Overnight on Saturday, Ukrainian drones struck two warehouses of Russia's largest online marketplace, Wildberries — one in Elektrostal near Moscow and another near Tambov. The warehouse in the Moscow region was almost completely burned down along with goods from hundreds of sellers. They began publicly complaining on social media about multimillion-dollar losses.
When Irina (name changed) woke up late on the morning of July 18, her phone was vibrating nonstop. In the Wildberries seller chat she belongs to, they were discussing the latest news — overnight on Saturday, Ukrainian drones attacked the marketplace's warehouses in Elektrostal near Moscow and in Kotovsk near Tambov. The attacks sparked a fire, killing eight people, injuring dozens, and destroying goods from hundreds of businesses.
Irina and her husband run a small business selling stationery. They sell exclusively through Wildberries. It is now the peak sales season — in July and August, schoolchildren and their parents stock up for the new academic year. Irina says that on July 17 they shipped goods to the warehouse in Elektrostal, and the next day they learned everything had burned down. "We shipped a thousand units, and another thousand were already there. Two thousand units burned," she says.
The Elektrostal warehouse is not the only place where Irina and her husband store goods. They keep some stationery at their own warehouse, and the rest is stored at other Wildberries warehouses in other major Russian cities to reduce logistics costs and delivery times. Currently, according to Irina, they have about 40,000 sets of stationery left at these warehouses. "The losses are very critical for us because we have a very short season and we need to pay contractors and eventually taxes," she says. "But not all is lost because the season is ongoing, and we still need to sell the goods we have left."