Empty produce shelves and hand-printed apology notices have appeared in Kyiv's supermarkets, as Russia retaliates for Ukraine’s targetting of some of Russia’s biggest retail companies in an effort to bring the confict into the frontroom of ordinary Russians. Ukrainians are being a taste of the same bitter medicine.

The supermarket shelves, in what was famously the “breadbasket of the Soviet Union,” are emptying. Leading Ukrainian chains, including Fora and Novus, have run short of fruit, vegetables, meat, dairy and eggs since Russian strikes destroyed a cluster of distribution hubs and cold stores around the capital in the last two weeks, UNITED24 Media reported. Video circulating on Ukrainian Telegram channels shows the gaps where the fresh produce used to be.

One Fora store pinned up a notice to customers: “Due to the consequences of the enemy attack on our logistics infrastructure, some goods require more time for delivery. We will bring everything.”

The shortages are the mirror image of Operation Wildberries, the Ukrainian drone campaign that has set light to warehouse after warehouse belonging to Russia's biggest retailer of any sort since mid-July, accounting for 10% of Russia’s entire retail turnover. Both armies now treat the other's shops, depots and supply chains as fair game, in a war that has already shifted to the Black Sea ports and, in the south, to the hunting of civilians in Kherson.

Novus, one of the worst-hit chains, lost a “significant volume of inventory” that “cannot be replaced instantly” when its hub was destroyed, chief executive Mark Petkevych said, though he played down the risk of a genuine food crisis.

A Ukrainian firefighter douses a warehouse set ablaze by a Russian strike. Credit: Ukrainian government

Operation Wildberries

Ukraine opened this front on July 18, when its long-range drones began methodically picking off the warehouses of Wildberries, commonly known as “the Amazon of Russia.” Reuters counted at least 20 hits on the retailer's logistics network by August 11, the latest a 156,000 square metre terminal in Voronezh region and, days earlier, a hub in Yekaterinburg more than 2,000 km from the border, where some 800 staff had to be evacuated.

Between a fifth and a quarter of Wildberries' warehouse capacity is now out of action — estimates run from about 17% to 27% of its network — enough to send the company hunting for storage beyond Ukraine's reach. It has accelerated construction of a hub in Belarus and, according to Kommersant, is scouting for space in Kazakhstan.

The damage has rippled into the Russian state. Moscow is weighing tax deferrals for sellers whose stock went up in flames, and the central bank has urged banks to ease loan terms for the firms affected, describing the strikes as “terrorist attacks”. Potential seller losses have been put at RUB215bn-280bn ($2.7bn-$3.5bn), with rival platform Ozon's shares sliding on fears the campaign could spread.

Russia hits back at Ukraine's shops

Russia has answered in kind, and with heavier weapons. A drone flattened an Epicentre hypermarket in Zaporizhzhia on the night of August 12, the fire spreading across 10,000 square metres until the store burned to the ground. The DIY and homeware chain has lost 417,000 square metres of retail and warehouse space to Russian attacks, with more than 500,000 square metres damaged and around a dozen of its centres destroyed since 2022, co-founder Halyna Gerega has said.

The costliest single blow fell on Rozetka, Ukraine's largest online retailer. Three ballistic missiles destroyed its main distribution centre in Brovary, near Kyiv, overnight on August 4-5 — the third strike on the same complex in days — writing off a $70mn facility that had opened in 2017 and processed more than 100,000 orders a day. Co-founder Iryna Chechetkina, who had meant to spend that morning marking the company's 21st birthday, told Ukrainska Pravda she was now cutting jobs among the 1,000-plus staff who had worked there.

“The losses are so colossal that, without help, we will not be able to recover tomorrow,” Chechetkina said, urging the government to let stricken firms defer their taxes.

The national toll now runs past 1mn square metres of warehousing damaged, about 750,000 of it in the Kyiv region alone, according to RBC-Ukraine — roughly a fifth of Ukraine's pre-war stock, on the logistics consultancy UTG's reckoning. Foreign brands have been dragged in too: an August 5 strike destroyed the central Ukrainian warehouse of Liqui Moly, the German lubricants maker sold in about 150 countries.

Warehouses are only part of it. Russia has struck more than 200 Ukrainian petrol stations since June, roughly three a day, and presidential adviser Serhii Beskrestnov says local informants are paid to watch trucks and stock so that food, retail and building-supply depots can be found on the cheap. Suppliers in the Kyiv region have already put prices up by 15-20% to cover their losses — the same squeeze that first pushed empty shelves into Ukrainian shops during last winter's blackouts – and there are reports that some regions are starting to suffer from the same fuel crisis Ukraine has inflicted on Russia.

Wildberries carries it alone

For all the symmetry in the rhetoric, Ukraine's fire has so far fallen almost entirely on Wildberries. Its main rival, Ozon, has yet to have a warehouse hit and has suffered only at second hand, its share price knocked by contagion fears. Russia's other big retailers and grocery chains remain, for now, untouched, leaving Wildberries to shoulder a war aimed at the Russian consumer largely on its own.

What began as tit-for-tat retaliation has hardened into deliberate strategy on both sides: to make the war felt in kitchens and checkout queues far from the front. For Ukrainians staring at the gaps where the peaches and the eggs used to be, the calculation behind the empty shelves is no longer abstract.