Ukraine Has Hit “Russia’s Amazon” At Least Seventeen Times Since July. Real warehouse workers are dying on the night shift — and even a Kremlin-critical outlet says Kyiv’s stated reason for the campaign doesn’t fully add up.

Since July 18, 2026, Ukrainian drones have hit at least seventeen warehouses belonging to Wildberries — the online marketplace that controls roughly 45% of Russian e-commerce and that Western press has taken to calling “Russia’s Amazon.” The strikes have reached from Crimea to the Urals, and they have killed real people: night-shift workers in Tambov Oblast, a woman in Krasnodar, more in a Moscow Oblast suburb this week. Regional Russian officials, not Kyiv, have confirmed most of the deaths.

President Volodymyr Zelensky says the warehouses are legitimate military targets — logistics hubs moving drone components, navigation equipment, and other hardware to the front. That claim deserves scrutiny, not deference, because a very online-shopping-brand-adjacent CEO is not accused of treason and a lot of ordinary Russians just lost their jobs or their local delivery point. So we put the claim next to the evidence, including an investigation by Meduza — an independent Russian outlet banned and declared a “foreign agent” by the Kremlin, with no reason to carry water for Moscow — that found the military-logistics case thinner than Kyiv has presented it.

Here is what is documented, what is disputed, and what it is costing — in rubles and in lives — three weeks into a campaign that shows no sign of stopping.

• 17+ warehouses hit — since July 18, 2026, per Meduza's Aug. 2 count of “the 17th” strike; wire-service tracking puts the total at 18–20 by Aug. 4 · Source: Meduza; Militarnyi; wire reports
• At least 24 killed — across separate strikes since July 18 (7 in Tambov, 1 in Krasnodar, 6 more July 24, 5–8 Aug. 2, 5 in Chekhov Aug. 4) — no single Russian or Ukrainian tally of the full campaign's toll exists · Source: Russian regional governors
• $2.7–3.5 billion — estimated potential losses to affected sellers by early August, per a Forbes Russia estimate — up from an initial ~60 billion ruble estimate in July · Source: Forbes; Data Insight
• 45% of Russian e-commerce — Wildberries' market share — the platform Kyiv says supplies army parts and Meduza's own reporting says isn't proven at scale · Source: Newsweek; Meduza
• 1,882 listings, 18.6M rubles — the actual volume of military-related goods Meduza's own reporters found for sale on the platform — a fraction of what would support Kyiv's stated rationale · Source: Meduza investigation
• EU-sanctioned in July — Wildberries' banking arm was separately hit with EU sanctions over its “financial contribution to Russia's state budget” · Source: EU sanctions reporting

The campaign opened on the night of July 18, with strikes hundreds of kilometers apart on the same night. In Kotovsk, Tambov Oblast, Governor Yevgeny Pervyshov confirmed seven night-shift warehouse workers were killed and 24 injured. The same night, in Elektrostal, Moscow Oblast, Governor Andrei Vorobyov confirmed 26 people hurt at another Wildberries facility — no deaths there, but the building was gutted. Militarnyi, an independent Ukrainian defense-news outlet, attributed the strikes to Ukraine’s 1st Center of Unmanned Systems Forces the same day.

It did not stop there. A woman died and ten were hurt in a July 22 strike on a Krasnodar facility, confirmed by Governor Veniamin Kondratyev. A wider wave on July 24 killed at least six across a Wildberries site and an adjacent industrial facility. By early August, strikes had reached Yekaterinburg in the Urals, Perm, Volgograd, Ryazan, Penza, Udmurtia, Crimea, and St. Petersburg’s outskirts. On August 4 — the same day this page was last updated — Vorobyov confirmed five more killed and ten injured in a strike on a facility in Chekhov, Moscow Oblast.

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Kyiv’s official rationale is specific: President Zelensky has described the targets as “logistics centers involved in supplying the Russian army with drone components, navigation equipment, and other military hardware.” Robert “Madyar” Brovdi, commander of Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Forces, called the August 2 strike on a Samara Oblast hub — which he said was the tenth strike on Wildberries logistics infrastructure — “the main bridge between European Russia and Siberia.” A separate Ukrainian commander, Yurii “Achilles” Fedorenko of the 429th Separate Unmanned Systems Brigade, said Russian authorities began restricting retail sales of drone components — cameras, propellers, controllers, batteries — after strikes destroyed stockpiles at Wildberries hubs, which he offered as evidence the warehouses served a real dual military-commercial purpose.

Meduza — a Russian-language outlet the Kremlin has banned and labeled a “foreign agent,” with every incentive to take Ukraine’s side and none to defend Moscow — took the claim seriously enough to investigate it directly. Its reporters found volunteers had documented roughly 1,882 military-related product listings on Wildberries, totaling about 18.6 million rubles (a few hundred thousand dollars) — a real but small figure against a company that moves billions of dollars in goods. Meduza reported “no information that Wildberries is systematically embedded in the infrastructure of Russia’s Defense Ministry,” and noted that comparable volumes of military-adjacent goods flow through Wildberries’ main competitor, Ozon — a platform Ukraine has not targeted.

Wildberries founder Tatyana Kim (previously known in Western coverage as Tatyana Bakalchuk, and not to be confused with a separate 2025 armed dispute at company headquarters involving her former husband) addressed sellers directly in a July 31 video message. “For nearly two weeks now, our company’s warehouses have been under terrorist attack,” she said, framing the strikes as “attacks against hundreds of millions of people in 10 countries at once.” She said more than 200 drones hit the Yekaterinburg facility in a single attack, and accused Ukraine of “covering up their true motives.”

Kim also delivered the news merchants did not want to hear: the company is treating the losses as force majeure, meaning sellers whose inventory burned are not entitled to compensation under Wildberries’ terms of service — “whether or not this clause is included... is irrelevant,” she said. The company is now reportedly exploring warehouse capacity in Kazakhstan as a contingency. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov called the strikes “an act of state terrorism,” denied the military-logistics claim outright, and praised Wildberries’ response to sellers as deserving “the highest praise.”

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Whatever the true military-logistics share of these warehouses, the economic damage is real and escalating. Early estimates put losses around 60 billion rubles; by July 24, the research firm Data Insight put merchandise losses at roughly 170 billion rubles; by early August, Forbes Russia was citing estimates of 215 to 280 billion rubles — roughly $2.7 to $3.5 billion — in potential losses to the sellers who stock Wildberries’ shelves, the small businesses least able to absorb a “force majeure” write-off. Bloomberg reported August 3 that Russian officials are weighing a year of loan-payment holidays for affected sellers and letting banks restructure seller debt without added capital reserves — a bailout-adjacent step, though Peskov said no formal compensation program exists yet.

Separately, and on a different legal track, the European Union sanctioned Wildberries’ banking arm in July over its “financial contribution to Russia’s state budget” — a recognition that Wildberries, sanctions or no drone strikes, is one of the largest taxpayers in the Russian Federation. Citing the Institute for the Study of War, RBC-Ukraine reported the warehouse campaign is pressuring people close to Vladimir Putin and prompted a redeployment of Pantsir air-defense systems to Moscow Oblast after the July strikes — air defense pulled from somewhere else to protect shipping depots, not military bases.

“It is not the case that Wildberries is involved in supplying the Russian military.”

Dmitry Peskov, Kremlin spokesman

Ukraine’s refinery campaign, which we covered separately, hit oil infrastructure with a fairly clean military logic: refineries fuel tanks and jets. The Wildberries campaign is messier, and that messiness is the story. Kyiv has a real argument — drone parts and tactical gear genuinely do move through the platform, even if the documented scale is disputed. But an outlet with no reason to defend the Kremlin looked hard at that argument and found the documented military volume small next to the retail giant’s overall footprint — and next to the number of ordinary night-shift workers who have been killed doing ordinary jobs.

What is not in dispute: seventeen-plus warehouses hit in three weeks, billions of dollars in losses cascading onto small sellers rather than the Russian state, and a company that just told its merchants their burned inventory is nobody’s legal responsibility. This is now one more front in a war that has already reached Russia’s refineries, its bombers, and its Black Sea fleet — and this page will update as the campaign, and the casualty count, continue to climb.

A note on sourcing gaps: we could not find any on-the-record Truth Social post or White House statement addressing this specific campaign, and did not force one in. See our companion pages for the wider war: Russia’s War Ledger and Bigger Army. Bigger Budget. Bigger Body Count.

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Last updated August 4, 2026