FT: Ukraine Has Turned Wildberries Into Putin's Achilles' Heel
- 25.07.2026, 10:07
The damage caused by the impacts is enormous.
The Russian online retail group Wildberries tried to convince Kremlin dictator Vladimir Putin that it could be something more than just Russia’s answer to Amazon. It also “could challenge the U.S.-led payment system worldwide.”
But after Ukrainian strikes hit five of the company’s warehouses over the past week, Wildberries has instead become yet another vulnerability in the Russian president’s war economy, writes Financial Times.
The attacks are part of a new Ukrainian campaign that largely leverages domestic advances in long-range drone technology to bring the consequences of Putin’s invasion—now in its fifth year—into the homes of ordinary Russians.
Ukrainian strikes have damaged Russian oil refineries in the heart of Moscow and even in distant Siberia, forcing one of the world’s largest energy producers to impose rationing at gas stations and import fuel, according to media reports.
Now, attacks on Russia’s e-commerce sector threaten to upend one of the country’s largest companies, which last year reported revenue of 6.1 trillion rubles and in 2024 presented Putin with a bold plan for global expansion, journalists say.
Wildberries is a mass-market platform targeting Putin’s key electorate: low-income Russians living outside Moscow and St. Petersburg. Its network of pickup points extends into small towns and villages, where they have become major hubs of local life. It is reported that the strikes, which began last Saturday, destroyed several billion dollars’ worth of inventory in fires that sent huge plumes of black smoke rising over cities in five Russian regions.
During the latest attack, Ukrainian drones struck the Wildberries facility in the Leningrad Region near St. Petersburg, causing a massive fire. The region’s governor Alexander Drozdenco confirmed the attack.
Wildberries has an explanation for these attacks
Alexander Kolyandr, director of the Eurasia Group, noted that the economic damage will extend beyond lost inventory. “The loss of goods will bankrupt thousands of merchants, leading to unpaid taxes, loan defaults, and the like,” he said, adding that the strikes will deprive the state of tens of billions of rubles in taxes from a major taxpayer.
Ukraine justified the attacks as retaliation for Russian strikes on warehouses belonging to “Nova Poshta”—a Ukrainian private postal service.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy stated that the Wildberries logistics network was being used to supply the Russian army with “drone components, navigation equipment, and other gear.”
Although Putin’s press secretary Dmitry Peskov denied this, sellers on the Wildberries platform offer goods that can be used to manufacture combat drones or as basic supplies for soldiers on the front lines—for example, body armor and helmets, the article states.
These goods, many of which are imported from China and fall under Western regulations on dual-use items, are popular among grassroots supporters of the war who are raising funds to equip Russian troops and building rudimentary drones as part of the “people’s military-industrial complex.”
The vast majority of products sold on Wildberries—which has built its reputation as an online clothing retailer targeting women—have no military application.
The damage is enormous
The first four strikes destroyed about 444,000 square meters, or 8% of Wildberries’ warehouse space, according to Russian media reports. Restoring the warehouses could cost the company approximately 36 billion rubles. Many small businesses that sell their goods on Wildberries—which controls nearly half of the Russian e-commerce market—lost their inventory as a result of the strikes.
The first strike—on warehouses in Elektrostal near Moscow and in Kotovsk in the south—could have destroyed inventory worth between 150 and 235 billion rubles on its own, which is comparable to Wildberries’ net profit of 175 billion rubles for 2025. Wildberries sellers posted emotional videos on Instagram, explaining that their businesses had been destroyed overnight.
“Right now, 4,000 of my fur coats worth over 20 million rubles are burning in the warehouse. What can I do to help myself? Nothing,” reads the caption to a video by one seller standing on the side of the road, with a plume of smoke rising behind her.
Russian business owners are left with nothing
One founder of a cosmetics brand said she lost 1 million rubles as a result of the strikes. “I can’t calm down. I’m in shock. Every business owner is in shock. I’ve got no strength left,” she wrote on Instagram. “We only found out from the news that if a warehouse gets blown up, we won’t get a damn thing in compensation.”
And that’s actually true, because less than two weeks before the first attacks, Wildberries changed its terms and conditions, classifying drone attacks as force majeure and absolving itself of any obligation to compensate merchants for lost goods.
As public outrage grew Tatiana Kim, co-founder and CEO of Wildberries, stated that insurers are unwilling to cover damage from drone attacks, but promised to compensate the 88,000 sellers, whom she described as Wildberries’ “smallest and most vulnerable” sellers.
According to Kim, the program will pay sellers as if the destroyed goods had continued to sell at the same rate and price as before the drone attacks.
But sellers in group chats on Telegram complained that the payments represent only a small fraction of the value of their destroyed inventory. One seller wrote that Wildberries paid him only 37,000 rubles after he lost 1.5 million rubles worth of goods in a fire in Elektrostal.