"The Situation Will Reach A Stalemate": Russians Warned The Kremlin

• 28.07.2026, 15:17

Peskov replied indistinctly.

The Russian authorities need to support small and medium-sized businesses that have been affected by Ukrainian strikes on Wildberries warehouses, so that they can continue to pay taxes to the state budget. Marina Gorshkova, founder of the cosmetics brand , made this statement in an appeal to the country’s leadership. In a video she posted on her Instagram account with 1.3 million followers, the entrepreneur stated that her company alone has paid 45 million rubles in taxes over the past year and a half. “If we close down tomorrow, this money will stop flowing into the treasury. The same will happen with other sellers who are currently in a similar situation. And new entrepreneurs won’t just spring up like mushrooms,” Gorshkova noted.

Instead of compensation payments, she proposed exempting Wildberries sellers from paying taxes “for at least a year” and asking banks to grant them payment deferrals, “so they can recover without stress and pay off their loans normally.” In addition, the entrepreneur asked that attention be paid to how Wildberries is fulfilling its obligations to sellers, noting that she is unable to ship her goods and that “the company is not complying with the terms of its own contracts.” “If you don’t intervene now, this situation will simply reach a deadlock. Tax revenue will stop flowing into the treasury, and a large number of people will be left without homes or other essentials. This is a very dire situation that requires intervention,” Gorshkova emphasized. The entrepreneur’s post garnered 10,000 likes in a single day.

Against this backdrop, the Kremlin stated that no decisions have yet been made regarding support for Wildberries and the affected sellers. Russian President’s Press Secretary Dmitry Peskov noted that the marketplace had taken the “unprecedented” step of deciding to assist entrepreneurs, “even though the company had no legal obligation to do so.” “Overall, this situation is, of course, under the government’s control,” Peskov said.

Since July 18, the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) have been launching strikes on Wildberries’ logistics centers. Warehouses in the Moscow Region, Tambov Oblast, Krasnodar, Stavropol Krai, Leningrad Oblast, St. Petersburg, Voronezh, and the annexed Crimea have already come under drone attack.

Sergey Semko , a leading analyst at the Data Insight agency , estimated the value of goods destroyed by fire in warehouses in the Moscow region and Tambov region alone at 170–230 billion rubles. At the same time, sellers complained that the initial compensation from the marketplace did not even cover half of their losses: most received 10–40% of the value of the lost goods, and some received only 3–5%.