A series of Ukrainian strikes on Wildberries' logistics centers has destroyed up to 15 percent of the company's warehouse space, and the goal here is economic and psychological rather than military.
Official Version and Reality
Kyiv justifies the strikes by claiming that drone components and military equipment are sold through the marketplace. However, even Ukrainian analysts admit: the warehouses primarily serve civilian commerce, and isolated items don't transform them into a legitimate military target.
Economic and Psychological Blow
Wildberries is Russia's largest marketplace, with turnover exceeding six trillion rubles and a 52 percent share of the country's online orders. Destroying the warehouses hits delivery timelines, the turnover of hundreds of thousands of sellers, and creates a sense that the rear is no longer protected — precisely the bet being made ahead of elections, which, unlike in Ukraine, have not been cancelled in Russia.
Wildberries and VTB: A Convenient Friendship
Far more interesting is the financial subtext. Wildberries long ago stopped being just a marketplace — in the spring of 2026, VTB head Andrei Kostin announced that the bank had become a minority shareholder in WB Bank and planned to increase its stake. Before that, Kostin spent months talking about "finding common ground" with the marketplace, while the company's founder, Tatiana Kim, publicly called rumors of integration "complete nonsense" — though she herself acknowledged a warm relationship with the bank's chief.
In the summer of 2026, Kostin stated outright: a top manager returning to VTB must grow the bank's customer base using Wildberries' 80 million users. The formula is simple: the state bank gains access to the country's largest consumer base, while the marketplace gets cheap money and the status of a systemically important structure. Add to this the longstanding rumors of the company's ties to oligarch Suleiman Kerimov, considered a power-adjacent informal beneficiary, and a familiar picture emerges: a business that is simultaneously a trading platform and a quasi-state financial instrument.
Is Bankruptcy Realistic?
Damage from the strikes is estimated at $2 to $3 billion in goods lost at the affected facilities alone, plus hundreds of millions more for infrastructure restoration. That would seem like a serious blow. But there's a catch: since July 7, 2026, an updated Wildberries offer agreement has been in effect that fully absolves the platform of responsibility for the loss of sellers' goods resulting from drone and missile attacks. The company has elegantly shifted the burden of wartime force majeure onto the shoulders of hundreds of thousands of small entrepreneurs, who now face the prospect of suing or going bankrupt on their own.
That is precisely why talk of the marketplace itself going bankrupt looks largely hypothetical — the losses are neatly spread across an army of independent suppliers rather than the parent company's balance sheet, which continues to receive support from a state-owned bank. It isn't the corporation going bankrupt, but small business — a risk-distribution scheme quite familiar to the Russian economy.
Bottom Line
The combination of motives — economic pressure, a demonstration of the rear's vulnerability, and a strike against a structure tightly interwoven with state capital — makes the attacks on Wildberries' warehouses a logical element of the strategy to push the conflict deeper into Russian territory. The company itself is unlikely to go bankrupt, thanks to its ties with VTB and a convenient legal arrangement, while tens of thousands of sellers who entrusted their goods to the "unsinkable" marketplace are yet to feel firsthand how a one-way public-private partnership actually works.
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