Supermarkets in Kyiv, which managed to preserve a striking degree of normality through some of the hardest years of the war, are showing gaps on their shelves again. Grains, dairy products, meat, vegetables and fresh herbs have temporarily disappeared from some stores, even though Ukraine itself is not running out of food.
The disruption is taking place inside the distribution system that moves goods from producers to individual shops. Russian missile and drone strikes have damaged major logistics hubs around Kyiv — facilities where products are received, sorted, refrigerated and assembled into deliveries for hundreds of stores.
The heaviest blow came on the night of August 5. Fozzy Group said fires broke out at four distribution centres serving Silpo, Fora and THRASH!ТРАШ! stores, killing six company employees. A major NOVUS logistics facility was also hit several times during the same attack.
Other logistics sites were destroyed or damaged that morning, including facilities linked to Rozetka and Nova Poshta. Russia’s Defence Ministry claimed some of the warehouses were being used for dual-use goods and drone components, but those assertions were not independently verified.
According to Daycom’s analysis, the empty supermarket shelves in Kyiv do not amount to a nationwide food shortage. They are the visible result of a severe but localised distribution shock: the food exists, but part of the infrastructure that moved it quickly from producers and warehouses to shops has been taken offline.
Large distribution centres are central to modern grocery retail. A single facility can receive hundreds of trucks, preserve the cold chain for meat and dairy products, sort thousands of items and dispatch customised loads to scores or even hundreds of stores across a region.
When such a hub is destroyed, its role cannot simply be transferred to another building overnight. Retailers need refrigeration, inventory systems, loading equipment, vehicles, trained staff and alternative routes. What appears to a shopper as an empty shelf may therefore be the downstream effect of a single strike many kilometres away.
Perishable goods reveal the disruption first. Dry grains and canned products can be redirected to alternative warehouses more easily, while milk, fresh meat, vegetables, herbs and ready-made meals depend on uninterrupted refrigeration and frequent deliveries.
After the early-August attacks, Fozzy Group began rerouting supplies, activating alternative storage sites and asking some suppliers to deliver directly to stores. The company had hoped to restore something close to its normal assortment by around Ukraine’s Independence Day on August 24.
For the Fora chain alone, management estimated losses from the destroyed warehouse and inventory at about 1.15 billion hryvnias. The company postponed planned store openings but did not announce layoffs, instead moving to redesign parts of its logistics network.
That recovery timetable came under renewed pressure on August 20, when Russia launched another large-scale attack on Kyiv and the surrounding region. Prime Minister Serhii Koretskyi said food warehouses and Red Cross facilities in Boryspil were among the sites hit.
The same day, a Fora warehouse in Martusivka in Kyiv region, used for fresh produce, was damaged. Workers had been evacuated in advance and no casualties were reported, but the strike again affected one of the most sensitive parts of the grocery supply chain.
A warehouse operated by a logistics partner of the VARUS supermarket chain in Boryspil was also damaged, with some of the company’s stock stored there. VARUS warned that individual products might temporarily disappear from certain stores while stressing that its shops remained open.
EKO Market reported damage to one of its logistics warehouses as well. The company said employees were unharmed and stores continued operating while supply routes were reorganised. Separately, a Kyiv warehouse belonging to an ice-cream producer serving the capital and 12 other cities was destroyed.
The repetition of the attacks changes the nature of the problem. One lost warehouse can often be compensated for by another centre or by direct deliveries. When several chains are hit at roughly the same time, they begin competing for the same spare warehouses, refrigerated space, trucks and logistics staff.
The Ukrainian government has therefore urged consumers not to confuse temporary distribution problems with a shortage of food. Agriculture Minister Taras Vysotskyi has said the damage to logistics centres should not produce a systemic deficit or an immediate surge in food prices.
His assessment was that roughly 30% to 40% of lost logistics capacity could be replaced or relocated comparatively quickly. Some suppliers are instead moving goods directly from production sites or trucks to individual stores, bypassing the large distribution centres that normally organise those flows.
That system is less efficient. Central warehouses allow retailers to consolidate large volumes, forecast demand and reduce transport costs. Direct delivery can keep shelves stocked during a crisis, but requires more journeys, more coordination and leaves individual products more vulnerable to delays.
There has also been no confirmed broad-based price shock directly attributable to the warehouse strikes. By mid-August, officials had not recorded major food-price changes in Kyiv linked specifically to the logistics disruption, although the attacks on August 20 created another setback that will have to be assessed.
For shoppers, the psychological effect of an empty shelf can be stronger than the underlying economic problem. Ukrainian cities saw similar scenes during the first weeks of Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, when transport networks broke down, consumers stockpiled staples and many stores struggled to operate.
In the years since, well-stocked supermarkets became one of the quieter symbols of the country’s adaptation to war. Retailers installed generators during blackouts, built fuel reserves, rerouted deliveries and repeatedly reopened shops soon after missile and drone attacks.
The latest strikes are testing that resilience in a different way. Russia is hitting logistics infrastructure at a time when Ukraine’s air defences are under growing pressure, particularly against ballistic missiles that are much harder to intercept than slower airborne threats.
During the August 5 attack, Ukraine’s Air Force reported that none of the 24 ballistic missiles used by Russia had been intercepted. The August 20 assault was also a complex combined strike involving 168 attack drones, dozens of cruise missiles and ballistic weapons, with impacts recorded across multiple locations.
For retailers, that creates a wartime challenge that goes beyond rebuilding one warehouse. The strategic problem is now concentration: a small number of large distribution centres can make the system efficient in peacetime, but each one becomes a potentially crippling point of failure when subjected to repeated missile attacks.
The likely response is further decentralisation. More smaller warehouses, reserve facilities in different regions, direct supply routes and duplicated cold-storage capacity would all make the system harder to disrupt. The trade-off is cost: resilience is considerably more expensive than the highly centralised logistics model used before the war.
Insurance is another constraint. War-risk coverage for large warehouse complexes is difficult and expensive, while rebuilding automated logistics centres can cost hundreds of millions or even billions of hryvnias. Companies may have to commit substantial capital before knowing whether rebuilding on the same site is safe.
Food logistics is therefore acquiring many of the characteristics of critical infrastructure, even when it does not always carry that formal designation. A warehouse full of milk, grains or vegetables is not a military installation, but destroying it can affect hundreds of stores and the daily lives of millions of civilians.
The empty supermarket shelves in Kyiv do not mean Ukraine is running out of food. They show how deeply the war is reaching into the civilian economy: destroying a single link in a distribution chain can produce shortages days later in shops far from the site of the strike.
The coming weeks will show how quickly retailers can restore normal assortments after the repeated attacks. If backup logistics hold, the shortages will remain temporary and local. If warehouse strikes continue, Ukraine may have to redesign not just individual delivery routes, but the entire architecture of wartime food distribution.
