Another Wildberries warehouse burned overnight, this time in Penza, over 600 kilometers southeast of Moscow—the latest in Ukraine’s two-week drone campaign against Russia’s biggest online retailer. The buildings, it turns out, are the least of it.
The strikes work not by destroying warehouses, which can be replaced, but by breaking what a business this size cannot run without: workers willing to staff it, and sellers willing to stock it.
That campaign has already killed. Whether it can spread into the wider Russian economy is the harder question—and for now, the answer looks like no.
Burning a warehouse barely dents Wildberries
The Penza hub—90,000 square meters, a main sorting node for Russia’s Volga region and only the first stage of a complex built to reach double that—was only the newest. Regional governor Oleg Melnichenko confirmed the fire, and staff had been evacuated before dawn, with the company shifting orders to other warehouses.
The same morning, drones struck a second Wildberries hub in Sarapul, in Udmurtia, where staff were evacuated ahead of the fire and no casualties were reported. Both were part of a campaign that opened in mid-July and has rolled across the country since.
Any single warehouse is close to disposable. Ukraine has knocked out more than a tenth of Wildberries’ storage network, and the network keeps absorbing the losses. Hubs like these run largely independent of one another: merchants ship goods straight to a given warehouse, where the stock waits until a local order pulls it out.
Burn one, and the next does not fall with it. No domino effect. The reading that the strikes therefore break Wildberries’ business model rather than its buildings comes from a Lines on Maps video analysis of the campaign.
On the physical damage alone, Wildberries can take the loss and carry on.
“When karma works”: Ukraine torched 188,000-square-meter warehouse of Russia’s biggest online retailer after years of strikes on leading logistics company
The real target is who staffs them
So the strikes are aimed at something harder to replace than a building. The campaign has killed at least eight people and injured more than 80, most of them night-shift workers caught in the first strikes. A warehouse job was never a prize, and it now carries a real chance of not surviving a shift.
Russia’s labor market makes the rest easy. Unemployment has reached a record 2.1%, the lowest figure Rosstat has ever logged, as mobilization and emigration drain the workforce, with the state forecasting a shortfall of some 3.1 million workers by 2030.
A worker who no longer wants to gamble on the next wave of drones does not have to. The staff who cleared out of the Penza hub before dawn can be hired somewhere safer by week’s end, and no one is paying them to stand under the flight path.
Sellers who cannot afford to stay
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The other half is the sellers. Wildberries had rewritten its seller terms just weeks before the strikes, reclassifying drone attacks as force majeure and shedding its liability for goods lost in them. So a trader whose stock sat inside a burning hub swallows the loss.
For Anastasia, a clothing-store owner, that meant watching a business vanish between one day and the next. “Just yesterday I was an entrepreneur, and today I am bankrupt. My entire clothing collection has burned down,” she wrote in an Instagram post.
And the sellers cannot easily flee the platform. The whole model runs on scale. Wildberries cannot simply put up smaller, less tempting warehouses without wrecking the economics that make it work, and nobody revives brick-and-mortar retail overnight. The smallest sellers needed the scale. The scale is what is burning.
How much of Russia’s economy is at stake
The sums are large enough to explain why Ukraine bothered. Goods sold through Wildberries in 2025 came to about 3% of Russia’s GDP, and the strikes have caused up to $2 billion in direct damage, Estonian military intelligence estimates—turnover moving across the platform, not Wildberries’ own revenue, which is a fraction of it. Much of the coverage has treated the two as the same.
Ukrainian drones destroyed nearly 15.4% of Russian retail giant’s storage space in July
Russia’s business climate index fell to its lowest reading since the middle of 2022 in July, on the Central Bank’s own numbers. Even so, the hit is easy to overstate: that 3% does not vanish with a warehouse, because a share of it reroutes, slower and costlier, through whatever the vendors improvise.
Wildberries is not a purely civilian target: the platform moves military kit—body armor, uniforms, drone parts—bought through it by Russian units, Estonian military intelligence says.
Why the fire probably won’t spread
Which leaves the biggest question, and the one it is easiest to overstate: could the fires reach the wider Russian economy?
Probably not. The company is heavily indebted and has already breached the terms of its bank loans—the sort of covenant breach that lets creditors call in everything at once. They have not. The Russian government has signaled it may prop the retailer up if it comes to that, with state-controlled VTB, Russia’s second-largest bank, cast in the central role.
On prediction markets, where the calls are backed by money rather than clicks, a bankruptcy this year is priced as unlikely. The damage that lasts is not on any balance sheet—the warehouse worker who will not clock in tomorrow, the trader who will not restock a shelf they have already watched burn once.
