Ukraine targets Wildberries in bid to shift war’s costs to Russia

Ukrainian drones struck eight warehouses belonging to Wildberries — Russia’s largest online retailer, with a 52% share of the country’s e-commerce market — between July 18 and July 24, 2026, killing nine people, injuring scores more, and torching an estimated 10% of the company’s national logistics capacity, according to the Associated Press and Reuters.

The campaign against Wildberries, a platform comparable in scale to Amazon and used daily by hundreds of thousands of Russian small businesses, marks a calculated escalation in Kyiv’s strategy to move the costs of war off the battlefield and into ordinary Russian economic life. Coming as battlefield intelligence suggests Russian forces continue to absorb losses without achieving significant territorial gains, the strikes represent a dual-track pressure campaign that analysts say Kyiv has been methodically building since 2024.

A week of fires, from Moscow’s suburbs to St. Petersburg

The first strikes hit Wildberries distribution centers in Elektrostal, just east of Moscow, and in Kotovsk in the Tambov region on the weekend of July 18–19, killing eight workers and injuring scores more, the AP reported. Two more warehouses — in the southern Krasnodar and Stavropol regions — were set ablaze on Wednesday, July 21, killing one additional person and injuring 14 others. By Friday, July 24, Wildberries co-founder Tatyana Kim confirmed in a public statement that facilities in St. Petersburg’s Shushary logistics complex, the surrounding Leningrad region, and Russian-occupied Crimea had also been hit overnight, according to The Moscow Times. Ukrainian drone manufacturer FirePoint confirmed its FP-1 drones carried out the St. Petersburg strikes.

Pillar-high columns of black smoke rising above the burned-out facilities appeared across Russian social media and news outlets, generating images that — unlike most of the war’s footage — were unmistakably set inside Russia’s major population centers. Wildberries said parts of several warehouses were saved from the fires but did not quantify the financial damage. The company did not respond to requests for comment on the military-use allegations.

The Russian business daily Kommersant estimated the combined strikes affected roughly 10% of Wildberries’ total logistics capacity, according to CNN. The company operates more than 200 facilities spanning 5.2 million square meters of storage space across Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Russian-occupied Crimea, according to Fortune.

Dual-use allegations and the case for targeting civilian infrastructure

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said publicly that the targeted hubs supplied Russian forces with drone components, navigation equipment, and other military materials — a justification Kyiv has used to frame the strikes as legitimate military targets rather than attacks on civilian infrastructure. The Russian government denied that Wildberries plays any role in military supply chains. A CNN search of the Wildberries website on Thursday found more than 78,000 items listed under military-related categories, including body armor, first aid kits, and field rations, though the site is open to all buyers and the search does not establish that the warehouses themselves were serving as military distribution points.

Serhii Kuzan, chairman of the Kyiv-based Ukrainian Security and Cooperation Center, described the strikes as deliberately serving two objectives.

“The destruction of this logistics infrastructure deals a significant blow to Russia’s economy and, consequently, to its state budget, which funds the armed aggression against Ukraine,” Kuzan told CNBC by email, adding that the attacks were also intended to reduce the capabilities of Russia’s military-industrial complex.

Whether the dual-use rationale holds up under international humanitarian law is a question legal experts have not yet resolved publicly. The Independent reported this week that a Trump administration aide described Russian forces as suffering “staggering” losses of approximately 5,000 troops per week — a figure consistent with the Ukrainian General Staff’s own daily tallies, though independently unverifiable. The Institute for the Study of War, in its July 23 assessment, wrote that the Kremlin continues to assert maximalist war aims while Russian forces have failed to achieve operationally significant gains on the front line, and that President Vladimir Putin has been publicly downplaying Russia’s economic difficulties amid what ISW described as an ongoing fuel shortage crisis.

Small Russian businesses absorb the blow

Wildberries is not primarily a state-owned enterprise. Founded in 2004 by Tatyana Kim, who Forbes identifies as Russia’s wealthiest woman, the platform hosts between 500,000 and 800,000 individual sellers, according to Sergei Semko, a senior analyst at Data Insight, a Moscow-based e-commerce research firm. The company employs approximately 48,000 people directly, CNBC reported.

The fires wiped out inventory stored at the burned warehouses, with no immediate indication of compensation for the merchants affected. Russian entrepreneurs quickly turned to social media to express the scale of their losses. “About 40% of our business went up in smoke,” one fashion retailer wrote in a post on Threads, cited by CNN, adding: “Of course, compared to human lives, it is just money.” The sentiment captured the bind facing Russian small-business owners: expressing outrage at the strikes risks implying criticism of the broader war that Kyiv frames as the root cause.

Wildberries Bank, a financial arm Kim established by acquiring a small bank in 2021, is currently under sanctions by both the United Kingdom and the European Union, according to Fortune — a detail that complicates any clean separation between the company’s commercial operations and its position within the Russian wartime economy.

What’s next

Kyiv has not indicated it will stop the campaign. Kuzan told CNBC that given the scale of the targeted facilities and their reported role in supplying both the civilian sector and the military-industrial complex, “it can be assumed that this tactic will continue.” Whether additional Wildberries sites — the company has more than 200 facilities still operating — will be struck in coming days remains to be seen. Zelenskyy’s government is expected to address the legal framework for targeting civilian-adjacent infrastructure at the next scheduled session of Ukraine’s wartime security council, though no date for that session has been publicly confirmed.

The Associated Press, Reuters, CNN, CNBC, Fortune, and The Moscow Times provided the facts and figures cited above. The Institute for the Study of War’s July 23 offensive campaign assessment informed the battlefield context.