Ukraine’s pivot to warehouse strikes brings war closer to ordinary Russians

Standing in front of a vast warehouse engulfed in flames outside Moscow, Tatyana Mikhailova watched as her entire stock of 4,000 fur coats, bought months in advance for the winter season, burned.

“It’s not just a warehouse that’s burning,” Mikhailova said in a video she shared on Instagram. “It’s the time you’ve invested, the immense stress you’ve endured, your money, and your last bit of hope. All I feel is emptiness.”

Mikhailova is one of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Russian entrepreneurs whose small businesses have been devastated by a wave of Ukrainian drone strikes targeting warehouses belonging to Wildberries, Russia’s largest e-commerce company and the country’s answer to Amazon.

Ukrainian drones have hit at least nine Wildberries warehouses on four of the past seven days, striking logistics centres from southern Russia to the outskirts of St Petersburg, killing at least nine people and destroying inventory worth billions of dollars.

The attacks are a new phase in Ukraine’s long-range strike campaign. After months of targeting oil refineries and fuel infrastructure, contributing to shortages across Russia, Kyiv is turning its attention to logistics networks in an attempt to erode the sense of normality that has insulated many urban Russians from the realities of the war.

On Friday morning a warehouse in Shushary, a suburb of St Petersburg, caught fire after a drone strike, according to videos and local media, sending thick smoke across Russia’s second city.

Together, the targeted sites cover about 552,000 sq metres – roughly one tenth of Wildberries’ total warehouse capacity, according to calculations by the Kommersant business newspaper.

Losses at Wildberries have reached an estimated 170bn roubles (about $2.2bn or £1.65bn) in destroyed merchandise alone, according to Data Insight, a Moscow-based research firm.

Most of the losses fall not on Wildberries itself but on the independent merchants whose stock was stored in the warehouses.

Many vendors this week express their anger on social media that their inventories had been torched.

Maria, who handmakes postcards, lost about $8,000 of goods when drones struck Wildberries’ warehouse in Elektrostal, 58km (36 miles) east of Moscow. Days later, she lost the rest of her stock when a warehouse in Krasnodar, southern Russia, was hit.

In an interview with the Guardian, Maria said: “How can you run a business when all your company’s assets just go up in flames?”.

Maria, who asked for her surname to be withheld, added: “I’m raising a child on my own and I’ve lost everything. How am I supposed to stay calm? Yesterday you had a peaceful, normal life. You could make plans. Today I have nothing.”

Wildberries, founded by the self-made billionaire Tatyana Kim, has become one of Russia’s biggest business success stories.

The platform is particularly popular among lower-income Russians living outside Moscow and St Petersburg – a demographic that forms a central part of Vladimir Putin’s political base. Its vast network of collection points extends into small towns and villages, where they have become fixtures of everyday life.

But the sheer scale of Wildberries’ logistics network has now become a liability. With more than 200 warehouses and logistics centres scattered across Russia, protecting every site from swarms of cheap Ukrainian drones is virtually impossible.

Kim this week announced that the company had begun compensating some sellers, but merchants say the payouts amount to only a fraction of the value of the goods destroyed.

Anton Bryanski, who imports clothing from China, said he lost goods worth 4.6m roubles (about $59,000) but received just 19,000 roubles (about $240) in compensation.

“That’s less than 1% of the total losses,” he said.

Adding to sellers’ anger, Wildberries had changed its terms just 11 days before the first strikes, exempting itself from liability for goods destroyed in “force majeure” events, including drone attacks.

For many small entrepreneurs, the attacks are another blow in mounting economic hardships caused by the war, which has brought soaring inflation, higher taxes and rising costs as the Kremlin scrambles to finance its military campaign.

Ukraine has defended the attacks as legitimate military strikes.

In his nightly address on Saturday, Volodymyr Zelenskyy did not mention Wildberries by name but said Ukrainian forces had struck “major logistics facilities” used to transport sanctioned components for drone production and navigation equipment.

While Wildberries does not manufacture or sell weapons, the platform is used by soldiers and volunteers to buy equipment and goods used for the war. A Guardian review of the marketplace found thousands of listings for military-related goods, including body armour, first aid kits, field rations, drone goggles and drone components with potential battlefield applications.

The majority of products sold on the platform, however, are ordinary consumer goods. Wildberries built its business selling clothing, cosmetics and household items and remains central to everyday shopping for millions of Russians.

Analysts therefore say the campaign serves a broader purpose than disrupting military logistics.

Sergei Guriev, a Russian economist and the dean of the London Business School, told the independent Russian news outlet Meduza: “This is an attack that touches every Russian because people increasingly depend on e-commerce.

“The Kremlin has spent years trying to convince Russians that life continues as normal despite the war. It’s difficult to maintain that illusion when huge columns of smoke are rising over cities. These attacks are a double blow – to the military machine and to the image of normality.”

Putin has yet to comment on the attacks on Wildberries, but in recent weeks he has shown no willingness to abandon his maximalist war aims, insisting that the difficulties facing Russia are temporary.

Speaking to senior officials on Wednesday, the Russian president sought to project confidence in the country’s economic resilience. “Let me note at the outset of our meeting that the state of the Russian economy, and of its key sectors, remains stable despite external attempts to destabilise the fuel and energy sector and certain other industries,” Putin said.