Ukrainian drone strikes on the warehouses of Russia's biggest online marketplaces will cost the country's e-commerce 400 million orders and 400 billion rubles ($4.8 billion) in revenue this year, the research firm Data Insight estimates, The Moscow Times reported. It prices what the campaign has done to a whole consumer market, not only to the companies whose warehouses burned. Sellers are cutting back on the platform at the center of it, and Wildberries' payout delays are pushing some of them out.

The forecast, cut by a fifth

Data Insight lowered its growth forecast for Russian online retail by 20%, founder Fyodor Virin said. The market will now grow to 9.6 billion orders this year instead of 10 billion, and to 15 trillion rubles ($178 billion) in sales instead of 15.4 trillion.

That is exclusively the effect of the Ukrainian strikes on marketplace warehouses, Virin said, and most of the loss falls on Wildberries. The bombardment of the depots cut sales because goods were unavailable in a given city or entirely, and because delivery times grew as parcels had to travel further.

All of it lands in the second half of the year. Strikes on Wildberries warehouses began on 18 July and on Ozon's on 25 August, according to Virin. Euromaidan Press reported the first strike on an Ozon warehouse on 22 August.

About 30% of the orders that got stuck or disappeared from sale were cancelled outright, Virin estimates. The rest of the unmet demand went mostly to other online platforms and, to a lesser degree, to physical retail. Payout delays that began in mid-August have pushed some sellers to pull their stock, and Wildberries blamed the first missed round on a DDoS attack.

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What the companies lost

Damage to RWB, the company that runs Wildberries, from the loss of warehouses and infrastructure may reach 147 to 280 billion rubles ($1.7–3.3 billion), while sellers have provisionally lost 445 to 507 billion rubles ($5.3–6 billion), Data Insight's lead analyst Sergei Semko estimated. All of the marketplace's key logistics complexes have been hit, and it could lose a fifth of its network and over half its main hubs at once.

Much of what the sellers lost will not come back. On 22 July, Wildberries' founder said the warehouses were insured but that standard policies do not cover drone-strike risk, and Ozon has told sellers that losses from military action are an entrepreneurial risk neither it nor insurers will compensate.

Total losses for Ozon and its sellers are far lower, at around 100 billion rubles ($1.2 billion). Ozon has a much more branched warehouse network and rents most of its large complexes, Alfa-Bank analysts said. Its shares still fell as much as 29% in a single August session on a day when the Moscow exchange lost 2.9%.

The UN is considering moving humanitarian supplies into underground facilities after strikes hit 10 of its warehouses in Ukraine this year and destroyed millions of dollars' worth of aid, UN Humanitarian Coordinator in Ukraine Matthias Schmale said on 15 September.

Repeated strikes on aid warehouses have forced the UN to rethink how it stores and buys supplies in Ukraine, including moving them underground. More of the humanitarian budget now goes to protecting aid rather than delivering it.

"These deliberate attacks on warehousing capacities … is a new trend of the last few months," Schmale told Reuters after briefing states in Geneva.

Strikes destroyed medical supplies, food, and generators worth millions across Ukraine

On 3 September, an air attack destroyed a major medical-supplies warehouse in the Kyiv region. The attack came after two other medical-supply warehouses were destroyed in the previous three months, including a double strike in Dnipro in late August that wiped out half the supplies earmarked for some 225,000 people in frontline and hard-to-reach areas.

In July, a strike on a warehouse near Kyiv destroyed nearly $3.9 million in UNICEF supplies, including power generators, water supplies, and hygiene kits. In May, an Iskander missile strike on a World Food Programme warehouse in Dnipro destroyed food meant for around 130,000 people.

Added security costs strain an already underfunded aid operation

Schmale said the UN is now weighing whether to store supplies underground rather than in conventional warehouses, and is delaying some purchases while it works out how to protect what it buys. The added security costs come on top of an already strained budget: the UN's 2026 humanitarian appeal for Ukraine seeks $2.3 billion to reach 4.1 million people.

Russia struck a fourth Ukrainian pharmaceutical warehouse in two weeks on 14 September, setting fire to the Odesa depot of medicine distributor BaDM, Ekonomichna Pravda reported. Russian forces hit it during an attack they ran across the country through the night. 

The fourth depot, and what Russia did to it

The BaDM complex stands on the edge of Odesa. The strike started a fire on the grounds, and the State Emergency Service worked at the site. It left significant damage to the storage buildings.

Preliminarily, nobody was hurt, sources on the pharmaceutical market told Ekonomichna Pravda. BaDM is one of the biggest wholesalers moving medicines to Ukrainian pharmacies.

The three depots Russia hit before it

• Russia opened the run on 3 September, when it damaged the Biokon logistics complex in Boryspil raion, Kyiv Oblast. That site counts as the country's largest specialized pharmaceutical warehouse.
• Overnight on 8 September, Russian forces attacked the Kyiv warehouse of Optima-Pharm with two ballistic missiles. They had already destroyed that site, which belongs to one of the largest distributors, in 2025.
• On 13 September, Russian forces struck Universal Logistic, the second-largest medicine warehouse in Ukraine. Four specialized sites in two weeks is a pattern, and Russia now hits medicine storage as it has hit food, construction materials, and parcels.

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WHO humanitarian warehouse in Dnipro destroyed in strike, Director-General says

The attack the Odesa strike came in

Russia launched 108 strike drones from 18:00 on 13 September, Ukraine's Air Force said. The wave carried Shahed-type drones, among them jet-powered ones, Gerbera drones, and Parodiya decoys. Air defense downed or suppressed 85 of them by 08:00. Ukrainian forces recorded hits at seven locations, and the Air Force said the attack was still running when it published that count.