Wildberries Has Decided To Hide Its Products From Ukrainian Drones At Its Warehouses In Belarus

• 4.08.2026, 18:44

The marketplace hopes they won't be attacked there.

Wildberries, Russia’s largest marketplace—20% of whose warehouse capacity has been destroyed by Ukrainian drones—will redirect goods intended for long-term storage to warehouses in other countries, where they are unlikely to be attacked. Company employees are discussing this during meetings with sellers. “We were told that ‘long-term’ warehouses will now be located in Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan. They promised to provide details later on how this will affect prices and delivery times, and how the goods will be shipped there,” says a participant in one of these meetings.

WB has been operating in the markets of these countries for several years now. Another entrepreneur who attended a similar meeting shared details he obtained from WB representatives: The marketplace already has some warehouses—some owned, others leased—and is already beginning to ship goods abroad “right now,” writes The Moscow Times.

“As soon as the company asks us to deliver goods to a new warehouse, drones start attacking it,” one seller described the situation. Moving goods to overseas warehouses will protect them, but Russian sellers are worried about other problems.
Due to such “long” logistics, WB will lose out to its main competitors in terms of delivery times and costs, explains one entrepreneur. “We’ll have to ‘shuttle’ the bulk of our goods back and forth,” he believes. Sales through the marketplace’s long-term storage warehouses account for 70–80% of large sellers’ revenue. “You won’t sell very much” by shipping from your own warehouses using your own resources; “that’s for small and mid-sized players,” explains one of them.

Another problem: to move commercial shipments of goods across the border—regardless of the purpose—you need a customs declaration. And a significant portion of WB sellers have a problem with this—they sell goods that entered Russia through gray-market or even black-market channels, says another seller. “Large suppliers and manufacturers will be able to handle this, but small and medium-sized ones will face a problem,” he believes.

It will be easier to transport imports from China to warehouses in Kazakhstan, and there will be even more of them on WB, which means competition for domestic sellers will intensify, worries one of the entrepreneurs. “In the end, it won’t be Ukrainian drones that will put our business out of business, but cheap goods from China,” he fears.

In Astana and Almaty, WB has leased approximately 46,000 square meters of warehouse space, and the company is building another 260,000 square meters, which are scheduled to be commissioned in the first quarter of 2027, said Arman Shakkaliev, Kazakhstan’s Minister of Trade and Integration, describing these as plans “to develop the local Wildberries branch.” The ministry has not received an official request from Wildberries regarding the establishment of additional warehouses, although, according to the minister, companies can negotiate directly with warehouse property owners without government involvement. Russia and Kazakhstan began work on integrating marketplaces even before the Ukrainian attacks on Wildberries, said Mikhail Galuzin, Deputy Foreign Minister of Russia, in response to a question about RWB’s warehouses in Kazakhstan.

RWB is also building a large warehouse in Belarus (costing 11 billion rubles), but of the 140,000 square meters, only 20,000 square meters had been completed by May; it was planned to be fully operational by the end of this year or early next year. In May, WB founder Tatiana Kim announced plans to build a second large warehouse complex in the country. At that time, it was assumed that these facilities would serve Belarusian customers.

In Uzbekistan, RWB is creating a Central Asian logistics hub, as the company’s CEO Robert Mirzoyan explained a month before the attacks on the company’s warehouses began. The hub will bring together the Wildberries sorting center and the warehouse complex currently under construction in the Tashkent region—covering an area of approximately 170,000 square meters—as well as infrastructure in other countries, and will connect key markets along the “Russia–Uzbekistan – Middle East” route, as well as serving as a transit point for exporting goods to African markets via the “China–Uzbekistan–Africa” route—that was the plan.

As of August 2, the total area of the Wildberries warehouses that had been attacked was 1.2–1.5 million square meters, with 0.9–1.15 million square meters damaged—or 17–22% of RWB’s publicly reported 5.2 million square meters of logistics infrastructure—according to an estimate by Sergey Semko, a leading analyst at the research agency Data Insight. Since then, drones have completely or partially destroyed two more of the marketplace’s large warehouses. RWB began restructuring its logistics and rerouting deliveries through smaller warehouses and its network of pickup points, but this has lengthened delivery times and increased transportation costs. Experts estimated the cost of restoring the destroyed facilities at 62.5–80.8 billion rubles, and sellers’ losses at 280 billion rubles.