Wildberries seller with 1.3 million Instagram followers appeals to Russian authorities for help after Ukrainian strikes

Marina Gorshkova, an entrepreneur and founder of a cosmetics brand with 1.3 million Instagram followers, has recorded a video appealing to Russia’s leadership over the fallout from Ukrainian strikes on Wildberries warehouses.

According to Gorshkova, a large share of Wildberries sellers have suffered from fires at the marketplace’s warehouses: “this is a huge number of small, medium-sized businesses,” she said. Speaking about her own business, she said she had paid 45 million rubles in taxes over the past year and a half.

“If we close tomorrow, those taxes will stop coming into the treasury. The same thing will happen with other sellers who are in exactly the same situation right now. And you need to understand that new entrepreneurs won’t just spring up like mushrooms. We very much ask you, please, pay attention to us,” Gorshkova said in the video.

Rather than compensation payments, she proposed exempting Wildberries sellers from taxes “for at least a year” and asking banks to grant them a loan payment holiday “so that they could recover calmly and keep making normal payments on their loans.”

“This situation is global. People have families, people have employees. And all of this, like a snowball, will turn into a huge number of affected people. If you don’t intervene now, this situation will simply become a stalemate. Taxes will stop coming into the treasury, and large numbers of people will be left without homes or without something else. This is a very difficult situation that requires intervention,” she said.

Gorshkova also called for oversight of how Wildberries fulfills its obligations to sellers, explaining that she has been unable to retrieve her own merchandise from the marketplace’s warehouse.

Gorshkova’s video post received 10,000 likes within a day.

Ukraine has been striking Wildberries logistics centers and warehouses since July 18. Drone strikes have already hit warehouses in the Moscow region, Tambov region, Krasnodar, Stavropol Krai, Leningrad region, St. Petersburg, Voronezh, and occupied Crimea.