Wildberries under fire: Why is Ukraine targeting a Russian retail giant?
The company dubbed Russia’s Amazon has come under heavy attacks in Russia as Kyiv tries to bring the sense of war home. Many have compared
The company dubbed Russia’s Amazon has come under heavy attacks in Russia as Kyiv tries to bring the sense of war home. Many have compared Wildberries, Russia’s largest online retailer, to Amazon, and some claim that, as in the case of the US company, shopping on its website or app feels addictive. “I know many people that are really addicted to it,” Aleksandra, an accountant and mother in the Urals Mountains city of Yekaterinburg, Russia’s fourth-largest, told Al Jazeera, withholding her last name for security purposes. “They add things to their basket, wait for discounts, make up their minds about what to buy, then decide to buy it again.” She found the site particularly useful while briefly living in the countryside, where otherwise she would have had to travel to the nearest town for shopping. Mere hours after being interviewed by Al Jazeera, Ukrainian drones hit a Wildberries warehouse in Yekaterinburg, 2,087km (1,297 miles) from the Ukrainian border. Online videos showed two plumes of grey smoke rising from the roof early Friday amid gunfire from security guards trying to down the incoming drones. The company said that “orders were temporarily limited” in Yekaterinburg, and regional Governor Denis Pasler said none of its 800 employees there was hurt during an evacuation. As Kyiv attempts to bring the war home to Russia, the company has become a frequent Ukrainian target. Last week’s attack did not look as devastating as two dozen earlier drone strikes that have fully or partially destroyed at least 12 warehouses since mid-July, killing 13 employees and wounding dozens.
A Wildberries logistical hub on the outskirts of Voronezh is the latest site to have come under fire earlier this week. According to Nikolay Mitrokhin, a researcher with Germany’s Bremen University, “Strikes on Wildberries aren’t about the front line, but about Kyiv’s conception of how Russia’s economy functions and what social and political consequences of these strikes are.” In the years after Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine, many Russians “really stopped going to shops” after switching to Wildberries, said Aleksandra. It has 40 mammoth warehouses and almost 200 smaller facilities with a storage space of 5.2 million square metres (56 million square feet) – 12 times the size of the Vatican. Tens of thousands of smaller retailers buy and store their goods there and use its delivery service. The company’s pickup centres have turned into informal centres of social gravity. “For youngsters, they’re like a club, especially in rural areas,” Anatoly, a businessman in the southwestern Russian region of Rostov, told Al Jazeera, withholding his last name for security reasons. In 2025, Wildberries’ turnover amounted to $79bn, or almost 3 percent of Russia’s gross domestic product (GDP) and almost half of its online retail. The abundance of the retailer’s offers attracts shoppers. But according to Kyiv, which calls its warehouses “legitimate targets,” it has fuelled the war effort by selling military or dual-purpose items such as drone components, navigation equipment, first aid kits and flak jackets. The company and the Kremlin deny that Wildberries has supplied the Russian army.
The BriefWire