On 4 August, Kazakhstan’s Trade and Integration Minister, Arman Shakkaliyev, confirmed that Russia’s largest online retailer is building 260,000 square meters of warehousing space in Almaty and Astana.

In the same appearance, he told Kazakh shoppers to favor domestic marketplaces instead. Take the construction money, steer the customers away: that is Astana’s answer to a war that has driven Wildberries to look abroad for shelter.

The warehouses aren’t new—they’ve been under construction for years. And officially, the ministry says, Wildberries hasn’t asked to move its Russian operations to Kazakhstan at all. Astana is drawing a careful line: a Russian company can build here, but it cannot relocate its business here to escape the drones.

The wariness predates the strikes. Kazakhstan already taxes foreign marketplaces at 12% and can block those that fail to register. Of marketplace complaints logged in 2024, 73.7% concerned Wildberries, even as home-grown Kaspi held more than 70% of the market to Wildberries’ 17.2%. Astana was fencing the platform in before the first drone struck.

The bill reaches the neighbors

Kazakh sellers put their losses at roughly 2 billion tenge ($4.2 million) by one count, and the Ecommerce-KZ association estimates more than $2.1 million—neither figure has been confirmed, and the minister has told people not to trust the numbers circulating online.

More than 120,000 Kazakh entrepreneurs were on the platform at the end of 2025, and Wildberries says it is repaying them in stages, working with the ministry and the business chamber Atameken.

Kyrgyzstan is hit harder. Its garment industry leans heavily on Wildberries, and individual producers have lost between 1 million and 100 million soms ($11,400 to $1.14 million) each—enough that Bishkek offered a tax holiday to garment firms through year-end.

What Wildberries wants sheltered is not neutral cargo. Ukraine says it strikes the retailer because the platform is used to trade body armor, drones, and their components that reach Russian forces.

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That leaves Kazakhstan exposed: it has spent the past year tightening dual-use export controls to avoid Western secondary sanctions, and now a company that sells to the Russian military wants to move its logistics onto Kazakh ground.

For now, the shelter barely exists. Wildberries wants to rent about 100,000 square meters—close to every empty warehouse Kazakhstan has—and the complexes it is building will not open until 2027. By then, Astana may have made up its mind about how much of Russia’s retreat it actually wants on its soil.

A Ukrainian drone strike set fire to a Wildberries logistics center in Oleksin, Russia's Tula Oblast, overnight into 5 August, according to the monitoring Telegram channel Exilenova+ and Russian outlet ASTRA. Tula Oblast Governor Dmitry Milyaev confirmed one person was injured and said a drone came down on the sorting center's territory before the fire broke out.

The strike extends a Ukrainian campaign against Russia's largest online retailer that has hit 15 Wildberries logistics sites in 18 days, Unmanned Systems Forces commander Robert "Madyar" Brovdi said on 4 August, before the Oleksin strike. Thirteen of those 15 were knocked out of action or seriously damaged, he said. Ukraine's deep-strike drones have turned Wildberries hubs — repeatedly described by Ukrainian officials as Russia's answer to Amazon — into a recurring target as they widen a campaign against the fuel and freight networks that keep Russia's war economy running.

Wildberries confirmed the fire at its Oleksin site, saying it evacuated staff in advance and temporarily redirected new deliveries to other warehouses. Milyaev also reported damage to two apartment buildings in Venyov district and two industrial sites in Novomoskovsk and Uzlovaya district from the same overnight barrage.

The Oleksin center covers about 194,500 square meters, according to Exilenova+, and opened in 2022. It supplies Tula, Kaluga, Oryol, Bryansk, Kursk, Lipetsk, Ryazan, and other central Russian oblasts, and partly relieves logistics centers in the Moscow region.

The strike follows fires at two other Wildberries sites — in Krasny Bor, Leningrad Oblast, and Chekhov, Moscow Oblast — overnight into 4 August, and comes as Wildberries has begun restricting employees to camera-free phones after staff filmed and shared footage of the strikes.

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.

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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

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.

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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.

Ukrainian drones struck logistics and industrial sites across Russia's Moscow Oblast on the morning of 28 July, according to monitoring channels and local authorities. Fires broke out near Podolsk and in Chekhov, while Russia's biggest online marketplace said its own warehouse kept running. Russian officials claimed air defenses downed hundreds of drones.

Aimed at Russia's Amazon, the hit landed next door

Early on 28 July, Ukrainian monitoring channel Exilenova+ started reporting drone activity over Moscow Oblast. Over the next hours it posted photos, video, and its own read of the target. The channel judged the strike as a likely attempt on the large Wildberries logistics center in Koledino, south of Podolsk. Air-defense fire, it said, probably pushed the hit onto the third-party warehouse right beside it.

Russian news Telegram channel Astra identified the burning building as that 3PL site. Residents of nearby Podolsk reported explosions and a fire that same morning. Supernova+ backed the account of a hit on the 3PL warehouse.

The operator's own site lists the warehouse at about 10,000 m². It stores goods, packs orders, labels and ships for clients that include Auchan, Magnit, Lenta, Pyaterochka, Fix Price and Detsky Mir. Next to it sits what one industry listing calls the marketplace's largest distribution center, over 200,000 m². Wildberries' press service said the complex was working normally. Monitoring channels still believe the intended target was the Wildberries hub. 

Podolsk district head Grigory Artamonov played it down, reporting only a damaged fence at a private house and a fire in a wooded area.

A rubber plant on fire in Chekhov

Video published by Exilenova+ also showed drones hitting an enterprise in Chekhov. More footage captured a fire after a drone reportedly struck a smokestack on a plant's grounds. Astra's analysis placed the blaze at the Chekhov Regeneration Plant. Residents had reported explosions overnight.

The plant recycles worn car tires into regenerate, rubber crumb and powder, and makes more than 600 rubber goods. By its own account, it is one of Russia's biggest producers in the field. Chekhov municipal head Mikhail Sobakin confirmed the attack, saying rubber had caught fire at the plant and crews were putting it out, with several buildings in the city damaged.

Moscow mayor Sergei Sobyanin first claimed 12 drones downed near the capital around 5 a.m. He later put more than 390 aircraft over the region between 20:30 and 6:30, saying air defenses hit most "on distant approaches" and 81 near Moscow. Russia's Defense Ministry claimed its air defenses downed 356 Ukrainian drones overnight, across a dozen regions plus the Moscow area, occupied Crimea and the Azov Sea. None of the figures could be independently checked.

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Deep-strike campaign continues

Since 18 July, Ukrainian drones have hit at least ten of the marketplace's centers, in Elektrostal, Kotovsk, Krasnodar, Nevinnomyssk, Voronezh and Yekaterinburg. The previous successful strike came on 24 July, at complexes near St. Petersburg, in Leningrad Oblast and in occupied Simferopol. On 20 July, drones struck the Wildberries center in Podolsk and an oil depot in nearby Lvovsky, both catching fire, as the effort widened from oil refineries to retail and industry.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has earlier explained the strikes on the "Russian AliExpress" by saying Moscow uses the platform to bring in sanctioned drone and navigation parts.