Ukraine has spent a month setting fire to Wildberries warehouses. Last week it went after the checkout instead.

Cyber specialists from Ukraine's Main Intelligence Directorate, the HUR, attacked the digital infrastructure of Russia's biggest e-commerce company on August 10-11, knocking out its main remote customer service channel and partially destabilising its payment infrastructure as the warehouse war goes digital. Users who could not complete transactions flooded the company's contact centres with complaints, the agency said in a statement on Facebook.

The operation was run by the HUR's Cyber Corps group and got through despite the company's security measures, the agency said, reports the Kyiv Post on August 15.

Drones have already taken out the physical side of the business - the warehouses, the stock, the square metres - and each one costs Ukraine a machine it could have flown at a refinery instead. An outage in the payment rails costs nothing to repeat, and it reaches the one part of the marketplace that drone strikes cannot: the transaction itself, which is where Wildberries earns and where its sellers get paid.

The kinetic tally behind it is heavy. Ukraine has hit at least 23 Wildberries facilities since mid-July, killing nine company workers, and analysts put the destroyed or damaged share of its warehouse space at up to a third - at least 1.18mn square metres, holding goods worth around RUB480bn ($5.7bn). That is more than several Russian regions spend in a year, and roughly the annual budget of Krasnoyarsk Krai.

It lands on tens of thousands of small traders rather than on the company. Sellers were already facing more than $1bn in losses earlier in the campaign, and while the government is preparing tax breaks and loan holidays, no scheme to compensate destroyed stock has been announced. Delayed payouts after a payment-system outage hit the same people twice.

Kyiv's justification is that Wildberries sells goods the Russian army uses. The company denies supplying the military and says weapons are banned from its platform, but The New York Times found first-person-view drones, fibre-optic control cable and other equipment with military applications on sale there in early August. The marketplace has since cut the visibility of military-related goods in its own search results.

The company is too big for any of this to stay contained. Wildberries accounts for roughly 10% of Russian retail sales, and SberIndex has recorded a sharp fall in non-food marketplace spending in recent weeks. The group has also been moving capacity into Kazakhstan, which brings its own sanctions questions for Astana.

Co-founder Tatyana Kim has said the strikes are meant to destabilise the company and spread panic among Russians. That is the stated point of Operation Wildberries, the phase of the war in which both sides stopped aiming at armies and started aiming at each other's shops, ports and delivery networks.

A warehouse can be rebuilt. A marketplace that customers stop trusting to take their money is a slower thing to fix.