Wildberries Is Over

Russia’s passive population propelled back to the 1990 as Wildberries burns

Date episode published: 24-Jul-26

Wildberries Is Over - This is a case of Russia against modernity. Putin is dragging the country back to the 1990s, but a darker version, with fewer nice things even than then. But he does not care about modernity, or about Russia’s passive population.

OUT OF STOCK: A week of “long-range sanctions” burns Russia’s Amazon from Moscow to St Petersburg to occupied Crimea - and proves a modern economy cannot survive the war its dictator started.

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WILDBERRIES IS OVER: Seven days. At least ten Wildberries logistics complexes struck across nine locations - Elektrostal, Kotovsk, Krasnodar, Nevinnomyssk, Voronezh region, and now, overnight, St Petersburg, the Leningrad region, Tver, and occupied Simferopol. The deadliest Ukrainian deep strikes inside Russia in two years. Around a tenth of the company’s national warehouse capacity gone. Pulkovo airport shut while the second city of the empire watched its own sky fill with smoke. Russia’s marketplaces have rewritten their contracts to abandon their sellers, and the Moscow Exchange has fallen through the floor. Putin tried to drag the twenty-first century back into the eighteenth - and the twenty-first century is burning down around him. Zelensky calls this campaign “long-range sanctions”. They are only going to increase. The scene is being set for Russians to ensure a brutal winter.

In the early hours of Friday 24 July 2026, two columns of smoke rose over St Petersburg. Not over a refinery this time, but over the logistics hubs of Wildberries - Russia’s largest online retailer, Russia’s answer to Amazon. The company’s own press office confirmed it: operations suspended at its centres in Shushary and Utkin Zavod on the city’s outskirts. In Novosaratovka, in the Leningrad region, a third warehouse burned, three people injured, as per governor Alexander Drozdenko. In occupied Simferopol, in Crimea, a Wildberries sorting hub was hit and evacuated - the company confirmed that too. In Tver, residents filmed thick smoke over yet another reported logistics fire. Pulkovo airport suspended flights for hours; around fifty departures were disrupted. And Tatyana Kim - Wildberries’ founder, Russia’s wealthiest woman - was reduced, on Friday morning, to reassuring the country that “parts” of her warehouses had been saved.

This is the third wave in under a week, and by the Kyiv Independent’s count the fifth attack on this single company in seven days. It began on 18 July with Elektrostal and Kotovsk. It reached Krasnodar and Nevinnomyssk on the 22nd, the Voronezh region on the 23rd. Now it has reached Peter the Great’s window on Europe. A window that is being slammed shut by Ukrainian long range drone operations. This is not a raid. It is a campaign. And it is aimed at something far bigger than warehouses. It is aimed at the central delusion of Putin’s war - that a modern, connected, just-in-time economy can wage a nineteenth-century war of imperial conquest and keep functioning. It cannot. Tonight, what burned, why it was targeted, and why this is a war against modernity that Ukraine’s model of modernity is now winning.

The numbers first. The 18 July strikes on Elektrostal - over 360,000 square metres, eight thousand employees, fifty kilometres from the Kremlin - and on Kotovsk killed eight people and injured more than sixty, per Russia’s own regional governors: the human toll of Putin locating his war economy inside his consumer economy. Russian analysts cited by The Moscow Times put the damage from that first night alone at up to 100 billion roubles - around 1.3 billion dollars - among the costliest strikes on Russian commercial infrastructure of the entire war. Rebuilding those first facilities: up to 35.8 billion roubles, per experts speaking to Kommersant, a bill the insurers are unlikely to cover. Before last night’s wave, Kommersant’s estimate was that roughly eight percent of Wildberries’ national warehouse capacity had already been disabled. Add St Petersburg, Novosaratovka, Simferopol, and the reported Tver fire, and the running total moves towards a tenth of the logistics network of a company Forbes Russia valued at 12.6 billion dollars this year - the retail bloodstream of the Russian consumer economy, reaching every household, from Kaliningrad to the Kurils.

WHY THIS TARGET

President Zelensky said Ukraine had hit “warehouses used to supply war materiel: navigation equipment, components for drone production, and other supplies for the Russian army”, framing the campaign as retaliation for Russia’s deadly strikes on Nova Poshta - Ukraine’s civilian postal and logistics company, bombed without a second thought. The Kremlin denies Wildberries serves the military. Yet CNN reported this week that a simple search for “military supplies” on the Wildberries site returns over 78,000 items - body armour, first-aid kits, rations - and Meduza has documented drone components and fibre-optic cable sold openly on the platform. Serhii Kuzan of the Ukrainian Security and Cooperation Centre put the logic plainly to CNBC: “The destruction of this logistics infrastructure deals a significant blow to Russia’s economy”. Russia militarised its consumer economy. Ukraine is now treating it accordingly. That is the moral arithmetic of this war, and it is entirely of Russia’s own making.

And note the geography of the past twenty-four hours. Simferopol - the logistics anchor of occupied Crimea, already the peninsula’s worst-supplied summer since annexation. Tver, on the Moscow-Petersburg axis. And St Petersburg itself, Putin’s home city, the imperial showcase, its airport closed and its skyline smoking. Zelensky has a name for this doctrine: long-range sanctions. Sanctions the West debates for months, Ukraine now delivers overnight - and no veto in Washington or Budapest can water them down.

THE FRAGILITY OF THE MODERN

Here is the thesis. Remember Azovstal. In 2022, Ukrainian defenders held a Soviet-era steel plant for weeks under direct bombardment, because industrial-age infrastructure is, almost by accident, a fortress - metres of reinforced concrete that swallowed bomb after bomb. A modern economy is the opposite. A modern logistics centre holding goods worth a measurable slice of GDP is a fast-assembled steel-frame shed. It has sprinklers and fire codes, because the entire system rests on one assumption: that nobody is deliberately trying to destroy it. Its address is public. It cannot be hidden, hardened, or dispersed without ceasing to be what it is. A drone costing tens of thousands of dollars erases hundreds of millions in assets, jobs, tax base, and consumer confidence in a single night - and Russia is too vast for any air-defence umbrella to cover the thousands of such targets it has built. That asymmetry is the new deterrence. Modern states cannot afford war - not because their leaders became virtuous, but because everything that makes an economy modern also makes it burnable.

Russia’s own corporate giants have already confessed as much through their behaviour. Ozon rewrote its seller agreement, effective 1 July, exempting itself from any claims arising from drone strikes and military action. Wildberries did the same on 7 July - eleven days before its warehouses started burning. This week, per Vyorstka’s reporting carried by Meduza and The Moscow Times, Yandex Market followed. Russia’s three biggest marketplaces have formally written the war into their contracts and dumped the entire risk onto their sellers - hundreds of thousands of small businesses, the last functioning entrepreneurial class in Russia, who told The Insider they have lost millions of roubles with no insurance, no compensation, no recourse. The markets have read it correctly: the Moscow Exchange’s all-session index closed below 2,000 points on 17 July, down twenty percent in a month per Investing.com data, and Ozon shares slumped when trading reopened after the first strikes. Bloomberg reports Russia’s biggest food retailers are now scrambling to decentralise their warehouse networks. Decentralisation means duplication, duplication means cost, and cost means inflation - paid, as always, by ordinary Russians, three times over: as consumers, as taxpayers, and as the collateral of a regime that classifies its own statistics rather than admit what is happening.

Step back and see the whole picture. Vladimir Putin’s understanding of the world froze somewhere around 1999, the year he took the presidential chair - before the smartphone, before the marketplace economy, before the cheap long-range drone. He believed territory could still be seized and held, that war could still solve political problems, that the twenty-first century could be marched backwards into the eighteenth at gunpoint. Four and a half years into his three-day war, the verdict is arriving nightly, by air. The empire he wanted cannot be taken. And the modern economy he governs - the delivery apps, the data centres, the marketplaces that touch every Russian household - is precisely what his war is destroying. There is bitter symbolism in where the smoke rose this morning. St Petersburg was built as Russia’s window on Europe, on modernity itself. Putin slammed that window shut - and now the fires of his own war are visible through the glass. The long-range sanctions will not stop. They will scale - because they work, because they are cheap, and because every strike lands where the Kremlin’s lies cannot reach; in the prices, the empty shelves, the burned inventory, the delayed flights, the abandoned sellers. The West should study this doctrine and fully support Ukraine in maintaining and extending it. Ukraine has found the pressure point of the swamp empire, and it is pressing harder every night.

Ukraine is winning, evil will not prevail.