Ukraine's Wildberries Campaign: Targeting Russia's Economic Chokepoint

On a Sunday morning in mid-August, fire consumed a Wildberries warehouse in Podolsk, a town forty kilometers south of Moscow. Ukrainian drones had struck overnight. Russian air defenses intercepted most of them, but not all. By then, it was the latest in a relentless campaign that had begun in mid-July—nearly daily attacks on the logistics hubs of Russia's largest online retailer, a company that had become, in effect, the circulatory system of Russian commerce.

Wildberries is often called Russia's Amazon, though the comparison only tells part of the story. When Western e-commerce platforms withdrew following the 2022 invasion and the sanctions that followed, Russian authorities opened a door: companies could now import goods without the consent of rights holders, sidestepping the restrictions that had choked off trade. Wildberries seized the moment. Between 2021 and 2025, its revenue grew sevenfold. Today it controls roughly half the Russian e-commerce market, hosting more than a million sellers and reaching eighty million users each month. The company and its ecosystem now account for about eight and a half percent of Russia's entire gross domestic product.

In the span of a few weeks, Ukrainian forces had targeted about twenty of Wildberries' logistics hubs. The warehouses themselves—sprawling facilities the size of dozens of soccer fields—made inviting targets: large, concentrated, and highly flammable. At least nine employees had been killed. Scores more were injured. Several warehouses had ceased operations entirely. The company's losses were staggering: somewhere between 480 billion and 800 billion rubles in destroyed goods and damaged capacity. In dollar terms, that was between 5.7 and 9.5 billion.

Ukraine's stated rationale was straightforward. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy argued that the warehouses were nodes in Russia's military logistics network—places where navigation systems, drone components, and other equipment destined for the front lines moved through the system. The Kremlin denied this categorically. But independent analysis told a different story. Researchers at the outlet Verska had identified tens of thousands of military and dual-use goods listed for sale on the platform between May and August, transactions worth hundreds of millions of rubles. Whether the primary purpose of those warehouses was military supply or civilian commerce, the distinction was becoming academic.

What made Wildberries a chokepoint, according to geopolitical analysts, was not just its size but its fragility. The company had borrowed heavily—short-term borrowing had spiked nearly eightfold between 2024 and 2025. Total debt was estimated as high as fourteen billion dollars, with the state-backed bank VTB as the largest creditor. Sberbank, another state-backed lender, had already signaled it was bracing for losses. CEO Tatyana Kim had reportedly approached the government for a rescue package. None had materialized yet, but the expectation was that VTB would lead any intervention.

The strategy, as Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to Zelenskyy, explained it to Deutsche Welle, operated on multiple levels. Yes, disrupting the flow of military goods to the front mattered. But so did the broader economic shock. A company with six trillion rubles in annual turnover does not fail in isolation. Its collapse would ripple through the creditors propping it up—state institutions themselves—and potentially trigger cascading failures across the financial system. Beyond that, there was a message being sent to the billionaires and politicians in Putin's inner circle who had stakes in the company. And there was the simple fact that four hundred thousand sellers had been affected, losing income and access to goods, losing the sense that normal life could continue.

Fabrice Pothier, CEO of the geopolitical consultancy Rasmussen Global, described it plainly: Wildberries was a choke point of Russian society and the Russian economy. Ukraine was squeezing it. What happened next—whether the government could prop it up, whether the financial system could absorb the shock, whether the company could survive—would tell much about Russia's capacity to sustain both its war and its civilian economy at the same time.