Since mid-July, Ukrainian drones have burned their way through the warehouses of Wildberries, Russia’s answer to Amazon, and how much of it is gone has become a question with too many answers.
Estimates in circulation range from a fifth of the company’s network to well over half, and they clash because each counts something different.
Only by sorting out what each figure measures can you see what the campaign has actually done—and what it has done is heavier, where it counts, than the modest numbers suggest.
Ukraine has concentrated its drones on a couple of dozen hubs that move most of the goods, while the hundreds of small depots that pad the total remain mostly untouched.
Wildberries’ network is scattered across hundreds of small sorting points that would hardly be missed if one burned.
Wildberries is no marginal target. Nearly half of everything Russians buy online runs through it, a marketplace as woven into daily life there as Amazon is in the West. And Kyiv is not burning it for the sneakers.
Estonian military intelligence reports that Wildberries, though not a military firm, supplies the Russian armed forces with kit bought straight off the platform—body armor and drone parts—a case Ukraine makes too. Wildberries denies it.
Yet once the strikes began, the company pulled its “SVO” tag, the label that had gathered those goods in one place, while the goods stayed on sale under other categories; it also barred warehouse workers from carrying camera phones.
Russia’s largest retailer is taking cameras away from its own workers month after eight of its warehouses burned
Count the hubs, and the damage jumps
The clash comes down to the word “network.” Most of Wildberries’ floor space is scattered across small sorting points that would hardly be missed if one burned. Set the damage against all of it, and the loss—about a fifth—looks minor.
But the parcels move through these two dozen hubs that hold more than half the company’s space, and those are the ones Ukraine has hit: more than a third are damaged, and by another count, well over half are out of action. It is the same campaign counted in two ways, and only the second shows its aim.
The gap between a building’s size and its damage is easy to miss, and the biggest hub shows how. Koledino, outside Moscow, covers more than 200,000 square meters, and that number keeps getting logged as a loss.
It shouldn’t be. When a drone came down there on 28 July, the fire took a neighboring warehouse—a separate operator that stocks shelves for chains like Lenta and Auchan—while the Wildberries hub kept working.
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Damage reaches beyond the warehouses
The Wildberries strikes are one arm of a declared campaign. On 25 June, Zelenskyy announced a 40-day operation to pressure Russia to end the war.
The warehouse strikes began on 18 July near Moscow and have since spread across a dozen regions, reaching as far as Yekaterinburg in the Urals.
The cost runs beyond floor space. At least eight people have been killed in the strikes so far—warehouse staff and residents caught near the hubs when the drones came down. And the pressure is pushing the company outward: Wildberries is scouting for storage in Kazakhstan, hunting warehouse space beyond the reach of Ukrainian drones.
The fires have become a line in Russia’s budget. The Kremlin is weighing state loans to keep Wildberries upright—at a point when the federal deficit had, halfway through 2026, already outrun the shortfall the Treasury set aside for the entire year.
Oil and gas revenue, the Kremlin’s main source of war funding, keeps falling short. Russia appears unwilling to let a company this central fail. Paying to save it, hub by burned hub, is the bill Ukraine is now handing Moscow.
