The Russian drones slammed into the American-owned warehouses one after another.
Each announced its arrival with an eerie whine. Then came the blasts, ripping through a vast grain terminal in southern Ukraine and lighting up the night sky.
Seven drones in three minutes. The target, according to a video of the mid-April attack recorded by a truck driver, was the U.S. farming giant Cargill.
“This is insane,” the driver is heard repeating in the video, which was obtained and verified by The New York Times. “This is insane.”
The attack was one of the latest in a series of Russian strikes on major American companies since last summer, including facilities tied to Coca-Cola, Boeing, the snacks maker Mondelez and the tobacco giant Philip Morris.
The corporations have largely avoided publicizing the strikes, wary of alarming investors and insurers. While Ukraine has disclosed several attacks on American assets, the strikes on Cargill and Coca-Cola have not been previously reported.
Russia’s motivation for striking U.S. companies is unclear. Some Ukrainian business figures say the attacks are part of a broader campaign targeting all types of assets, regardless of companies’ nationality, aimed at choking off the country’s economy. Others see a more focused goal: to deter U.S. investment just as Kyiv is trying to deepen business ties with a deal-making White House.
The companies have quietly raised concerns with U.S. officials about what they see as a deliberate and escalating campaign against American business interests in Ukraine. The White House, despite its pledge to defend U.S. commercial interests abroad, has been muted in its response.
The Trump administration has not condemned any of the attacks that Ukraine has made public this year. After U.S. diplomats in Kyiv and Ukrainian business figures and officials warned about the attacks, the administration offered a response that amounted to little more than an acknowledgment of the concerns, according to three people familiar with the exchanges, who insisted on anonymity to discuss internal matters.
At the same time, Washington has told Kyiv to refrain from hitting a Russian Black Sea oil terminal that exports oil from Kazakh fields in which U.S. companies have stakes, according to Ukraine’s ambassador to the United States, Olga Stefanishyna.
The contrast has fueled accusations of a double standard in the Trump administration’s handling of the war. It follows President Trump’s repeated pressure on Ukraine to accept unfavorable terms to end the war, while overlooking Moscow’s refusal to make concessions.
A State Department spokesperson said Washington had “urged both sides to refrain from targeting U.S. business interests.” A White House spokeswoman did not respond to questions, saying only that Mr. Trump and his team “are working very hard to end the war between Russia and Ukraine.”
The companies mentioned in this article either did not respond to questions or issued brief statements saying they continued to operate in Ukraine. The Russian Foreign Ministry did not respond to a request for comment.
In February, representatives of several American companies, including Coca-Cola, Cargill and Bunge, another farming giant, spoke with a bipartisan group of U.S. senators who were visiting Ukraine.
“Listening to several of them, they said they believed they were being intentionally struck,” Senator Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, the top-ranking Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee, said in a telephone interview.
Andy Hunder, the head of the American Chamber of Commerce in Ukraine, which represents U.S. companies operating there, said that the Russians “are sending these missiles and drones with the hope that they will stop American business coming into Ukraine.”
U.S. businesses’ footprint in Ukraine is modest, roughly 120 companies. Still, big consumer brands like McDonald’s and Coca-Cola operate there, as do all the major U.S. grain traders.
Many companies took losses in the opening weeks of Russia’s 2022 invasion. In Velyka Dymerka, a town on Kyiv’s outskirts, Russian soldiers plundered a bottling plant partly owned by Coca-Cola, taking, among other things, bottles of Jack Daniel’s whiskey, said Oleksandr Borsuk, the town’s mayor. After the soldiers were seen in a drunken celebration in the streets, residents joked that the whiskey had helped stall the Russian advance.
The bottling plant resumed operations in May 2022, after the Russian troops were pushed back. For the next three years, it operated without incident, in line with most U.S. firms in Ukraine.
“I don’t recall Russia specifically targeting U.S. businesses in Ukraine before 2025,” said Jim O’Brien, who served as United States assistant secretary for European and Eurasian affairs from late 2023 until January 2025, when Mr. Trump returned to power.
That changed last summer.
In mid-June, a strike damaged a Boeing facility in Kyiv. Two months later, Russian cruise missiles slammed into a factory run by Flex Ltd., an American electronics manufacturer. That plant is in western Ukraine, hundreds of miles from the front.
The attack on Flex shocked the U.S. business community in Ukraine. Mr. Hunder called on Mr. Trump “to stand with American business in Ukraine” and “show Putin that the United States protects its own.” Mr. Trump told reporters he was “not happy” about the attack.
Russia continued to strike regardless.
Perhaps the most symbolic attack targeted the Coca-Cola bottling plant. The factory, surrounded by farmland, is hard to miss. Two water towers at its entrance are painted red and stamped with the firm’s name in its signature white script.
Late last year, a Russian drone hit the plant, according to Mr. Borsuk, the mayor. A few months later, another drone was shot down by Ukrainian air defenses as it approached the plant, while a third later struck a solar farm adjacent to it, Mr. Borsuk added.
Russia has repeatedly targeted energy facilities during the war but has mostly avoided solar installations, which are easy to repair and generate limited power.
To Mr. Borsuk, the attacks left little doubt: “They were aiming at Coca-Cola.”
As the war entered 2026, the attacks only intensified.
In just four weeks, facilities owned by Bunge, Philip Morris and Mondelez were struck, an escalation that has coincided with a broader rise in Russian air attacks against a range of targets that has also included Ukrainian and European firms.
Still, several Ukrainian business figures noted that the strikes on U.S. firms intensified just as Ukraine began to deepen economic ties with the United States last year.
Last spring, Kyiv and Washington signed a sweeping agreement giving the United States preferential access to investment in Ukraine’s energy sector. In January, the Ukrainian government awarded a contract to mine a major state-owned lithium deposit to a billionaire friend of Mr. Trump and a company partly owned by the U.S. government.
The strikes are meant to undercut this business-led approach “by making American factories, warehouses and offices look like an unacceptable risk,” said Oleksandr Romanishyn, a former deputy economy minister who now works on projects to develop U.S.-Ukraine business ties.
Raising alarms about the attacks has proved to be a delicate matter.
Some publicly traded companies refuse to acknowledge the attacks, fearing they could spook shareholders. Some still operate in Russia despite the war, further muddying the picture. And while Ukraine has disclosed some of the strikes, it has not made them a point of emphasis, wary of reinforcing its image as a risky place to do business.
Mr. Hunder got some traction with the bipartisan group of U.S. senators, including Ms. Shaheen, who visited Ukraine in mid-February. The lawmakers were briefed about the attacks and issued statements voicing shock and concern.
Ms. Shaheen later signed a bipartisan Senate resolution that denounced “the specific targeting of American companies operating inside Ukraine to try and discourage American investment.”
The Trump administration’s response, however, “has been silence — nothing,” Ms. Shaheen said. It did not publicly react to the strikes on Bunge, Mondelez and Philip Morris, which were all disclosed by Ukraine.
Mr. Romanishyn, the former Ukrainian deputy economy minister, said the American response mattered not just for Ukraine but also for the United States itself.
Either Washington sends a credible signal that American businesses will be protected, he said, “or it quietly accepts a precedent that other authoritarian regimes will study very carefully: that you can attack U.S.-linked companies abroad and face only rhetorical concern.”
Adam Entous and Olha Konovalova contributed reporting.
