Ukraine has hit Russia’s biggest online retailer again. Overnight strikes on Wildberries logistics hubs in Krasnodar and Nevinnomyssk, in southwestern Russia, injured 15 people and set an oil depot ablaze. Drone debris also hit two apartment buildings.
This is the second attack in four days. Over the weekend, strikes on Wildberries warehouses in Tambov and Elektrostal, the latter barely 50 kilometers from Moscow, killed 8 people. Satellite imagery from Planet Labs shows three buildings at Elektrostal completely gutted.
The campaign against Wildberries is not random. It is a deliberate strategy to take the war into the Russian home front.
Why Wildberries?
Wildberries is Russia’s equivalent of Amazon, a vast online marketplace where independent sellers list goods and the company handles storage and delivery. Its warehouses hold everything from clothing and electronics to components that can be used in military equipment.
Serhii Kuzan, chairman of the Ukrainian Security and Cooperation Centre, explained the logic: “The primary rationale for striking Wildberries’ warehouses is to disrupt Russian logistics and the supply of dual-use goods, critical electronics, sanctioned goods and the like to the Russian army and Russian arms manufacturers.”
Ukraine’s government claims the warehouses were being used to supply the Russian military with drone components and navigation equipment. Whether or not that specific claim is true, the broader point stands: in a war economy, everything is dual-use. The electronics in a civilian warehouse can end up in a military drone. The logistics network that delivers consumer goods also delivers military supplies.
The economic and psychological effect
But the strikes have another purpose: to make ordinary Russians feel the war.
The Wildberries campaign is part of a wider Ukrainian strategy to hit targets inside Russia that affect daily life. The weekend strikes in Tambov and Elektrostal were followed by maritime strikes on an oil depot, a tanker, and four cargo ships of Russia’s “shadow fleet” in the Sea of Azov and Black Sea.
One trader, who spoke to the BBC Russian service on condition of anonymity, described the fear: “If there are more strikes, I probably won’t manage. It’s terrifying to keep loading my goods into what feels like a furnace.”
Tatyana Kim, Wildberries’ founder, posted on Telegram: “There are no words to describe all the feelings and emotions caused by the attacks on ordinary people, on our employees, on us, who are simply doing our jobs.”
That is the point. The war is no longer something that happens in Ukraine and appears on Russian television as a sanitized “special military operation.” It arrives in Krasnodar at night, in the form of a drone that destroys a warehouse full of someone’s livelihood.
A war of logistics
Russia has adapted to many aspects of the drone war, electronic warfare jammers, anti-drone nets, fiber-optic drones for its own use. But defending every logistics hub across 11 time zones is a different problem.
Ukraine’s drone production now exceeds one million FPV units per month. Long-range strike drones can reach targets 1,200 kilometers inside Russia. Every Wildberries warehouse, every oil depot, every logistics node is a potential target.
The campaign cannot win the war by itself. But it can make the war felt in places the Kremlin assumed were safe, and in doing so, change the calculation of who is willing to endure a conflict that shows no signs of ending.