The Ukrainian attacks on the sprawling Russian warehouses produced stark images, with massive pillars of black smoke rising above fires that raged at facilities for Wildberries, the country’s biggest online retailer and its equivalent of Amazon.
Kyiv’s drones first hit the sites over the weekend in Elektrostal, just east of Moscow, and in the Tambov region, killing eight people and injuring scores more. Two more Wildberries warehouses -– in the southern
Krasnodar and Stavropol regions -– were attacked and set ablaze early Wednesday. One person was killed, and 14 others were hurt.
The strikes are a part of Kyiv’s aerial campaign inside Russia, aiming to undermine its wartime economy and make its citizens feel the consequences of the Kremlin’s all-out invasion of Ukraine.
A look at Wildberries and how it became a wartime target:
Wildberries was launched in 2004 by Tatyana Kim, a teacher and a young mother at the time, focusing at first on selling clothes.
Since then, the platform with its distinct purple logo has become an industry leader and household name, allowing big and small businesses alike to sell their goods 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 marketplace features all sorts of goods -– clothes, books, cosmetics, toys, appliances, household items, sports gear and much more. There’s 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 now is Wildberries Bank, but that institution has since come under sanctions by the U.K. and the European Union.
Last year, Kim said the company had more than 200 facilities totaling over 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.
Some 500,000 to 800,000 sellers are involved with Wildberries, estimated Sergei Semko, leading analyst with Data Insight, a Moscow-based company that analyzes online retail in Russia.
Wildberries currently accounts for 52% of all online orders in Russia, Semko told The Associated Press.
While Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy did not name Wildberries directly, he has said the facilities his country attacked were involved in supplying gear and various technical components to the Russian military.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Tuesday that “it is not the case” and accused Kyiv of continuing to “strike civilian targets.”
An AP search of the Wildberries website showed goods that could be used for both civilian and military purposes, such as body armor, helmets, radios and other electronics. Some of those were even marked as “tested in the SVO” or “SVO fighters’ choice” -- a Russian acronym for “special military operation,″ the term used by the Kremlin for the war in Ukraine.
Wildberries did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Russia regularly attacks Ukrainian logistics and retail facilities, including several that were hit last week.
The attacks have dealt a massive blow to many small businesses in Russia, Semko said.
Online retailers like Wildberries and its competitors Ozon and Yandex Market have enabled local craftsmen and entrepreneurs to sell their goods across Russia’s vast territory, he said.
Since Saturday, people took to social media to say that inventory for their businesses that was being stored by Wildberries in the attacked facilities had been destroyed, tearfully recounting their losses.
The extent of the damage at the four warehouses is hard to gauge.
Wildberries said it took three days to put out the fire at the facility in Elektrostal, a key distribution hub for Moscow, but the site in Kotovsk, in the Tambov region, is slated to resume operations Thursday. Both Kim and the company have not elaborated on how much was damaged.
Peskov said Tuesday that “the situation is difficult due to the losses suffered by both the company itself and representatives of small and medium-sized businesses.”
In order to support the sellers, Wildberries offered discounts on storage fees, free transfer of goods to other facilities, discounted loans at the Wildberries Bank and other measures.
Many wondered whether they would be compensated for their losses. Earlier this month, the company changed its seller policy and is now exempt from liability for stock damaged because of a “force majeure,” which includes drone attacks.
Late Wednesday, Kim said the company began payments to sellers whose inventory was damaged at the Elektrostal site. “First and foremost, we want to support the smallest and most vulnerable entrepreneurs — there are more than 88,000 of them. The funds will appear on sellers’ balances within 24 hours,” she said.
Semko cautioned that there is not enough data to make an assessment but he estimated the four stricken facilities accounted for about 12% of Wildberries’ total warehouse space. He said that the losses of the goods could be as high as about $3 billion.
That loss comes on top of increased taxes, a fuel crisis and additional regulatory hurdles faced by many small Russian businesses this year, he said.
″It is almost a perfect storm,″ Semko added.
Russia's online retail sector has grown rapidly since 2022, said Chris Weafer, CEO of Macro-Advisory Ltd. Consultancy. It accounts for about 20% of all retail sales in Russia, and “that comes from about much less than half of that five years ago,” he told AP.
After multiple Western brands withdrew their business from Russia over its war in Ukraine, Wilbderries and Ozon managed to source products no longer available in shopping malls via parallel imports from Asia, the United Arab Emirates or Turkey, leading to the rapid growth in online business, Weafer said.
He estimated Russia's e-commerce sector to be worth around $150 billion, and online retail around $80 billion-$90 billion of that.
The warehouse attacks added to the pain of small businesses, which in recent years have been “struggling very badly,” Weafer said, while probably causing only “relatively slight” damage to the industry and the economy in general, which he described as effectively stagnant, but stable.
Rather, he said, it's about “undermining public morale, and getting people to talk much more” about the war and question the Kremlin's actions.
Since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, people largely appeared complacent about the fighting.
“It was something that was happening a long way off,” Weafer said. But that has changed this year, with regular strikes on oil refineries in parts of Russia leading to the massive fires, and now Wildberries, he added.
“There is now much more awareness, but there’s also much more discussion, and more people are questioning what’s going on and why is it happening and the conflict lasting so long,” he said. “It brings it home.”
