Ukraine’s campaign targeting Russia’s war-related vulnerabilities has expanded beyond oil facilities and energy infrastructure to a new target: warehouses of the e-commerce giant Wildberries.
Ukrainian drones have hit 23 of its warehouses across Russia in less than three weeks, killing nine Wildberries employees and injuring several dozen others. Several of the company’s warehouses have completely ceased operations.
What is Wildberries?
The company is a household name in Russia: Its purple-and-pink plastic bags are ubiquitous throughout towns and villages.
Wildberries is the most popular marketplace platform in Russia: 79 million people, more than half the country’s population, use it every month.
Its reach in Russia is unmatched, both in the variety of goods sold on the platform and breadth of its operations, touching the most remote corners of the country.
Russians have grown to rely on the company’s fast and easy delivery services. In the sparsely populated countryside, the local Wildberries pickup point is often the only piece of communal infrastructure other than the post office and a corner shop.
That success has made one of its founders, Tatyana Kim, Russia’s richest woman.
Why is Ukraine targeting the company?
Ukrainian officials say they are attacking Wildberries warehouses because Russian soldiers often buy nonlethal equipment from the company.
Weapons or other items that are clearly military equipment are not sold on the Wildberries platform, but soldiers leaving for the war often stock up on essentials from it, just as their families buy pots and pans from the site. Until recently, the company had a search tag for army-related equipment, which has since been removed.
Those products included tactical vests, boots and socks, which are still available on the Wildberries platform, as well as on its biggest rival, Ozon, which has been targeted by Ukraine at least once.
Wildberries, however, is not just about military wear: a $20 pair of red-checkered lounge pants was its biggest seller last year. Other top-selling items, like hair masks, also bear little relevance to military activity.
A linchpin of Russia’s consumer economy
Punishing strikes on the company’s operations are devised to “shutter the illusion of a peaceful life in a second,” Robert Brovdi, commander of Ukraine’s drone forces, said in a statement after the Ukrainian military first destroyed a Wildberries warehouse, outside Moscow in July.
Wildberries is an obvious target for Ukraine as it seeks to damage a linchpin of Russia’s consumer market. Its 95,000 pickup points across the country represent a sense of economic normalcy in Russia, which the Kremlin has been eager to preserve.
Wildberries is an important source of employment.
Each of the company’s pickup points is privately owned and run, and an estimated one million Russian sellers supply the vast variety of goods on the platform. Most are small businesses that cannot afford their own physical stores and would otherwise struggle to find customers.
Who owns Wildberries?
The company was built from the ground up by Tatyana Kim, a former English teacher, and her husband, Vyacheslav Bakalchuk, an I.T. engineer, in the early 2000s.
Until their highly publicized divorce in 2024, Ms. Kim held 99 percent in the company, with Mr. Bakalchuk owing just 1 percent. A Russian court last year gave Ms. Kim full ownership of the company as part of their divorce proceedings.
The couple split up just as Ms. Kim agreed to a controversial merger with Russ Outdoor, an advertising company valued at a small fraction of Wildberries’s worth. Ms. Kim now holds 65 percent of Wildberries; a 35 percent stake was transferred to Russ Outdoor, which many critics have called a front for a Kremlin-connected billionaire tycoon, Suleyman Kerimov.
Before the merger, Wildberries had an estimated valuation of about $10 billion.
Speculation about who else may be linked to Wildberries resurfaced earlier this year when the company’s earnings report showed that Ms. Kim’s own firm had not received any dividends last year, and that the entire 51 billion rubles ($640 million) in dividends went to Russ Outdoor.
How have drone strikes affected the company?
The drone strikes disproportionately affected small businesses that use Wildberries as a marketplace platform. Wildberries receives, stores, processes and ships their goods. An estimated 100,000 businesses are believed to have lost their stocks in the attacks.
Just a few days before the first Ukrainian strike on its warehouses, Wildberries amended its standard service agreement with its sellers, relinquishing any liability related to losses incurred in terrorist attacks or natural disasters.
Wildberries has since pledged to support its partners with one-off payments, prioritizing the smallest businesses. Ms. Kim recently said the company had already deposited 40 million rubles (some $500,000) in the accounts of 88,000 sellers.
A Russian deputy prime minister, Aleksandr Novak, met in late July with top officials and several Wildberries sellers, promising to draft a comprehensive package of financial aid.
The post What to Know About Wildberries, the Company in Ukraine’s Cross Hairs appeared first on New York Times.
