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Wars are increasingly fought through supply chains, and Ukraine appears to have drawn a sharp lesson from that reality. In a sustained campaign that has accelerated sharply since mid-July, Ukrainian drones have been systematically targeting the warehouse network of Wildberries, Russia’s largest e-commerce platform and a company often compared to Amazon for its scale and reach inside the country.
Overnight attacks reported on Tuesday killed five people and injured ten in the Moscow region city of Chekhov, where a drone strike set a warehouse ablaze and also damaged an electrical substation and a nearby building. Moscow region governor Andrei Vorobyov confirmed the casualties but did not identify the company that owned the site. Separately, drones struck a Wildberries facility in the Tver region northwest of Moscow and another near St Petersburg, with local authorities reporting no casualties in those two incidents.
A Deliberate Campaign, Not Random Strikes
The scale and repetition of these attacks make clear this is not opportunistic targeting. Ukraine has struck close to 20 Wildberries sites since July 18 alone, according to reporting by Reuters and local Russian officials. The logic Kyiv has articulated publicly is direct: by hitting infrastructure that ordinary Russians interact with daily, through delayed deliveries, destroyed goods, and visible fires in their regions, Ukraine aims to make the costs of the war tangible to a civilian population that has largely been insulated from frontline realities.
The material damage is already significant. A large Wildberries warehouse in the Samara region was effectively gutted after a strike on Sunday, with regional official Denis Gurkov telling state news agency TASS that roughly 160,000 square metres of the 180,000-square-metre facility burned down. That is the equivalent of approximately 22 football pitches of storage space destroyed in a single incident. On Monday, hundreds of firefighters spent hours battling a 100,000-square-metre fire at a separate Wildberries warehouse in the Vladimir region, with the company acknowledging that only part of the stock inside was saved.
Wildberries itself has not released any estimate of total financial losses from the campaign. Founder and CEO Tatyana Kim has publicly labelled the strikes “acts of terrorism,” a framing that reflects both the company’s distress and the political sensitivity of a private business becoming a symbol of wartime vulnerability.
Why Wildberries Makes a Strategically Logical Target
Wildberries is not simply a convenient symbol. It is a genuine logistics giant, processing millions of orders daily through a sprawling network of warehouses distributed across Russia. That geographic spread, which makes the platform commercially powerful in peacetime, also makes it difficult to protect comprehensively against drone attacks that can be launched from long range at relatively low cost.
Russia has spent years striking Ukrainian logistics infrastructure, energy facilities, and distribution hubs as part of its own strategy to degrade civilian resilience and economic function. Ukraine’s Wildberries campaign represents a deliberate mirroring of that approach, using the asymmetric advantage of cheap, long-range drones to impose costs that are visible, cumulative, and hard to fully defend against.
The company’s exposure extends beyond Russia’s borders, which adds a layer of regional complexity. Kazakhstan’s trade minister confirmed on Tuesday that Wildberries is currently building 260,000 square metres of new warehouse capacity in Kazakhstan, where the company also operates. That expansion, announced amid the ongoing attacks on its Russian facilities, suggests the company may be diversifying its logistics footprint partly in response to wartime risk, though no official connection between the two facts has been stated.
Why This Matters Beyond the Battlefield
For observers in Southeast Asia, including Malaysia and Singapore, the Wildberries campaign is worth watching as a case study in how modern conflict increasingly targets commercial and economic infrastructure rather than purely military assets. The legal and ethical debates around striking civilian logistics networks are unresolved in international law, and the precedent being set here, of using drone technology to systematically degrade a country’s retail supply chain, is one that will shape future conflicts.
There is also a straightforward economic signal embedded in the story. If a company the size of Wildberries, with the resources and state adjacency it enjoys in Russia, cannot protect its warehouse network from sustained drone attack, it illustrates how dramatically the cost-benefit calculus of drone warfare has shifted. Defending large, fixed infrastructure against small, cheap, and numerous drones is extraordinarily expensive and logistically complex, a reality that militaries and governments well beyond Russia and Ukraine are already absorbing into their strategic planning.
The campaign is still escalating. With each warehouse strike adding to a cumulative toll that Wildberries has not yet quantified publicly, Ukraine is demonstrating that the economic geography of a country at war is itself a battlefield, and that the line between military and commercial infrastructure is becoming harder to hold.
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