As Ukraine intensifies its drone and missile attacks on Moscow, Wildberries, Russia’s largest online retailer, co-founded by billionaire entrepreneur Tatyana Kim, has suffered billions of dollars in losses, with 23 of its warehouses hit so far.
At least nine workers have also been killed after the warehouses were hit in midnight attacks since mid-July, following months of airstrikes on Russia’s oil refineries that led to gas shortages.
Ukraine has directly targeted private Russian businesses, affecting ordinary Russians in attempts to put more pressure on President Vladimir Putin to end the war. It said Wildberries has been targeted because it provides goods to Russian soldiers.
In a video address last month, Ms Kim said the goods on her platform, which accounts for 10 per cent of all Russian retail sales, are not different from those sold by other retailers and described Ukrainian airstrikes as “terror attacks”.
“There is no logic, common sense or rationality in the actions of the terrorists, nor can there be,” Ms Kim said, referring to the Ukrainians. She further said Kyiv was trying to “apply pressure, destabilise and provoke panic and shock among a large number of
people”.
According to Moscow-based Data Insight, which focuses on research into e-commerce and the online retail market, Wildberries have lost goods worth roughly $5.9 billion.
Sergei Semko, an analyst at Data Insight, told The New York Times that the online marketplace had almost run out of its biggest warehouses and that every single day one warehouse after another was getting destroyed.
Ms Kim launched Wildberries alongside her husband in 2004 and has since expanded it, with about 95,000 pickup stations and more than half of Russia’s population making purchases on the online market at least once a month.
Wildberries’ significance grew after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, as Western companies left the market. In 2024, Ms Kim completed a merger with a Russian advertising firm, which resulted in a feud with her former husband, Vladislav Bakalchuk, an IT entrepreneur.
After facing political and personal issues, including a business feud with the father of her seven children, the entrepreneur now has financial challenges to contend with, as attacks from Ukraine threaten her business.
Ms Kim said in her video address that Ukraine attacks threaten the business, prompting her to decentralise distribution and overhaul its logistics network.
She said in an online post on Thursday that Wildberries was holding meetings with regional governments and sellers and that “broad support measures at the federal level are also being actively developed”.
Wildberries has provided two rounds of payouts to over 80,000 small- and medium-sized sellers and rolled out limited insurance against drone attacks.
Russia’s deputy finance minister Aleksei Sazanov said the government was also working on an aid package for Wildberries’ sellers that will involve tax breaks and grace periods.
