Wildberries warehouse in Ryzan was hit by Ukrainian drones on July 29 and burnt to the ground. 

A Ukrainian drone strike hit a Wildberries logistics warehouse in Ryazan overnight on July 28-29, forcing the company to evacuate the site and halt deliveries.

The destruction of Russia’s biggest retailer of any kind has brought the company that accounts for a little under 9% of the country’s entire retail turnover close to bankruptcy; it was reported on July 29 that Tatyana Kim, Russia’s richest woman and Wildberries’ co-founder and chief executive, has approached the Kremlin for a bail out after her most important distribution centres were all destroyed by Ukrainian drones in just over a week.

The attacks on Wildberries' logistics hub were part of the same wave of attacks that also struck oil refineries in Ryazan and Perm and a logistics centre in Taganrog, President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said. The Ryazan refinery, part of Rosneft, had already been knocked offline once before, after a strike on May 15.

The Ryazan hit is the latest strike in a 10-day campaign that has moved beyond military and energy targets to attack the everyday civilian economy on both sides of the front line — Russia's largest retailer, Ukraine's biggest shopping malls, its petrol-station network, and both countries' seaports — turning ordinary commerce into a battlefield in its own right.

Wildberries: a $2.7bn hit and a retreat to Kazakhstan

Ukraine has struck Wildberries logistics centres and warehouses since July 18, hitting facilities in Elektrostal, Kotovsk, Krasnodar, Nevinnomyssk, Tver, Voronezh, Yekaterinburg, Kazan, two sites in St Petersburg, occupied Simferopol and now Ryazan. Reuters counted at least seven warehouses damaged as of July 29, destroying about 10% of the company's storage capacity; Kommersant put it at four large complexes and 444,000 square metres, or roughly 8%, a day earlier — the toll is still being tallied in real time.

The financial damage is large and contested. Sellers have lost between RUB150bn and RUB215bn ($1.9bn-$2.7bn) in destroyed inventory, according to the latest preliminary estimate cited by Meduza, with rebuilding the damaged facilities themselves seen costing a further RUB35bn ($445mn).

That dwarfs the last comparable incident: a January 2024 fire at Wildberries' Shushary warehouse destroyed RUB10bn-12bn in goods, and the company paid out nearly RUB35bn — 95% of losses — within seven months, no questions asked. This time, sellers say they are being offered only about a tenth of their goods' value, calculated through what founder Kim called a "sales simulator" modelling what unsold stock would have earned — a methodology one economics commentator on Meduza's podcast said points to Wildberries simply lacking the cash to pay in full.

Kim has said the company owes sellers nothing under liability terms it revised on July 7, just 11 days before the first strike; Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov backed her up, as the Kremlin has made it clear it was unwilling to step in with a bailout, calling the voluntary payouts worthy of "very high praise."

One seller with 1.3mn Instagram followers, Marina Gorshkova, posted a video appeal to the Russian authorities warning that a wave of small-business collapses and job losses could follow if the state does not intervene — proposing a tax exemption and loan holiday for affected sellers rather than direct compensation. Russia’s small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are already struggling as a result of the war-induced economic slowdown and their situation has deteriorated rapidly as bankruptcies rise alarmingly this year.

Trying to stay on its feet, Wildberries reportedly now seeking up to 100,000 square metres of warehouse space in Kazakhstan, though rental rates there have already reached Moscow levels and no single vacant block of that size exists; standard Russian insurance policies do not cover drone strikes, making landlords increasingly reluctant to lease to the marketplace at all now that it is in Bankova, Ukraine’s presidential administration, crosshairs.

The economic ripples are also already visible in official data. Wildberries' weekly turnover fell 10.6% week-on-week, and shares in rival Ozon plunged 12% in sympathy. Russia's Central Bank consumer sentiment index fell 8.3 points to 89.5 in July — its steepest monthly drop in over a year — though the decline was driven mainly by darkening expectations about the future rather than the present, and real-time SberIndex spending data still show consumption growth accelerating even as the warehouse strikes briefly knocked weekly spending down 3.9%.

The choice of target is deliberate, according to Denys Shtilerman of missile-maker Fire Point which is ramping up production to try and match Russia’s missile production: Wildberries is one of Russia's largest corporate borrowers, and its collapse could strain lenders including VTB Bank, which has bet heavily on the marketplace. Wildberries and rival Ozon are also used to distribute drone components to assembly sites in occupied Ukrainian territory, Shtilerman said — Ozon, Wildberries’ main rival, he added, should be next.

Russia answers in kind

Russia has adopted the same punishment strategy against Ukraine's civilian retail and fuel infrastructure. Strikes have begun hitting Epicentre, Ukraine's largest home-improvement and non-grocery retail chain, with a mall in Zaporizhzhia hit in and completely destroyed at the weekend, part of a pattern of Russia’s weekend tit-for-tat missile strikes on the network.

Petrol stations have taken a heavier, more contested hit. Ukraine’s relentless campaign against Russia’s oil refineries has caused a fuel crisis, although that is starting to ease in the last weeks as some refineries come back online and Russia’s partners ship more petrol.

The Kremlin is determined to cause the same shortages in Ukraine by systematically destroying petrol stations; Russia already bombed Ukraine’s one oil refinery out of existence in the first year of the war.

More than 200 filling stations have been destroyed across Ukraine this month, over 80 of them in the Kharkiv region alone, a regional council deputy told Espreso TV, adding that the entire 140km Kharkiv-Poltava stretch of highway has lost single one of its working gas station, most recently one in Valky on July 26. The head of the Kharkiv Regional Military Administration pushed back within hours, confirming the loss of more than 80 regional stations but denying any fuel crisis: "We live, we fight."

And as these are civilian targets, the human toll of the wider bombardment is severe on both sides. July has become the deadliest month for Ukrainian civilians since the full-scale invasion began, with at least 377 people killed and 2,129 injured, according to preliminary figures from journalist Iuliia Mendel; in the last week alone Russia fired nearly 1,700 drones, more than 1,630 guided glide bombs and over 50 ballistic missiles at Ukraine. Russia in turn responded to the initial Wildberries strike with the largest ballistic missile bombardment of the war on Kyiv.

The port war

The most consequential front in this tit-for-tat exchange is ports, where both sides are trying to choke off the other's seaborne trade. Attacks on the Greater Odesa region have made maritime shipping so dangerous that not a single vessel passed through Ukraine's sea corridor between July 22 and the time of writing, according to Ukrainian economic reporting seen by IntelliNews. Sea transport normally carries about 66% of Ukraine's exports by tonnage and nearly 50% by value, according to Ekonomichna Pravda, worth roughly $19bn in exports and almost $9bn in imports annually.

Grain and iron ore, the hardest cargoes to reroute economically, have been hit hardest — mining group Ferrexpo suspended sea exports after an attack damaged a vessel carrying 55,000 tonnes of its iron ore pellets and killed one crew member, while Ukraine's Pivdennyi GZK has separately halted mining entirely because it cannot ship what it digs and its warehouses are already full to bursting.

Alternative routes by rail, transshipment terminal or the Danube hub exist but cost more, economist Iryna Kosse of the Institute for Economic Research said, making them uneconomic for low-margin bulk cargo even as the war makes their development a strategic priority. Even the Climate Crisis is working against Ukraine as the Danube just closed down shipping completely due to the extreme temperatures and record low water levels.

Russian ports are under equivalent pressure. Alongside the Ryazan and Perm refinery strikes, Ukraine's July 29 wave also hit an export terminal and military plant in Russia's Rostov region and a naval base in occupied Crimea, Zelenskiy said — part of the same effort to squeeze Russian oil exports that Ukraine is applying to Russia's refineries, mirrored by Russia's own campaign against the port that handles the bulk of Ukraine's grain trade.

Strikes on Wildberries warehouses*

July 18 (overnight, Sat) — Elektrostal, Moscow region: Wildberries' largest hub (~250,000 sqm), effectively destroyed; fire burned for three days. Also Kotovsk, Tambov region: 7 night-shift workers killed, dozens injured; partially reopened July 23. (Ukrainian drones kill seven at Wildberries warehouse in Russia's Tambov region)

July 22 (overnight, Wed) — Krasnodar (1 killed, 10 injured) and Nevinnomyssk, Stavropol region (5 injured); both taken offline. (The Bell, "Can Wildberries withstand the attacks on its warehouses?")

July 24 (overnight, Fri) — St Petersburg, two sites: Shushary (the same complex that burned down in an unrelated January 2024 fire, rebuilt, now destroyed again) and Novosaratovka/Utkin Zavod logistics park just south of the city. Also Tver, and Simferopol in occupied Crimea (company says some goods there were saved). (Kyiv Independent, "Major fire reported in St. Petersburg... fifth time in past week")

July 25 — Yekaterinburg, roughly 1,750km from Ukraine — the deepest strike of the campaign. (UBN, July 27 digest)

July 22–24 — Kazan, listed among hit facilities by Russia Matters (July 24) and a later Meduza roundup (July 29), though I couldn't find a dedicated report pinning down the exact night.

July 29 — Ryazan Oblast: Wildberries complex burns alongside the Ryazan oil refinery. (Kyiv Independent, "Wildberries warehouse, key oil refinery burn...")

Koledino/Podolsk (Moscow region) was reported hit on July 20, but Meduza's July 24 wrap said that report was unconfirmed and the site kept operating; a nearby but separate 3PL warehouse (not Wildberries) then burned on July 28 during an unrelated mass drone raid, with Wildberries' own Koledino site reported "operating as normal." Voronezh hit was reported in broad-brush summaries (Russia Matters, Meduza) as "struck," but The Bell's more granular July 26 account says the drone missed and hit a neighbouring Magnit warehouse instead, with Wildberries' Voronezh site continuing to operate.