More than 20 Wildberries warehouses in a month — drones are bringing the war into the economy of the Russian rear

Since mid-July 2026, the most frequently hit target deep in the Russian rear has not been an oil refinery or a military airfield, but the warehouse network of the online retailer. Over four weeks, Ukrainian drones struck more than 20 Wildberries logistics centers (according to Reuters), incapacitated eight of the fifteen largest hubs of the company (Agentstvo), and destroyed about 1.18 million square meters of warehouse space. For comparison: this is more than the entire warehouse infrastructure used by Russian troops near Kharkiv in 2022.

Why the target is a marketplace, not a military facility

The choice of target seems strange only at first glance. Wildberries is not just the largest online retailer in Russia with a turnover of 6.1 trillion rubles (about 75 billion dollars) in 2025 and a 45 percent share of the online trade market (according to the company and Al Jazeera). It is the intersection of three contours that Kyiv has been trying to sever for the third year in a row.

The first contour is military supply. The Ukrainian side claims, and this is confirmed by open data from the platform itself, that components for drones, microcontrollers, explosives in the composition of pyrotechnic mixtures, bulletproof vests, and tactical medicine are freely sold on Wildberries. The company denies direct involvement in military supplies, but it does not need to supply the army directly: it is enough that any assembly shop for "Geran" and FPV drones orders electronics through the same catalog that a family from Ufa uses to order diapers. The second contour is banking: Wildberries is called the largest borrower in Russia, and its financial partner is the state-owned VTB. Co-founder of the Ukrainian company Fire Point, Denis Shtilerman, stated directly on July 27 that the collapse of the marketplace would drag down several banks, including VTB. The third contour is social: estimates suggest that about two-thirds of the adult population of Russia are customers of Wildberries, and pickup points in small towns have turned into informal centers of public life.

Note the chronology, which speaks for itself. On July 7, 2026, eleven days before the first wave of strikes, Wildberries changed the terms of its offer: goods destroyed under "force majeure circumstances," including drone strikes, were declared non-compensable. Russian business media estimated the share of uninsured warehouses and goods at about 80 percent. The company knew it would become a target before it became public knowledge — and preemptively shifted the losses onto hundreds of thousands of sellers.

Three weeks that changed the map of the rear

The timeline of the strikes resembles methodical work rather than a series of random hits: July 18 — Elektrostal and Kotovsk, July 20 — Koledino near Podolsk, July 22 — Krasnodar and Nevinnomyssk, July 24 — Shushary near St. Petersburg, July 29 — Tyushevo near Ryazan, July 30 — Penza and Sarapul, July 31 — Volgograd, August 3 — Sobinsky District, August 4 — Krasny Bor in Leningrad Region, August 5 — Alexin, August 6 — Tver, August 11 — Tula, where one of the largest hubs of the network was halted, and finally, on the night of August 14 — again Tver Region, where explosions were caught on video by eyewitnesses (Astra). Simultaneously, a warehouse in Yekaterinburg — 2087 kilometers from the border with Ukraine — and a logistics complex in Chishmy in Bashkortostan were hit, where, according to satellite data from RFE/RL, about one-fifth of the building, approximately 30,000 square meters, burned down.

The scale of the losses can no longer be hidden behind the formula "debris fell, no one was hurt." According to independent sources, at least 13 warehouse employees died in the strikes, and dozens were injured. The company's turnover is estimated to have dropped by about a quarter due to the loss of logistics capacity and the departure of sellers. The cost of restoring just two facilities — in Elektrostal and Kotovsk — was estimated by experts at 35.8 billion rubles (about 457 million dollars), with insurance payouts covering only a small part (Kommersant).

The banking contour — the most sensitive part

"Strikes on Wildberries are not about the front line, but about Kyiv's understanding of how the Russian economy is structured," says Nikolai Mitrokhin, a researcher at Bremen University. "They will not affect the army's combat readiness: similar goods are sold on other platforms. But they strike at how Russian society perceives the war."

It is here that the analysis goes beyond military logic into an area that Russian military science has traditionally called "the resilience of the strategic rear." In Soviet doctrine, the rear was an inviolable category: the country's air defense was built so that the enemy could not physically reach the cities and industry. Today, the rear is less protected than the front. A drone costing several thousand dollars, flying 600 kilometers, inflicts damage comparable to that of an operational-tactical missile system — and the Russian air defense system, as shown by the Ministry of Defense reports on "605 intercepted drones in one night," cannot guarantee protection for dozens of dispersed civilian objects.

The consequences have already reached the level of the financial regulator. On August 10, the Central Bank of Russia sent a letter to banks recommending restructuring loans for businesses affected by the strikes on Wildberries warehouses (The Moscow Times). At the same time, according to Reuters, the government is discussing a package of state support: state loans, tax benefits, and subsidies for the company and affected sellers. This is a classic "too big to fail" trap: if the marketplace, which is tied to about 4 percent of the country's gross income (together with Ozon) and two largest state banks, begins to collapse, it will have to be saved with budget money — that is, money intended for the front.

What this means for Russian military doctrine

From the perspective of military science, what is happening here is what I would call "exporting the war to the rear." The Soviet doctrine, which I studied for decades, was based on the principle: the war at the front should not become a war in the rear — otherwise, the mobilization model will collapse. The Ukrainian side, apparently, has come to the opposite conclusion: presidential office advisor Mikhail Podolyak directly states that the target of the strikes is "large social groups that pretend to be apolitical and claim that the war does not concern them." For Kyiv, the Wildberries warehouses are not a military target in the classical sense, but a node connecting military procurement, the banking system, and the consumer calm of Russian society. One strike — and all three contours crack simultaneously.

There is also a bitter historical irony in this. In 1943, Soviet partisans waged a "rail war" against the occupiers' railway communications, and this was considered the pinnacle of operational art. Today, the same logic — to strike at logistics rather than troops — is being applied against Russia itself, and its rear infrastructure turned out to be completely unprepared for this. The difference is that then the strikes were aimed at military transports in occupied territory, while now they are aimed at a civilian trade network deep within the country, and the line between military and civilian in the Russian economy is blurred to the point that even the company itself cannot draw it.

Forecast with a caveat

Wildberries as an institution will likely survive — the state will not allow the largest taxpayer and borrower of VTB to collapse, and the support package will expand as the strikes continue. But the price of this survival is already clear: tens of billions of rubles of budget money, a wave of bankruptcies among sellers whose goods were destroyed, and a silent acknowledgment that the Russian rear is open to drones along the entire stretch from Yekaterinburg to Tver. The real test will come in the fall: if the strikes continue at the current pace, and the banking system begins to absorb the losses, the model of "war at the front, peace in the rear" will be completely exhausted. If the government formalizes subsidies for the marketplace — this will be an official acknowledgment that the rear has become a battlefield, and thus the next question of doctrine will not be "how to protect warehouses," but "how to replace the consumption that these warehouses served."