Add to cart How pro-war networks use Russia’s biggest online retailer to supply troops at the front
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Since July 18, Ukraine has struck more than 20 warehouses belonging to Wildberries, Russia’s largest online retailer. President Volodymyr Zelensky says the sites supplied “sanctioned components for drone production and navigation equipment.” The Kremlin insists the warehouses are purely civilian infrastructure and has called the strikes “terrorism.”
As yet, there’s no evidence that Wildberries is systematically tied to Russia’s Defense Ministry. But a new investigation by Meduza found that volunteer groups supporting Russian troops have spent years using the marketplace to buy equipment for the front — openly, regularly, and on a scale that is real, if relatively modest.
A parallel supply line
Not everything Russian troops use reaches the front through the Defense Ministry. Since the full-scale invasion, volunteer groups have built a parallel supply network, raising money for everything from tourniquets to drone components — much of it bought the same way millions of Russians buy everyday goods: online. Fundraising posts link directly to specific products on Wildberries, asking supporters to donate the money for a purchase or buy the items themselves and ship them to pickup points, including ones in occupied Ukraine.
Officially, Wildberries prohibits the sale of weapons, military uniforms, and other military goods. Until Ukraine began striking its warehouses, however, Wildberries ran a dedicated “Everything for the SVO” (“special military operation”) section, where users could browse first-aid kits, radios, body armor, and drone components. While the goods might technically be dual-use, sellers often describe items outright as “tactical assault body armor with plates” or “tactical combat helmets.” The section disappeared after the strikes began. The products didn’t.
Following the links
To understand how Wildberries fits into the volunteer supply chain, Meduza examined fundraising posts across 77 pro-war Telegram channels and VKontakte groups. The earliest Wildberries links appeared in July 2022, less than six months after the full-scale invasion began. By the first quarter of 2026, organizers were running 513 fundraising campaigns linking directly to products on Wildberries — up from just 13 in the third quarter of 2022.
Organizers asked most often for medical supplies: tourniquets, first-aid kits, bandages, burn dressings, trauma shears. Other appeals sought generators, tires, tools, clothing, radios, food, body armor, night-vision devices, Starlink terminals, and drone components.
Most posts said only that the purchases were “for military personnel.” But 53 posts named a specific unit — including some that have already turned up in war-crimes investigations. Among them: the 205th Motor Rifle Brigade, which has been linked to drone strikes on civilian vehicles near Beryslav, in Ukraine’s Kherson region, and the former Vostok Battalion — since folded into the Russian army as the 114th Motor Rifle Brigade — whose fighters U.N. investigators have documented committing abductions, torture, and sexual violence.
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A gray area
Across the posts Meduza reviewed, the total value of the Wildberries purchases came to roughly 18.6 million rubles (about $221,000) — a negligible sum compared with the overall scale of Russia’s volunteer fundraising for the war, where one corruption scandal alone involved some 200 million rubles (about $2.5 million). But that’s a partial count: the tally includes only posts linking directly to specific Wildberries products, not the much larger number of “urgent appeals” where organizers never say where they plan to buy the equipment.
Wildberries isn’t the only Russian marketplace groups use to buy dual-use goods for the front. Fundraising posts link almost as often to Ozon, the country’s second-largest online retailer, and those posts skew toward more specialized drone and weapons hardware than the ones linking to Wildberries — though Ozon doesn’t have a separate “SVO” section.
Kyiv hasn’t explained why it’s only struck Wildberries, and the theories floating around are just that: theories. It’s possible Ukraine has intelligence about these specific warehouses that hasn’t been made public. It could be that Wildberries, as Russia’s largest marketplace, is simply the more economically damaging target. Or that it relies more heavily on a handful of especially large hubs — though there’s no way to confirm that, since marketplaces don’t publish what share of their capacity sits in their largest warehouses. There’s also nothing to say that other marketplaces won’t suffer the same fate eventually.
None of this settles whether the strikes were lawful. Under international humanitarian law, it’s not enough that Wildberries holds dual-use items that end up at the front. Ukraine would also have to show that the warehouses it struck held those goods in quantities substantial enough to give Russia a clear military advantage — something far harder to prove. But more than four years into the full-scale war, the distinction between civilian commerce and military logistics looks less tidy than either side suggests.
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