The Ukrainian attacks on sprawling Russian warehouses produced stark images, with huge plumes of black smoke rising above fires ravaging the facilities of Wildberries, the country’s largest online retailer and its Amazon equivalent.
kyiv’s drones first struck the sites over the weekend in Elektrostal, just east of Moscow, and in the Tambov region, killing eight people and wounding dozens more. Two other Wildberries warehouses, in the southern regions of Krasnodar and Stavropol, were attacked and set on fire early Wednesday morning. One person died and 14 others were injured.
The strikes are part of kyiv’s air campaign inside Russia, aimed at undermining its wartime economy and making its citizens feel the consequences of the Kremlin’s full invasion of Ukraine.
A look at Wildberries and how it became a wartime target:
A retailer that has grown since 2004
Wildberries was founded in 2004 by Tatyana Kim, a teacher and young mother at the time, and initially focused on selling clothing.
Since then, the platform with its distinctive purple logo has become an industry leader and household name, allowing businesses large and small to sell their products to customers across the country by storing, shipping and delivering their inventory. In April, Forbes Russia estimated Kim’s fortune at $8.1 billion.
The market presents all kinds of products: clothing, books, cosmetics, toys, household appliances, household items, sporting goods and much more. There is an “E-Pharmacy” page and a travel section where users can book plane tickets or hotels.
In 2021, Kim acquired a small bank and turned it into what is now Wildberries Bank, but that institution has since been subject to sanctions by the United Kingdom and the European Union.
Last year, Kim said the company had more than 200 facilities totaling more than 5.2 million square meters (55 million square feet), with plans to expand in 2026, including planned warehouses in Belarus and Kazakhstan, where Wildberries already operates.
Between 500,000 and 800,000 sellers participate in Wildberries, estimated Sergei Semko, lead analyst at Data Insight, a Moscow-based company that analyzes online retail in Russia.
Wild berries currently account for 52 percent of all online orders in Russia, Semko told The Associated Press.
Kyiv says affected facilities supplied Russian military
While Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy did not directly name Wildberries, he said the facilities his country attacked were involved in supplying equipment and various technical components to the Russian military.
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Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Tuesday that “this is not the case” and accused kyiv of continuing to “attack civilian targets.”
An AP search of Wildberries’ website showed products that could be used for both civilian and military purposes, such as body armor, helmets, radios and other electronic devices. Some of them were even marked as “tested in the SVO” or “choice of SVO fighters,” a Russian acronym for “special military operation,” a term used by the Kremlin for the war in Ukraine.
Wildberries did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Russia regularly attacks Ukrainian retail and logistics facilities, including several that were attacked last week.
Attacks are a blow to Russian small businesses
The attacks have dealt a hard blow to many small businesses in Russia, Semko said.
Online retailers such as Wildberries and its competitors Ozon and Yandex Market have enabled local artisans and entrepreneurs to sell their products throughout Russia’s vast territory, he said.
Since Saturday, people took to social media to say that their business inventory that Wildberries stored at the attacked facilities had been destroyed, and they tearfully recounted their losses.
It is difficult to assess the extent of the damage to the four warehouses.
Wildberries said it took three days to put out the fire at the Elektrostal facility, a key distribution center for Moscow, but the Kotovsk site in the Tambov region is scheduled to resume operations on Thursday. Both Kim and the company have not provided further details on how much damage he suffered.
Peskov stated on Tuesday that “the situation is difficult due to the losses suffered by both the company itself and representatives of small and medium-sized businesses.”
To support sellers, Wildberries offered discounts on storage fees, free transfer of goods to other facilities, discounted loans at Wildberries Bank and other measures.
Many wondered if they would receive compensation for their losses. Earlier this month, the company changed its seller policy and is now exempt from liability for stocks damaged due to “force majeure,” which includes drone strikes.
Late Wednesday, Kim said the company began paying sellers whose inventory was damaged at the Elektrostal site. “First of all we want to support the smallest and most vulnerable entrepreneurs: there are more than 88,000 of them. The funds will appear in the sellers’ balances within 24 hours,” he said.
Semko cautioned that there is not enough data to make an assessment, but estimated that the four affected facilities represented about 12 percent of Wildberries’ total storage space. Merchandise losses could amount to about $3 billion, he said.
That loss comes on top of increased taxes, a fuel crisis and additional regulatory hurdles many Russian small businesses face this year, he said.
“It’s almost a perfect storm,” Semko added.
The attacks also undermine Russian morale.
Russia’s online retail sector has grown rapidly since 2022, said Chris Weafer, CEO of Macro-Advisory Ltd. Consultancy. It accounts for about 20 percent of all retail sales in Russia, and “that’s coming from much less than half of what it was five years ago,” he told the AP.
After several Western brands withdrew their business from Russia due to its war in Ukraine, Wilbderries and Ozon managed to source products that were no longer available in shopping malls through parallel imports from Asia, the United Arab Emirates or Turkey, leading to rapid growth of the online business, Weafer said.
He estimated that Russia’s e-commerce sector is worth about $150 billion, and online retail between $80 billion and $90 billion of that figure.
The attacks on warehouses added to the pain of small businesses, which in recent years have been “struggling a lot,” Weafer said, although they likely caused only “relatively minor” damage to the industry and the broader economy, which he described as effectively stagnant but stable.
Rather, he said, it is about “undermining public morale and getting people to talk a lot more” about the war and question the Kremlin’s actions.
Since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, people have largely seemed complacent about the fighting.
“It was something that had been going on for a long time,” Weafer said. But that has changed this year, with regular strikes at oil refineries in parts of Russia leading to massive fires, and now at Wildberries, he added.
“Now there is a lot more awareness, but there is also a lot more discussion and more people wondering what is happening and why it is happening and the conflict lasts so long,” he said. “Brings it home.”
