The warehouse served Ukraine’s southern region. Photo: Dnipropetrovsk Regional Military Administration.
As Russia continues targeting Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, Ukrainian officials say Moscow is also trying to restrict access to medicine by striking pharmaceutical logistics. For the third time, one of the country’s two largest pharma distributors has come under attack.
An Optima-Pharm warehouse in Dnipro was hit and completely destroyed, Ekonomichna Pravda reported. No staff were injured.
The value of the damage has not yet been disclosed. According to the outlet, the facility supplied Ukraine’s southern regions.
It is the company’s third warehouse strike in the past three months. A previous site serving central Ukraine was targeted on October 25 during a large-scale attack on Kyiv. That strike destroyed an office and warehouse complex, causing losses of about $100 million and wiping out roughly 20% of Ukraine’s monthly medicine stock. The first attack on an Optima-Pharm warehouse in Kyiv occurred on August 28.
Optima-Pharm has operated in Ukraine for more than 30 years. The Ukrainian-Estonian joint venture runs 11 branches nationwide. According to YouControl, the company’s revenue exceeded 69 billion hryvnias in 2024. In the wholesale medicines market, Optima-Pharm ranks second behind BaDM; together they accounted for more than 85% of medicine distribution in 2022–2023.
So far, neither Dnipro Mayor Borys Filatov nor the regional administration has provided additional details on the strike.
According to Vladyslav Haivanenko, the acting head of the Dnipropetrovsk Regional Military Administration, Russian forces attacked Dnipro with drones overnight on November 15. Air-raid alerts sounded shortly after midnight, followed by powerful explosions around 1 a.m., authorities said. Several fires broke out, private businesses and a car were damaged, and one drone crashed near residential buildings. These claims could not be independently verified.
Ukraine’s State Bureau of Investigation and the Office of the Prosecutor General have said that Russian company JSC Katren, a co-owner of one of Ukraine’s largest drug distributors, Venta LTD, supplies medical goods and equipment to Russia’s Defense Ministry. Despite the war, Venta LTD’s Russian owners continue to earn revenue in Ukraine’s pharmaceuticals market, where the company controls about 10% of distribution.
