can cover a fifth of the gap at best. The rest is the private sector's problem, in the fourth year of a war.