The night shift workers at the Wildberries warehouse in Kotovsk did not know their employer had been designated a military target. Seven of them are dead. Dozens more were injured. In Elektrostal, another warehouse hit the same weekend, one more worker was killed.
The strike was part of a sustained Ukrainian drone campaign that has now hit four of Wildberries’ ten largest distribution centers. The weekend attacks destroyed goods worth an estimated $1 billion. On Wednesday, fresh strikes hit the company’s hubs in Krasnodar and Nevinnomyssk.
Ukraine’s President Zelensky said the warehouses were legitimate targets, “major logistics facilities” used to supply “sanctioned components for drone production and navigation equipment” to the Russian military.
Whether or not that claim is true for every individual building hit, the effect on the ground is unambiguous: Russia’s largest online retailer and the tens of thousands of small businesses that depend on it are taking damage that may not be reparable.
The platform trap
Wildberries is not Amazon. It is a marketplace platform, it does not own the inventory in its warehouses. The goods belong to independent sellers, small and medium-size businesses that use Wildberries because it reaches 85 to 90 percent of Russia’s economically active population, especially in remote areas with no physical stores.
When a Ukrainian drone destroys a warehouse full of goods, the small vendor bears the loss, not Wildberries.
Less than two weeks before the first attacks, the company quietly added “drone attacks” to its force majeure clause. Sellers expect no compensation.
The stories emerging from affected merchants paint a grim picture. One seller who deals in children’s clothing lost 1.4 million rubles ($13,300) worth of stock, merchandise delivered to Elektrostal the day before the attack. A stationery seller lost everything he had sent for the back-to-school season. A teenage clothing seller said: “The outlook for working with Wildberries is very murky. Right now I have enough of a safety cushion to survive the current losses, but if there are more strikes, I probably won’t manage.”
The bigger picture
These attacks do not happen in a vacuum. Russian small and medium businesses are already under extraordinary pressure in 2026.
The value-added tax was raised from 20 to 22 percent in January to fund defense spending. Tax breaks for businesses were scrapped. Internet shutdowns and messaging app crackdowns disrupted commerce, Moscow businesses lost tens of millions of dollars in a single week in March. A fuel crisis from Ukrainian strikes on oil depots and refineries is pushing transport costs up. And 209,000 small and medium companies closed in the first quarter of 2026 alone, 9 percent more than the same period last year.
Oil and gas revenues, the Kremlin’s financial cushion, are 23 percent lower than in the first half of 2025.
Ruben Eniklopov, a professor at Pompeu Fabra University, put it this way: “There are already a lot of nails, and they keep hammering them in. Is the attack on Wildberries warehouses another nail in the coffin? Well, yes, of course.”
The dual-use question
The Kremlin denies that Wildberries handles military supplies. But pro-war Russian bloggers say volunteers routinely buy military equipment through the platform, body armor, combat helmets, camouflage, fiber-optic cable for drones. Reuters has documented that a search for “components for drones” returns results on Wildberries. There is no independent confirmation that the four targeted warehouses stored such supplies, but the platform as a whole is clearly part of the military supply chain.
This is the uncomfortable reality of modern warfare. When a country routes its military logistics through consumer fulfillment centers, the line between retail and war materiel collapses. The eight dead workers in Kotovsk and Elektrostal were not soldiers. But they were working in a system that, by design or by neglect, doubles as a supply channel for the weapons killing Ukrainians.
Russia has done the same to Ukraine. It has hit Nova Poshta postal terminals, ATB retail warehouses, and Roshen confectionery facilities. Tit-for-tat strikes that spare neither side’s civilian economy.
For the small sellers watching their inventory burn, the distinction between “civilian” and “military” logistics is academic. Their savings are gone. Their businesses are failing. And if the drone campaign continues, the platform they depend on may not survive either.