Russian drones struck and burned down the Epicenter, a major home-improvement hypermarket, in the central city of Kryvyi Rih on the morning of 26 July, the head of the Dnipropetrovsk Oblast Council and the local Telegram channels said. No one was hurt, but the strike destroyed a store that employed around 400 people. It was the third store of the same chain that Russia has destroyed in this one region since the full-scale invasion began.
Russian attack sets a Kryvyi Rih superstore ablaze
Russian forces launched several strikes on the Epicenter hypermarket in Kryvyi Rih, regional council head Mykola Lukashuk wrote on Telegram. Telegram channels posted video of the impact and reported that Russia used Shahed drones, the Iranian-designed attack drones Moscow launches at Ukrainian cities in swarms.
Epicenter is Ukraine's largest home-improvement chain, a rough local equivalent of Home Depot.
Fire spread across more than 16,000 m² of the building, the State Emergency Service reported. Crews contained the blaze, but firefighting remained difficult. Repeated air-raid alerts and the threat of fresh strikes kept forcing them back. No one was injured. The store was completely destroyed, Epicenter's head of public relations, Yulia Chudnovets, told Liga.
"The assessment of the destroyed property will be carried out after the inspection is completed and the scale of the losses is determined," she said.
Third store the chain has lost in Dnipropetrovsk Oblast
The Kryvyi Rih hypermarket is the third Epicenter that Russia has destroyed in Dnipropetrovsk Oblast since the full-scale invasion, Lukashuk said. Earlier strikes burned down the chain’s store in Nikopol and destroyed its store in Kamianske. The Kryvyi Rih strike landed exactly one year, to the day, after that attack on Kamianske.
The Kryvyi Rih store had traded for nearly 19 years, employing around 400 people and paying taxes into the local budget.
Part of a recurring pattern
Across Ukraine, Russia has now completely destroyed 11 Epicenter shopping centers and damaged 14 more since the start of the full-scale invasion, the company reported. One of its logistics complexes has been wrecked as well.
The chain has been a repeated target.
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Overnight on 21 July, Russian drones destroyed an Epicenter in Sumy, where repeated strikes stopped rescuers from starting to put out the fire at once and one State Emergency Service vehicle was destroyed.
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In February 2026, a Russian strike damaged an Epicenter in Zaporizhzhia, though crews saved most of the building and the company said it would rebuild.
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The deadliest attack on the chain came in Kharkiv, where Russian glide bombs tore through an Epicenter store and killed 19 people in 2024.
Russian drones and missiles regularly hit Ukrainian cities, while Russian attacks of all types killed at least seven civilians and injured 58 across the country over the past day, regional authorities reported on 26 July.
