Ukrainian drone strikes hit about 10% of Russian retail giant Wildberries’ warehouse space
Ukrainian drone strikes hit Wildberries warehouses covering a total of 552,000 square meters (5.9 million square feet) over the past week — roughly 10% of the marketplace’s logistics capacity, according to calculations by the Russian business daily Kommersant based on publicly available data.
The estimate covers strikes on warehouses in Elektrostal, in the Moscow region; Kotovsk, in the Tambov region; Nevinnomyssk, in Stavropol Krai; and Krasnodar. Overnight on July 23, Ukrainian forces attacked another warehouse, this one in the Voronezh region.
Experts polled by Kommersant put the value of the damaged Wildberries property at 60 billion rubles, not counting the strike on the Voronezh region warehouse.
Sources cited by Kommersant said 444,000 square meters (4.8 million square feet) of warehouse space — about 8% of the marketplace’s total logistics capacity — is now unusable because of the drone strikes. The warehouse complex in Kotovsk, the outlet said, remains operational.
A real estate market source cited by the outlet estimated that building the same volume of warehouse space, not including equipment, would cost 35.5 billion rubles. Experts said restoring the damaged warehouses would likely be faster than building comparable facilities from scratch.
Sources cited by the outlet said the drones struck facilities central to Wildberries’ logistics operations: the Krasnodar center, they said, serves as the marketplace’s main hub for supplying southern Russia.
Given the situation, they said, Wildberries may abandon its preferred delivery model — shipping from its own warehouses — in favor of delivery from sellers’ warehouses. The marketplace could also redistribute product flows to warehouses in other regions and lease additional space, they said.
Over the past week, Ukraine has attacked Wildberries warehouses twice. On July 18, drones struck logistics centers in Kotovsk, in the Tambov region, and in Elektrostal, outside Moscow. On June 22, Wildberries warehouses in Krasnodar and Nevinnomyssk were attacked.
At Meduza, we are committed to transparency about our use of artificial intelligence in the newsroom. The story you’re reading was written by one of our living, breathing journalists and translated from Russian using an AI model configured to follow our strict editorial standards. This translation process is the result of extensive testing and refinements to ensure our English-language coverage is timely and accurate. A Meduza editor reviews every draft before publication.
If you find any errors in this translation, please contact us at [email protected].
To read Meduza’s exclusive content in English, please subscribe to our newsletter.