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Three months after Ukraine began striking warehouses belonging to Russian online shopping giants Wildberries and Ozon, workers and sellers describe the damage to their livelihoods

Source: Meduza

Wildberries and Ozon play an enormous role in Russia’s economy and in the lives of millions of Russians, as well as entrepreneurs and shoppers in the Commonwealth of Independent States, where both companies also operate. For some, these online marketplaces offer relatively low prices; for others, jobs at logistics centers where pay often exceeds the regional average; and for still others, a platform to grow their own businesses. Employees and sellers have always had strained relationships with Wildberries and Ozon because of the companies’ strict rules. But the situation became more complicated in the summer of 2026, when Ukraine began regularly striking the marketplaces’ infrastructure, destroying goods stored in their warehouses.

The independent journalists’ cooperative Bereg reports on how Ukrainian military attacks destroyed dozens of warehouses and disrupted the livelihoods of people who built their businesses through the marketplaces. Meduza is publishing the story in full.

Three months have passed since the first Ukrainian drone attack on Wildberries warehouses: On July 18, drones struck logistics centers in Elektrostal, outside Moscow, and Kotovsk, in the Tambov region. In late August, Ukraine attacked a warehouse belonging to another Russian marketplace, Ozon, for the first time. According to IBC Global, Russia saw 49 attacks on 36 warehouse sites belonging to various companies from July 18 to September 24.

How the war changed warehouse employees’ jobs

Russians take warehouse jobs for the high pay and flexible hours. For many, those two factors outweigh any risks

In 2023, inspecting returned goods at a Wildberries warehouse in Nizhny Tagil became Olga’s main job. (Her name has been changed.) She checks goods returned by customers, looks for defects, assesses damage, and determines what caused it.

Olga was drawn to warehouse work by the flexible hours and the pay: Wildberries paid more than many other companies in her city. Over three years at the warehouse, her income has grown substantially.

The warehouse rules have always been strict, Olga tells Bereg. Before their shifts, employees change into uniforms without pockets and pass through security and a metal detector to enter the operations area, where goods are handled. They undergo another inspection at the end of the workday. Phones with cameras, lighters, and other personal belongings are banned from the operations area.

Olga says employees understand these requirements. Still, some workers have objected: Women at warehouses in Tver and Vladimir, for example, complained that they struggled to bring in sanitary pads during their periods. They said they were forbidden to carry wet wipes or tissues, and there was not enough toilet paper for everyone.

The warehouse rules did not change after Ukrainian drone attacks began, Olga says. Shifts continued during air raid alerts. She says her warehouse has no designated shelter, so management allowed anyone afraid to remain at work after an air raid siren to go home.

Olga herself became frightened of going to work, even though she loves her job. “Every day, you’re scared you’ll leave in the morning and never make it home to your kids that evening,” she tells Bereg.

The warehouse where Olga works has never been struck by the Ukrainian military. “Ours is small, and they attacked the big ones,” she says. None of her colleagues have quit so far, although frequent drone attacks on warehouses have disrupted deliveries, and “there’s less work.” “We’re waiting for them to reorganize deliveries,” she adds.

The first Ukrainian drone strikes on Wildberries warehouses took place on July 18, hitting the company’s facilities in Elektrostal, outside Moscow, and Kotovsk, in the Tambov region. Over the following five weeks, Ukrainian forces attacked only Wildberries infrastructure, but overnight on August 21–22, they struck an Ozon warehouse with drones for the first time. It was a logistics center in Chapayevsk, in the Samara region. At the time of publication, Ukraine had attacked at least eight Ozon facilities.

Dmitry, who spoke to Bereg, has worked at an Ozon warehouse in Saratov for several months. Before that, he worked at the company’s logistics center in Adygeysk, which Ukrainian drones struck two days after the attack on the Samara region. Dmitry had left his job at the Adygeysk warehouse just a few days before the attack.

Dmitry says both warehouses where he has worked have signs and notice boards explaining what to do in a fire or during an air raid alert. Shelters were set up at the Saratov logistics center after the attacks.

As Ukrainian attacks on Wildberries infrastructure became more frequent, Dmitry began to worry that drones would start hitting Ozon warehouses too. “The attacks on warehouses in Samara, Krasnodar, and Makhachkala proved those [fears] right,” he says with a sigh.

Air raid alerts were issued every day in the Saratov region this past summer, Dmitry says. “As far as I know, a drone was recently shot down about 20–30 kilometers [12–19 miles] from the warehouse. That day, the fire alarms went off in every section, and they quickly gathered us in a safe place,” he says.

Dmitry says police and emergency personnel are now stationed near the warehouse. “I’ve personally seen two fire trucks and two ambulances. But I can’t say for sure whether they’re always there,” he says.

After the Ukrainian attacks, management at Dmitry’s warehouse became “more attentive to employees’ need to stay in touch with their families,” he tells Bereg. “They [now] let us bring a basic phone into the operations area. You can also bring your documents, which we used to be allowed to keep only in the lockers in the changing room.”

Despite the serious risks, neither Dmitry nor any of the colleagues he talks to plan to quit. He believes warehouse management and the company as a whole can keep employees safe. “Knowing my life is in the hands of professionals, I’m not worried,” he says.

The main thing keeping Dmitry in the job is the pay: “You can easily earn 5,000 to 6,000 rubles a day, or 80,000 to 100,000 a month.”

Some employees believe Wildberries is “working for the war effort” — and that Ukrainian strikes are justified

The Wildberries logistics center employees Bereg spoke to are also unwilling to quit. Some believe Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s statements that the marketplace sells military gear and parts for combat equipment.

Oksana, whose name has been changed, is in her sixth year working at Wildberries warehouses. She started at Koledino — the same warehouse Ukrainian drones have hit several times — and now works at the marketplace’s logistics center in Kursk, about 100 kilometers (62 miles) from the Russian-Ukrainian border.

“I’d be lying if I said nothing had changed [after the Ukrainian attacks]. But on the whole, life goes on: We work and hope for the best,” Oksana tells Bereg.

Oksana is 50 and has two university degrees, in economics and law. She previously worked for the Interior Ministry in Kursk, rising to the rank of police captain, and later worked at the regional trade union council.

“A lot of people say only losers work at WB [Wildberries]. Nonsense. I’ve got something to compare it with. The warehouse has given me a really good balance of freedom and pay: flexible hours, no pressure from management, and an income that’s higher on average than anywhere else for this kind of work,” Oksana says. She says she “really loves” what she does.

Oksana found her first Wildberries warehouse job almost by chance. After her husband died in the early 2020s, she left Kursk for Podolsk to work at a factory. She earned about 800 rubles a shift — not enough to live on. Women living in her dormitory who already worked at a Wildberries warehouse persuaded her to apply.

“The girls said I was a sucker for working for 800 rubles a shift and practically made me try WB. I remember it like it was yesterday: My first shift — 3,200 [rubles],” she says.

For Oksana, “the best time” at Wildberries was the period before 2022, before the warehouse introduced a new pay system and what it called “shared liability by barcode.”

The Russian abbreviation ShK refers to a barcode, an identifier for a particular item in the Wildberries system that can be used to determine which employees handled it. Under “shared liability by barcode,” if a parcel is lost or damaged at a warehouse and no one can establish who was responsible, its cost can be divided among the employees who handled it and deducted from their pay.

Overnight on August 15–16, 2026, a Ukrainian drone struck the warehouse where Oksana works. No employees were injured.

Oksana believes Wildberries had already “started working for the war effort” in the first year of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. In early August, Meduza published an investigation into whether Wildberries was helping supply the army. Reviewing 1,008 posts about fundraising for Russian troops, journalists found 1,882 items that pro-war volunteers and bloggers, foundations, and regional groups had ordered through Wildberries. They included first-aid kits, clothing, generators, body armor, weapon sights, night-vision devices, radios, Starlink equipment, and drone components. The purchases Meduza identified totaled about 18.6 million rubles.

“We’re still working for the war effort now. [That’s why Ukrainian forces] blew up a bunch of warehouses!” Oksana says angrily. “And look how many people in this country are out of work! And our wonderful leader [Vladimir Putin] is counting on everyone rushing off to the ‘special military operation.’”

Evacuations were poorly organized at the first warehouses hit

Thousands of warehouse workers across Russia have come under Ukrainian drone attacks. At some facilities, logistics center managers failed to organize evacuations. During the July 18 attack on the Elektrostal warehouse, security guards kept workers inside the buildings. People had to open automatic gates by hand, crowd through narrow doorways, and, once they had left the warehouse grounds, run through the woods.

In one section of the warehouse, workers were first sent to hand in their handheld scanners before evacuating, eyewitnesses said. When the situation became critical, people ran for the exits, causing a crush.

The news outlet Msk1.ru reported that senior supervisors in one section ordered employees to shelter in the mezzanine — a shelving structure used to store goods.

“That mezzanine is the space between the shelves. Basically, it’s a trap. Everything there catches fire easily, and an explosion could bring the structure down and bury someone. It wasn’t safe to stay there. But the section managers may not have made that decision [to evacuate] right away because they didn’t know how many drones were coming or realize that a fire had already started,” former warehouse employee Anna Yeperina told Msk1.ru.

Wildberries said the evacuation had gone “according to procedure and without delay.”

According to Russia’s Emergency Situations Ministry, one employee died in the fire at the Elektrostal warehouse and seven died at the warehouse in Kotovsk, in the Tambov region, which was attacked the same day. Wildberries did not give an exact death toll for either Elektrostal or Kotovsk, saying only that people had been killed and injured in Kotovsk.

Some colleagues of those killed do not believe the official figures. “What do you think? If they’d written that 500 people died there, would any sensible person have gone to work at the warehouse the next day?” Asya, an Elektrostal warehouse employee who was working on the day of the attack, told Msk1.ru. The outlet did not give her surname. North Korean citizens worked alongside Russians at the warehouse.

Msk1.ru reported that several dozen employees at the Elektrostal warehouse were unable to contact their families during the fire: They had left their phones, documents, and other personal belongings in lockers in the changing room, as the rules required. Retrieving them during the evacuation was impossible.

“There were about 7,000 people on the night shift. Everyone doing their own job. That’s fewer than during the day, but it’s still incredibly busy,” Yelena, whose name has been changed, told Msk1.ru. She was at the warehouse overnight on July 17–18.

On July 30, Wildberries said its emergency response team was “working around the clock to keep its own records and reestablish contact.” “Since it began making calls,” the team had determined “the whereabouts and condition of 99% of those working at the facility at the time of the attack,” the company said.

“Wildberries contacted one woman and just asked, ‘Are you alive or not? And where are you?’ That was it. No support, no compensation, no psychological help. People have no documents, everything they had burned up, and they don’t know what to do,” a former Wildberries employee told the investigative outlet iStories.

In late August, Alexander Shvets, head of the Wildberries workers’ union, told Post- magazine that the warehouses in Aleksin, in the Tula region, and Elektrostal, outside Moscow, were not operating. In Koledino, in the Moscow region, only one warehouse section was operating. Under the law, workers on staff were entitled to downtime pay. To avoid paying it, Shvets said, the company was pressuring them to switch to civil-law contracts, which carry no employment benefits or protections.

“They say, ‘The warehouse burned down; you can’t work there. To go to another warehouse, you have to terminate your employment contract and sign a civil-law contract.’ Instead of drawing up an addendum changing their workplace, they’re forcing people to quit,” Shvets said.

How Wildberries left sellers with little support and millions in losses

Ukrainian strikes are costing successful sellers millions. Wildberries offered support — but it hasn’t helped everyone

Anna Yemelyanenko has worked with Wildberries since 2020. She uses the marketplace to distribute products from the Russian professional cosmetics brand Alganika Spa, which she says is fairly popular with beauty salons, spas, and health resorts. Yemelyanenko also has her own sports nutrition brand, Eme, which is sold on Wildberries too.

“What can I say about the impact of the drone attacks [on Alganika Spa]? Everything burned up. The losses are enormous. A key business partner who’s been selling our cosmetics for years lost more than 5 million rubles’ worth of goods — 7,000 items gone,” Yemelyanenko tells Bereg. She asks that the warehouse where the destroyed goods were stored not be identified.

Unlike the larger cosmetics brand, Yemelyanenko’s Eme brand is considered a “small seller account” on the marketplace, meaning it has low turnover, a limited product range, and small shipment volumes.

Her own brand lost more than half a million rubles’ worth of goods. Yemelyanenko received 34,000 rubles from Wildberries in compensation. But the partner selling Alganika Spa cosmetics has not been compensated. “Wildberries just sends canned responses. Nobody says anything specific,” she says.

Yemelyanenko says she didn’t fill out any forms to receive compensation and doesn’t know how Wildberries calculated the payout amount for her brand:

There’s no phone hotline for affected sellers to reach Wildberries, only a written feedback form on the company’s website, where Anna says all questions are “answered in fairly generic terms.”

“When the first attack happened [on July 18] — on the warehouses in Elektrostal and Kotovsk — it was a shock. Then they attacked the next warehouses… At some point I became depressed,” Yemelyanenko recalled. “I was apathetic for two weeks. I didn’t know what to do next. We never managed to get our business going on Ozon. We learned how to work with traffic specifically on Wildberries.”

Now Yemelyanenko and her colleagues are trying to figure out “how to go on living.” “Maybe we’ll rebuild our B2B business or start doing something else. I might have to go work for someone else. Right now we’re stuck in this stagnant swamp — everything’s at a standstill. I want to keep the business going, but right now it’s very difficult,” she lamented.

The marketplace was genuinely useful for growing a business in the early years of her work, Anna said, but lately “it’s made things much harder.” “It’s constantly introducing fines, changing its terms of service, and raising commissions and logistics costs,” Yemelyanenko listed.

The day after the July strikes on the Elektrostal and Kotovsk warehouses, Wildberries offered support measures to affected sellers. Along with compensation for lost goods (the company hasn’t said how it calculates the amount), Wildberries made preferential loans available through its WB Bank and offered a factoring service for inventory recovery. WB Bank also introduced a deferral of up to six months on current debt repayment for small and medium-sized businesses and dropped fees for internal WB Bank payments.

Wildberries also lowered certain fees and costs for sellers using the FBS model, in which sellers store and ship goods from their own warehouses rather than the marketplace’s. The platform extended the deadline for automatic order cancellation and added other benefits to make switching to self-run storage and shipping easier.

When announcing the support measures, Wildberries founder Tatyana Kim stressed that the company has no formal ”obligation” to compensate for lost goods. Wildberries representatives later said in official statements that the company sends sellers voluntary “supportive” payments.

Despite these measures, Anna Yemelyanenko believes Wildberries “did nothing” to help affected sellers. She calls the compensation “a drop in the bucket.” Both she and the management of the cosmetics brand she distributes decided against taking loans from the Wildberries-owned bank, since their sales channel had stopped anyway.

Russia’s Finance Ministry didn’t announce support measures for Wildberries and affected sellers until August 24. The ministry said entrepreneurs whose losses exceeded 5% of their annual income would get a one-year deferral on value-added tax and corporate profits tax, along with other benefits.

Tatyana Kim called the measures “an important step for Russian business.” “An enormous amount of work by government agencies, industry associations, and, of course, our own team went into developing this program,” the Wildberries owner added.

Anna Yemelyanenko believes the government could “at least temporarily exempt sellers from taxes entirely, for three months or six months, say.” “Not a tax holiday like during the COVID era, which just deferred payments, but an actual exemption from taxes. That would be a more or less real support measure,” the entrepreneur said.

She also believes the government could lift the requirement for sellers to label their products with Chestny Znak. To comply, sellers have to buy labeling equipment at their own expense and pay for label codes.

“I don’t get what the hell [Chestny Znak] is even for. This system makes life a lot harder in many ways,” Yemelyanenko groused. “Scrapping it would also be a great support measure.”

Sellers stay in touch with each other — and watch as stores close one after another without adequate help

Wildberries entered Kazakhstan in 2021, 11 years after it grew from an ordinary online store into a marketplace, giving local entrepreneurs the ability to register on the platform as sellers themselves. Sellers from other CIS countries — Belarus, Armenia, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan — soon followed. In 2023, Tatyana Kim said foreign business accounted for about 10% of the company’s total turnover.

Lyazzat Muratkyzy is co-founder of the Kazakhstan E-Commerce Association and owner of the online store Tommy Ariko, which sells power tools, home appliances, and construction materials that she buys directly from Chinese manufacturers.

Lyazzat initially ran two brick-and-mortar stores, in Almaty and Astana, with monthly revenue of 20–30 million tenge — about 3.3–5 million rubles. (For convenience, subsequent amounts are given only in rubles.) Her company launched on Wildberries in 2021, and the physical stores soon closed.

“Once we shifted most of our sales to the marketplace, the business started growing at a completely different pace. Our turnover and purchasing volumes grew significantly, and today Chinese factories themselves are reaching out to us with cooperation proposals,” Muratkyzy said.

Wildberries gave her business the opportunity to expand beyond Kazakhstan into the markets of Russia and other CIS countries, Muratkyzy said. But the platform’s terms have grown less comfortable for sellers, she added:

Without paid promotion, it’s become much harder for products to land prominent spots in Wildberries’ search results, Muratkyzy said, forcing sellers to raise prices or work with almost no profit.

Like Anna Yemelyanenko, Lyazzat was shocked by the news of Ukrainian attacks on the warehouses. “It wasn’t just goods that burned in the warehouses — that was our working capital. After the first attack, we immediately started checking our inventory and calculating potential losses. At that point, we still hoped it wouldn’t happen again,” Lyazzat recalled.

After a third warehouse — in Koledino, in the Moscow region — was hit on July 20, Lyazzat developed “a kind of acceptance of the situation.” “You wake up and you’re no longer surprised by news of attacks. As scary as it sounds, at some point we started getting used to it,” she said.

One of the warehouses where Lyazzat stored part of her goods sits near the marketplace’s Koledino logistics center but isn’t owned by Wildberries. After the drone attack, she and her colleagues quickly moved their products to another warehouse, farther from Koledino. “Logistics has become more complicated and takes much longer. But the safety of our goods matters more to us,” she said.

Lyazzat calculated that revenue from selling the goods that burned could have reached about 67–84 million rubles. Part of that would have gone to employee salaries, taxes, fuel, and packaging materials — 20–25% in total — while the marketplace would have taken another 40% for its services.

By the end of September, the drone attacks had cost Lyazzat’s company about 46 million rubles in damage, not counting the debt owed to manufacturers for the burned goods, which had been purchased in installments.

The Kazakhstan E-Commerce Association keeps a list of companies that suffered losses from the drone attacks, Lyazzat said. “Entrepreneurs fill out a questionnaire themselves and report the amount of damage. Then we send the list and a statement to RWB,” she said. By the end of August, the total damage sellers reported to the association exceeded 335 million rubles, she said.

The consequences have been critical for many sellers Lyazzat is in contact with, who had put almost all their working capital into the goods that burned. Most sellers whose businesses were seriously affected have already stopped operating or are close to it, she said — about 90% of entrepreneurs in her circle have made that decision. “I’m in about 10 Wildberries seller chats, and I know a lot of people personally. When I say 90%, I’m basing that on my own circle,” she said.

Those who are still operating — thanks to a financial cushion or because part of their goods were stored at warehouses not owned by Wildberries — are switching from the FBO model to FBS, restructuring their logistics, continuing sales through Kazakhstani online stores, and using warehouses in Kazakhstan.

“We [members of the Kazakhstan E-Commerce Association] met with Wildberries representatives [at the marketplace’s office in Almaty]. They said they would compensate the losses, but didn’t specify when or how. Compensation is coming in gradually, and the amounts vary. We received about 1.2 million rubles in promo bonuses — against losses of more than 27 million,” Lyazzat said.

But promo bonuses aren’t real money. As with the offer of preferential loans from the Wildberries-owned bank, by paying out promo bonuses the company forces affected sellers to keep using the marketplace’s services. “And if an entrepreneur’s goods have been completely destroyed and they have no working capital left for a new purchase, they simply have nothing to advertise,” she said.

Promo bonuses can’t be withdrawn to a bank account — they can only be used to pay for advertising within the WB Promotion service. “They’re only valid for 15 days. The first installment had to be used by August 16, the second by August 30. We did that,” Lyazzat said. But some sellers, she added, barely use paid advertising, so this kind of compensation won’t help them.

As a business owner herself, Lyazzat understands Tatyana Kim. “It’s hard to spend decades building a huge company and then run into circumstances you can’t control. It’s not just sellers taking losses right now. Wildberries is also going through a serious crisis and losing large-scale infrastructure,” the entrepreneur reflected.

She finds it hard to say whether Wildberries has done enough to support affected sellers. If she were in the company’s shoes, Lyazzat herself would handle compensation differently:

The rules for working on Wildberries get stricter every year, and commissions and fines keep rising. But many sellers have nowhere else to go

Clothing, footwear, and accessories make up one of the largest product categories on Wildberries. The company launched in 2004 as an online clothing store and didn’t become a marketplace until 2010, when outside sellers began joining the platform and Wildberries started earning commissions on their sales.

Russian entrepreneur Alina Litvinova’s women’s clothing brand, Simple Paris, was “born specifically for Wildberries” in 2023. (She asked Bereg not to name the region where she lives.) Litvinova designs the clothing herself, creates the patterns, and analyzes the market. Her brand mainly sells shirts, blazers, tops, and corsets, which are sewn at a factory in Bishkek and then brought to Russia.

Wildberries seemed like a “very promising” platform at first, and its terms suited her. Litvinova took a course on how to quickly launch a profitable business on the marketplace, had her first batch of clothing sewn, and went live on the platform.

Soon after launching her store, though, Litvinova received a fine from Wildberries. In 2022, sellers often resorted to “self-buyouts” to boost their products’ ratings — buying their own products through a third-party service and leaving reviews on them. The practice didn’t violate Wildberries’ rules at first, but the company banned it in December 2022 and began issuing fines.

Litvinova had to pay the marketplace 500,000 rubles. Her sales volume at the time, she said, was about 200,000 rubles a month. “It took me about six months to dig myself out of that hole, and it hurt a lot. I even wanted to leave the platform. But I decided I could handle it. And I did, more or less,” Alina recalled. She added that “every year, things got harder and worse on Wildberries.”

The company then began raising commissions, logistics costs, and advertising prices. On January 13, 2024, a fire broke out at the Shushary warehouse in St. Petersburg, where Litvinova’s goods were stored. Investigators attributed the blaze to safety violations. The fire spread across tens of thousands of square meters and took 30 hours to extinguish. In August 2024, Tatyana Kim said Wildberries had paid sellers nearly 35 billion rubles in compensation.

“We received about half the value of the goods that burned back then,” Litvinova told Bereg. The Shushary warehouse caught fire again this summer, this time in a Ukrainian drone attack, but Litvinova didn’t have any goods there.

Wildberries’ commissions kept climbing throughout this period, with the most recent increase — nine percentage points at once — coming this summer. “Basically, our abusive relationship with Wildberries has really put us through hell all these years, but we kept working and turning a profit anyway,” Litvinova said.

Litvinova remembers the first news of Ukrainian strikes on Wildberries warehouses, in Elektrostal and Kotovsk, “very well.” “I was in Moscow, having a leisurely breakfast with a friend. Suddenly my manager messaged me that the Elektrostal warehouse had been attacked. We’d just had a big shipment of new items go there,” Litvinova recalled. “I was in shock and burst into tears; I couldn’t hold back. I had a train to St. Petersburg, and I cried the whole way. I couldn’t pull myself together the entire trip.”

The “creepiest” part, she said, was that shortly before that, on July 7, Wildberries changed its terms of service: the marketplace stated that it bears no responsibility for the aftermath of drone strikes.”

The company likely adopted this rule after smoke was reported at the Elektrostal warehouse in mid-June. Wildberries didn’t say what caused the fire, but it may have followed a Ukrainian drone attack: overnight on June 15–16, drones injured four people and damaged two residential buildings in the village of Sluchainy, near Elektrostal, where the company’s warehouse is located.

“Back then no one took it [the change to the terms of service] seriously, because no one could have imagined something like this would happen,” Litvinova said.

Ukrainian drone attacks continued after July 18, “and with every new warehouse, every new thousand units of burned goods, the stress got worse,” Litvinova said. “At the same time, our shipments [to Wildberries warehouses] kept going out. Naturally, we minimized them and started thinking about what to do,” she added. Like other Bereg sources, she has since switched to the FBS system.

However, shortly before July 20, she still sent a small batch of goods to the Koledino warehouse. “I read somewhere that it was a central warehouse and definitely wouldn’t be touched. But it got hit too. Our shipment burned,” Alina said with a sigh.

Litvinova estimates her brand’s losses at about 6,000 units of product, with a production cost of around 6 million rubles. Her products were stored at many of the large Wildberries warehouses hit by drones. “About 1,500–2,000 units were in Koledino, the rest at other warehouses,” she said. “The remaining goods are either being shuttled between warehouses, sitting in our fulfillment warehouse, or still being sewn at the factory in Bishkek.”

Litvinova hasn’t received any compensation yet. She knows sellers who were paid 10,000–30,000 rubles, but their accounts, she said, are “very small.” She calls her own account “medium-sized,” with a significantly higher turnover.

“In my view, Wildberries hasn’t done enough to support sellers. The platform could have lowered advertising costs. All they did was remove the localization index, which affects delivery and logistics costs and, ultimately, a seller’s margin,” Alina said.

Litvinova says she’s lost about half her business while still having to pay off loans worth millions of rubles. “Banks don’t want to offer reasonable deferrals and instead offer predatory restructuring deals where I’d have to pay several million rubles extra on top. That’s completely unacceptable to me. There are no reasonable deferral options,” she said.

Tax authorities also won’t grant deferrals, she said. “Because I was 11 days late paying VAT for the second quarter, they froze all my accounts, including my personal bank cards,” she said. Relatives helped her pay off the debt.

Litvinova used to withdraw funds from Wildberries daily, but Wildberries blocked that service without explanation. She waited about a month before her account regained access to weekly withdrawals. “The whole time, about two million rubles were frozen,” Alina added.

Other sellers she knows who were also affected by the Ukrainian attacks are still operating, but aren’t sure they can keep their businesses going.

Large stores are worse off than small and medium-sized ones when their logistics and storage discounts on Wildberries are tied to meeting sales targets, Litvinova said. They lost goods in the Ukrainian attacks, missed their targets, and lost their discounts for operating on the marketplace — discounts that are critically important for many sellers.

Under their contracts, she added, some stores can’t sell on other marketplaces, such as Ozon, and still receive benefits on Wildberries.

“I can work on Ozon, and I do. We already tried selling there, but it didn’t work out at the time. Now we want to try again with renewed effort, because there are products that can be sold there,” Litvinova said. Wildberries, she added, remains the most profitable platform in Russia for clothing sellers.

Alina declined to answer Bereg’s questions about the Ukrainian strikes on Ozon warehouses that began in mid-August, or about her future plans to do business on that platform.

In her view, Tatyana Kim reacted to the warehouse strikes like “a typical politician.” Litvinova calls Kim’s video address “completely puppet-like.” In it, the Wildberries chief lists support measures for sellers, calls the warehouse attacks “terrorist,” and asks the public to trust “only official channels of communication.” “It’s as if some political operatives came up with it,” she said.

Alina believes Kim should pay sellers at least part of the value of the burned goods “by whatever means available.” “Even at the expense of Wildberries’ net profit and owner dividends,” the entrepreneur stressed. “I would go to the government and ask for subsidies. And I would also give up part of my own capital to pay out sellers.”

Litvinova believes government involvement in helping affected sellers is necessary and justified:

How the crisis at Wildberries is affecting pickup point owners and couriers

Delays in deliveries from warehouses are the main, but not the only, reason pickup points are losing customers and income

Wildberries’ turnover grew sharply in the early 2020s, from 118.7 billion rubles in 2018 to 844 billion in 2021. An entire ecosystem formed around the marketplace, generating income not just for sellers and logistics center employees but also for couriers and pickup point owners and employees.

In spring 2023, the company got into a serious conflict with pickup point workers after the marketplace introduced rules that let it fine employees for product substitution or for handing a customer defective goods or items that didn’t match the order.

Pickup point workers were outraged — the company had effectively shifted the blame onto them for mistakes more often made by sellers or logistics staff. A strike began, coordinated through Telegram chats, and employees wrote appeals to lawmakers and filed complaints with the Prosecutor General’s Office, Rospotrebnadzor, and the Labor Ministry.

Under pressure, Wildberries canceled more than 10,000 fines and temporarily stopped issuing new fines for product substitution. The Federal Antimonopoly Service (FAS) also demanded that the company revise its rules for working with pickup point employees and create an internal arbitration process to resolve disputed cases.

Pickup point owners and employees remain unhappy with the marketplace’s policies, though. In summer 2026, new problems from Ukrainian drone attacks on Wildberries warehouses piled onto existing fines, unstable pickup point income, constantly changing rules, and other inconveniences. Most pickup points are also located in residential high-rises, which could themselves be hit by Ukrainian strikes.

Aksinya (not her real name) owns a pickup point in Lyubertsy, outside Moscow, where deliveries used to arrive two or three times a day. Amid the attacks on Wildberries’ infrastructure, deliveries have dropped sharply, and now a truck comes once every three days. Pickup point owners’ revenue from the company depends almost entirely on how many items are handed out.

Aksinya opened her pickup point in early June, and just a month and a half later, Ukraine’s military began regularly attacking the warehouses. She decided she wasn’t willing to take the risk.

“I had the bad luck to open at this time. There’s no point working at a loss, so I’m closing,” Aksinya said with a sigh.

Oleg (not his real name), from St. Petersburg, hasn’t yet run into problems from the Ukrainian strikes, unlike Aksinya. What complicates his work are Wildberries’ own rules.

Oleg bought an existing pickup point from its previous owner in March 2026 and invested 350,000 rubles at the start. The decision seemed like a good one: the location was already operating and didn’t need major upgrades. In the first few months, it brought in modest profit — an average of 10,000–20,000 rubles.

Another Wildberries pickup point operated not far from Oleg’s. Soon a third opened nearby as well. “There used to be two locations in the area — mine and one other — and each brought in 100,000 rubles in profit. When the third pickup point opened, the number of residents in the area didn’t grow. Now customers are split between three locations,” he complained to Bereg.

The company restricted pickup point density more strictly a few years ago, Oleg said, but now new locations can open right next to ones already operating, leaving owners almost no way to influence customer flow. As a result, his business started running at a loss of 30,000–40,000 rubles a month.

To make up the shortfall, Oleg installed an advertising screen at his location, part of a separate Wildberries digital-screen service that moderates all the ads it displays. A pickup point owner gets an additional bonus for showing the ads, equal to 40% of what the advertiser pays for the placement. Oleg’s main goal now is “at least to break even.”

Oleg complains that he has little freedom running his own pickup point. An owner can try to change operating hours — switching from 10 a.m.–10 p.m. hours to 9 a.m.–9 p.m., say — or ask Wildberries to raise compensation, he said, but the company almost never responds to such requests.

“It’s hard to call a pickup point a small business. The exception is entrepreneurs who have five or more locations. Either you open a pickup point as a side venture while already having a main business, or it’s a failing project,” Oleg said.

According to Oleg, in disputed situations — when goods are lost, don’t match the order, or turn out to be defective through no fault of the pickup point — Wildberries often sides with the customer and fines the pickup point.

Challenging the marketplace’s decisions is very difficult, Oleg said, as is getting rid of negative customer ratings on online maps. His pickup point once received a one-star rating with the comment: “I won’t be coming back here, I caught a cold.” A pickup point owner, he said, effectively has no way to dispute an unfair rating.

Pickup point owners are also left explaining Wildberries’ own rules to customers, Oleg said. If a customer receives defective goods, for instance, a pickup point employee can’t always just take them back — in some cases, the customer first has to buy the order and then file a separate return, which infuriates some customers.

Despite the losses, Oleg isn’t planning to close his pickup point for now. The easiest way to exit the business without losses, he said, is to sell it. Another option is to turn it into a family business and save on employee salaries — he currently has two employees. If he can’t “pull his pickup point into the black” in the near future, Oleg said he’ll hand it over to his daughter and son-in-law.

Some Russians own multiple pickup points — for them, it’s a full-fledged business and their only job

Irina (not her real name), who lives in the Krasnoyarsk region, decided to open her own pickup point in Minusinsk after a year of running an Ozon pickup point. Her investment there paid for itself in just two months, so in 2025 she wanted to “expand” and “try her hand with Wildberries.”

This pickup point didn’t start operating until 2026: Irina spent a long time renovating the space, and in February of this year, the marketplace changed its brand guidelines, so she had to redo the interior and order new furniture.

Irina hasn’t given much thought yet to Ukrainian drone attacks on Wildberries logistics centers, saying there are “no major warehouses in the Krasnoyarsk region that would attract the attention” of Ukraine’s military. But drones have already attacked neighboring regions — an air raid alert was declared in the Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Okrug on July 6, for instance.

“If something like that happens [in the Krasnoyarsk region], we’ll deal with it. I’m not scared for now,” Irina said. “A lot of people talk about this being ‘not the best time’ to work with WB. It’s different for everyone — some people are fine, some complain. I talked to pickup point owners in our city about a drop in order volume: nobody has noticed a decline. Nothing has changed for me on Ozon either.”

Milena (not her real name), from St. Petersburg, owns three pickup points. She opened the first one a year and a half ago, and the most recent one in June 2026.

Her work with Wildberries started “in a pretty mundane way,” Milena recalled — there simply weren’t enough pickup points in her neighborhood for her own needs. She invested about half a million rubles to open her first location.

The location turned out to be a good one, and the investment paid off in less than six months. After that, the pickup point started generating profit, which allowed Milena to open two more. By her estimate, a well-located pickup point in St. Petersburg brings in about 100,000–120,000 rubles in profit a month on average.

“All pickup points are very different. Mine are completely different from each other. It all depends on the location and the people who live nearby: whether it’s a new neighborhood with mortgaged homes or an older one with more elderly residents [where demand for marketplaces is lower],” Milena explained.

Everything got harder in summer 2026, Milena said. July has always been a “weak month” for business, she said, as people go on vacation and to their dachas and sales drop by about 20%. But this year sales fell much more sharply, by about 50%, which she attributes to the Ukrainian drone attacks and disrupted logistics:

Despite the difficulties, Milena enjoys working at the pickup points. “I love talking to customers myself. All my regulars know me, many of them have my phone number, and they can come to me with questions. Sometimes they come with problems that even WB support couldn’t answer, and we help solve them,” Milena said.

The Ukrainian drone attacks have made her anxious about the future of her business. Milena fears that the cost of rebuilding the destroyed infrastructure could fall on everyone in the system — sellers, pickup point owners, and customers. “Money doesn’t come from nowhere,” she added.

Even so, Milena doesn’t think Wildberries is handling the aftermath of the attacks or supporting its workers poorly. “I think they’re doing everything they can. It’s a huge system, and it’s hard to even imagine the scale of its supply chains. Of course, it will never be enough for some people, but I don’t know what else the company could do,” she reflected.

In Milena’s view, it’s wrong to place the entire burden of the attacks’ consequences on Wildberries:

Couriers are also suffering from Wildberries’ rules. In some disputes, it’s easier for the marketplace to blame the delivery worker than to figure out who’s actually at fault

Income depends on order volume not just for pickup point employees but for couriers too, who have had little to deliver because of disruptions at the logistics centers. Wildberries hasn’t changed courier working conditions since the drone attacks began, and there have been no reports of delayed payments to couriers.

How many couriers currently work with Wildberries is unknown. In February 2025, the company told journalists that more than 20,000 couriers worked with it in 67 Russian cities, and by the end of the year it was already reporting “tens of thousands” of couriers in more than a thousand cities.

Wildberries says a courier’s average income is about 105,000 rubles a month, with a maximum of up to 250,000 rubles, and that payments are made weekly.

Alisa (not her real name), who lives in Magnitogorsk, has worked as a Wildberries courier for several years. It used to be her main source of income, but now she only takes shifts “from time to time.”

She likes the flexible schedule and the chance to be out and about around the city, but the job has downsides that really bother her.

Sometimes, an order a courier drove to a pickup point to collect turns out to have been canceled or disappeared from the task list for no clear reason. Other times, a pickup point employee can’t find the item, or customers aren’t home or don’t answer calls. In those cases, the courier spends time traveling to and from the pickup point without getting paid.

“I’ve hauled 15-kilogram (33-pound) bags of pet food and heavy [cat litter] that way. If you can’t reach the client by phone, you end up with a free round trip. Over five hours there can be several deliveries like that — so you end up working an hour for free,” Alisa complained.

What worries her most, though, is couriers’ financial liability for goods. The terms of service hold them responsible for the loss, substitution, damage, or shortage of an order for 90 days after delivery. After that much time, Alisa said, it can be difficult to reconstruct the circumstances of a disputed delivery. What’s more, “the courier will have one version of events, the pickup point employee another, and tech support a third.”

“It’s easier for WB to shift the blame onto the courier than to figure out who messed up and where. I don’t feel like a protected employee,” Alisa said with a sigh. “It’s hard to recommend this job. As a rule, couriers stick around until their first shortage claim. Then they leave.”

* * *

On September 18, Wildberries announced the third phase of payments: starting October 1, more than 200,000 sellers are supposed to receive cash compensation, and the company promised to fully reimburse losses of up to 500,000 rubles.

Ozon, through the insurer Ingosstrakh, began paying sellers insurance compensation: by September 18, about 90,000 sellers had received 8.2 billion rubles.

Sellers from both marketplaces have also begun taking the companies to court, the Russian business daily Kommersant reported in late September. Between July 15 and September 15, sellers filed 599 new lawsuits against RWB, which manages Wildberries, and 236 against Internet Resheniya LLC, Ozon’s main legal entity. Most of the lawsuits concern goods lost in the warehouse attacks and, in Wildberries’ case, delayed payments to sellers that came to light in early September.

Wildberries sellers complained to the government that many of them still hadn’t received payment for sales from the last week of July, which Wildberries was supposed to transfer by August 26. The Marketplace Sellers Union estimated the total debt at about 20 billion rubles. The seller service Tochka Sverki said payment delays had begun even before the Ukrainian attacks on the warehouses but grew noticeably worse afterward.

Wildberries attributed the delays to DDoS attacks on its Seller Balance service. The company also said that the number of lawsuits is proportionate to the scale of RWB’s business. Ozon attributed the rise in claims to the fact that “the volume of litigation against the company depends on the number of its transactions, which has grown substantially,” Kommersant reported.

Russian attorneys began telling their social media followers and journalists as early as July that sellers whose goods burned in warehouses after drone strikes should take the matter to court, and many believe sellers have a chance of winning. Attorney Anya Bagdasaryan, for instance, said that Wildberries’ addition of a clause disclaiming liability for drone-attack damage to its terms of service doesn’t, under the law, “mean the company is automatically exempt from liability.”

To be exempt, the marketplace still has to prove the goods were lost specifically because of force majeure — a drone strike — rather than for other reasons, attorney Sergei Zhorin said. Failures in the warehouse’s own operations, he said, such as “failing to take reasonable measures to contain the fire and preserve surviving goods,” don’t count as force majeure.

Attorney Artemy Volovik agrees: “The company still has to prove that it truly could not have prevented the aftermath of what happened.”