Wildberries and the War

Enemy drones attacked Wildberries warehouses in Leningrad Region in the early hours of 24 July, reported Alexander Drozdenko, head of Russia’s 47th region.

Governor Alexander Beglov reported that, in Petersburg, “civilian infrastructure on Moscow Highway was targeted.”

The Russian Defense Ministry claimed it had downed 571 Ukrainian Armed Forces drones over Russia’s regions overnight.

Delovoi Peterburg reports below what we know about the latest series of attacks on warehouses in the Petersburg metro area.

Repelling the drone attack in Leningrad Region: Fire in Novosaratovka

Three people were injured and hospitalized in stable condition, Drozdenko said.

“A drone strike caused a fire at Wildberries warehouses in the village of Novosaratovka* in the Vsevolozhsk District,” the governor explained.

In addition, a warehouse belonging to the Severnaya poultry farm in the village of Sinyavino, Kirovsk District, Leningrad Region, sustained damage. No one was injured. Debris from the drone fell onto the grounds of the old hospital, according to Andrei Voropayev, head of the Sverdlov Settlement.

“They’re not letting anyone in there, including us. We don’t know what was there. Just warehouses and more warehouses. Definitely no chemicals. When it was shot down over the Neva, one drone fell on the old hospital in the village. There are only bare walls there, no people, and the firefighters have left,” Voropaev told 47news.

A drone alert was issued in Region 47 at 01:43 Moscow Time on 24 July 2. Drozdenko reported that fifty drones had been shot down over the region. The regional governor lifted the drone threat alert at 06:17 Moscow Time.

“The drone threat in the Leningrad Region has been lifted. Fifty-nine enemy UAVs have been shot down. I thank the anti-aircraft forces for their effective performance,” said Drozdenko.

The Investigative Committee reported that a criminal case had been opened regarding a terrorist act (per Article 205 of the Russian Federal Criminal Code) in connection with “an attack by Ukrainian armed groups on civilian targets in the Leningrad Region.” No further details of the attack were provided in the statement.

Attack on Petersburg: Shushary and Utkina Zavod

The company’s warehouses in Petersburg were also targeted. According to the RWB (Wildberries | Russ) press office, operations at two logistics complexes have been temporarily suspended.

“Operations at the company’s logistics complexes in Shushary and Utkina Zavod (both in Petersburg) have been temporarily suspended. Updates on the resumption of operations will follow,” the press office stated.

The company clarified that there had been no casualties at Wildberries facilities in Petersburg and the Leningrad Region.

Some of the warehouse space and merchandise was salvaged, and a swift evacuation was carried out at the warehouses, such that there were no casualties, Tatyana Kim later reported.

“Dear partners, up-to-date information on the situation is being published on the seller’s website. All our efforts are now focused on redistributing goods across warehouses to ensure more efficient inventory turnover and the economic stability of our partners,” the Wildberries founder wrote on her social media channel.

Eyewitnesses reported that Pyaterochka’s warehouses in Utkina Zavod may also have been hit, but X5 (the discount grocery store chain’s operator) denied this.

“The reports are false. The facility was not damaged and will continue to operate as usual,” X5 told DP.

Governor Beglov reported that efforts are underway to address the aftermath of the attack on a civilian infrastructure facility on Moscow Highway.

“The emergency response headquarters, which I personally head, has been coordinating the work of the municipal services and interagency cooperation,” the governor wrote on Max.

Drivers and eyewitnesses have reported that traffic on Moscow Highway has come to a standstill. The City Transportation Committee announced that, due to the impassability of Moscow Highway, bus lines 179, 192, 196, 197, and 388 have been temporarily rerouted.

“Bus routes Nos. 179, 192, 196, 197, and 388 are running via Danube Boulevard and Sofia Street, then continuing along their regular routes (in both directions). We recommend that residents of Slavyanka take suburban commuter trains. Trains are running every ten minutes,” the transportation committee announced.

Eyewitnesses report major traffic jams in the south and southeast of the city, on the Ring Road and on Sofia Street.

“A massive traffic jam has formed on Sofia Street heading toward the city: it starts past the intersection with Ust-Izhorsk Highway. There is also a major traffic jam on the inner ring road between Murmansk Highway and Moscow Highway; it is caused by the closure of the city-bound exit to Moscow Highway due to roadwork,” reported the city’s Megapolis channel on Telegram.

A live map of the traffic jams in question, in Petersburg’s far south. Image courtesty of *Delovoi Peterburg*

Residents of a building on Aleksa Dundić Street in the Frunze District were evacuated on the afternoon of 24 July, according to 78.ru. Residents of stairwells 8 through 19 were asked to leave their flats and go outside.

Pulkovo Airport imposed flight restrictions starting at 1:46 a.m. and resumed flight operations at 6:00 a.m. Moscow Time after the drone threat was lifted.

As of that time, over fifty flights had been delayed by two hours or more, and fourteen were waiting at alternate airports. By 8:20 a.m., Pulkovo had handled approximately thirty flights, both arriving and departing. Two flights arrived in Petersburg from alternate airports, according to the VVSS (Northern Capital’s Air Gateway) press service.

“All services are working to fulfill the daily flight plan per the revised schedule,” airport officials said.

UPDATE: As of 9:15 a.m., approximately sixty flights had been dispatched to their destination airports, and seven aircraft had arrived in Petersburg from alternate airports.

During the drone threat, restrictions on mobile communication were in effect in the metropolitan area, with the peak number of complaints occurring overnight.

A chart showing numbers of complaints about loss of mobile phone coverage in the Petersburg area during the 24 July 2026 drone attack. Image courtesy of Delovoi Peterburg

The damage from the attacks on Wildberries warehouses in the Leningrad Region and Petersburg could reach 76 billion rubles [approx. 861 million euros], according to preliminary estimates done for DP by Sergei Semko, lead analyst at Data Insight, conducted preliminary calculations for DP.

Attacks on Warehouses: A Timeline

In recent days, Wildberries warehouses have been targeted by enemy drones. Just yesterday, two logistics complexes sustained damage in Voronezh.

The first attacks on Wildberries warehouses in Russia took place on 18 July. The strikes targeted the company’s facilities in the Tambov and Moscow regions. At least eight people were killed, and more than sixty civilians were injured. Several of the injured were in critical condition.

On the night of 21–22 July, drones attacked large Wildberries warehouses in Krasnodar and Nevinnomyssk, Stavropol Territory. A local state of emergency was declared in Nevinnomyssk. The head of the Krasnodar Territory reported one fatality resulting from an attack on the oil depot in Armavir and provided an update on the condition of those injured at the warehouses in Krasnodar. The Investigative Committee classified the attacks as acts of terrorism. A criminal case has been opened under Article 205 of the Russian Federal Criminal Code.

DP has reported that the drone strikes on Wildberries warehouses have created problems not only for that particular and the sellers collaborating with it. In fact, a new reality has dawned for the entire Russian e-commerce and logistics market. Everyone will have to restructure their internal procedures and come up with new solutions.

Source: Ksenia Malinovskaya, “Drones Attack Wildberries Warehouses near [sic] Petersburg,” Delovoi Peterburg, 24 July 2026. Translated by the Russian Reader

* Here are some snapshots I took of Novosaratovka during a Sunday Cafe expedition there in December 2015:

Russian businesses have been feeling the effects of the war in Ukraine through tax increases, rising costs caused by fuel shortages, and supply chains disrupted by sanctions. Now, there is another risk to contend with: Ukrainian drone strikes on their facilities.

As Ukraine wages a campaign to bring the conflict home to ordinary Russians, it has opened a new front aimed at the online marketplace Wildberries, a pillar of the country’s retail economy and a potent symbol of modern life in Russia.

In recent days, Ukraine has hit five warehouses belonging to Wildberries, a Russian analogue to Amazon, as well as storage sites for other large retailers. Eight people were killed in attacks on Saturday and one person on Wednesday, the Russian authorities said. The strikes on Saturday alone were reported to have wiped out between 6 and 9 percent of the storage capacity of Wildberries.

Ukraine’s long-range strikes on Russian economic targets, including a months-long campaign of attacks on oil processing facilities, are intended to pressure President Vladimir V. Putin to end the war, in part by hampering his ability to finance it. The oil strikes have caused fuel shortages that have led to lines at gas stations, and they could affect the coming harvest season.

Mr. Putin has signaled no intention of backing away from his objectives in the conflict, and the economy, while weakened by the war, is not on the verge of collapse. Still, analysts said that if the attacks on Russia’s business infrastructure continued, the ripple effects could pose severe economic challenges on top of a range of other war-related strains, reducing tax collections and adding to inflation.

Ukraine has targeted Wildberries warehouses in five regions across Russia, including a reported strike early Thursday in the Voronezh region, south of Moscow. A fire at a warehouse in Elektrostal, a city in the Moscow region, took three days to extinguish.

The day after the initial strikes, Russia unleashed the largest missile attack on Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital, since the war started in 2022, firing at least 35 ballistic and hypersonic cruise missiles.

Ukraine has said that its strikes are in retaliation for Russian attacks on its postal delivery hubs and other civilian infrastructure, a yearslong campaign by Moscow that has been far more devastating than Kyiv’s strikes against Russia. A Russian attack last week on a postal terminal in the northeastern city of Kharkiv left three people dead and 20 injured.

President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine has also said that Wildberries facilities are a legitimate target because the company sells goods to the Russian military. The Kremlin spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov, has denied the accusation.

Wildberries has a policy of not selling military-grade weapons, but it does sell goods used by soldiers, like commercial drones that can be jury-rigged with explosives, as well as fiber-optic cables, tactical clothing and other so-called dual-use items.

The Wildberries attacks have been calamitous for small Russian entrepreneurs who sell goods through the site, the country’s largest online marketplace.

One of them, Timur, woke up on Saturday morning to news that he had lost clothing and shoes worth about $25,000 as a result of the attacks on the Wildberries warehouses in Elektrostal and in Kotovsk, in the Tambov region, southeast of Moscow.

Timur, who was nervous about speaking with foreign journalists when reached by telephone and asked that his last name be withheld to avoid reprisals, said that his main concern was the uncertainty that he and other Russian entrepreneurs now faced.

He said on Tuesday that it was unclear what would happen next “because most likely they are not the only warehouses that will be attacked.”

Hours later, two more Wildberries warehouses that contained his apparel, in the southern Stavropol and Krasnodar regions, were hit by drones. His losses doubled.

Timur said he had been building his business for five years, “and it can just collapse in a week,” he said, a precarity that Ukrainians have been living with for nearly four and a half years.

He warned of the effects on the Russian economy, saying that continued strikes could cause the Wildberries business model to collapse, raising prices and bringing about shortages.

Alexander Kolyandr, director for Europe at the Eurasia Group, a consulting firm, echoed that view.

“The company itself and all the sellers will likely pay less in taxes than last year, and given the size, it might be pretty substantial, especially at a time when the Russian budget is experiencing a widening deficit,” Mr. Kolyandr said.

Additionally, the cost of protecting, rebuilding and insuring the warehouses will be passed on to consumers, he said, contributing to already high levels of inflation.

The attacks on Saturday in the Moscow and Tambov regions destroyed goods worth almost as much as Wildberries’ entire profit last year, according to expert estimates reported by Kommersant, a Russian newspaper, and by Forbes Russia.

The company’s chief executive, Tatyana Kim, promised financial compensation of about $25,000 to families of the workers who were killed and half of that amount to the injured.

At the beginning of the month, Wildberries and another large online marketplace, Ozon, changed their terms and conditions to stipulate that the companies had no legal obligation to compensate for losses caused by drone attacks.

On Wednesday, however, Ms. Kim announced payouts to small-scale sellers who were “most vulnerable.” She did not disclose the amounts.

Many sellers on Wildberries financed their products with loans, including Timur, who told of interest rates as high as 35 percent. Some vendors risk having their bank accounts frozen as soon as next week if they are unable to make tax payments due in the coming days, according to the business newspaper Vedomosti.

A civilian facility like a warehouse can become a lawful military target if it is being used, or is being prepared to be used, for military purposes, said Michael Schmitt, who teaches international law at the University of Reading in England and is a former legal adviser to the U.S. military.

Combatants, he said, must take into account exactly what kind of materials are inside, have a high degree of certainty about the site’s future military use and make efforts to mitigate harm to civilians.

Maria Snegovaya, a researcher at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said that Russia’s economic slowdown, related in part to Ukraine’s long-range strikes, had coincided with declining levels of support for the war.

But some in Russia said that the increased drumbeat of attacks could rally Russians around their leader.

“The adversary started doing the job of our propaganda, which is to explain to the nation that a real war is underway, and no one can just lie low,” a Russian military blogger, Roman Saponkov, wrote on Telegram. “At first they switched off fuel at the petrol station, now they took on Wildberries warehouses. Next, it will be beer factories and nail salons.”

Source: Valerie Hopkins and Alina Lobzina, “A New Target for Ukraine’s Long-Range Attacks: Russia’s Version of Amazon,” New York Times, 23 July 2026. Since my digital + weekend delivery subscription to the Gray Lady costs me an arm and a leg (to wit, forty dollars a month), I feel no compunction about reposting their articles on this website, which has always been free to anyone anywhere whose government hasn’t banned it (as Russia’s did in 2022). |||||| trr

Dima Vorobyev: Forty Days

Dima Vorobyev, in a construction workers’ camp on a new housing estate, Petersburg, spring 2017.
Photo by the Russian Reader

Although I met dozens if not hundreds of people through my late friend Dmitry (“Dima”) Vorobyev (1974–2022), some of whom would become real friends, I cannot for the life of me remember when and how exactly I met Dima himself. It must have been sometime in 2005 or 2006, at the latest, because by the spring of 2007 we were already well enough acquainted to give a talk on our beloved city’s “anti-regeneration” movements at a conference on art and urbanism in Hamburg. Benedict Seymour, one of the editors of Mute magazine, was at the conference, and he kindly asked us to turn our talk into a full-fledged article, which we did. It was published the next year, somehow appropriately, in an issue featuring a picture of a cute kitten on the cover. Dima loved cats.

He also adored his hometown, Petersburg, in a wide-eyed, insatiably curious, panamorous fashion that meant endlessly exploring and enthusiastically embracing all its nooks, crannies, back alleys, abandoned lots, outskirts, dive bars, suburbs, new estates, subcultures, and courtyards. A geologist turned sociologist, he turned his “teleporting” (his coinage) from the imperial city center to the “provinces” (some of which, as it transpired, were also in the city center) into an undertaking called Sunday Cafe (in Russian, Voskresnoe kafe or V-kafe for short), a constantly mutating ensemble of serious urbanists and flighty flaneurs who went on long walks through the city that invariably featured a more or less elaborate “coffee break,” which often as not, happened outside, using a tiny camping stove and a Turkish coffee pot to make the coffee.

These walks were not “drifts” in the Situationist sense of the term. They almost always had well-defined beginning and end points (usually, subway or train stations, thus making it easier for the walkers to gather and disperse), and they often had more or less planned routes and even themes. For example, Dima and I did two “Leninist” walks as part of Sunday Cafe. The first, inspired by a book of Lenin-related addresses in Leningrad-Petersburg that I had picked up somewhere, was a fairly comprehensive tour of the Petrograd Side to all the places listed in the book while, periodically, stopping to read aloud choice passages from Lenin’s writings. The second, similarly inspired by a found bit of Leniniana (a late Soviet-era map for teenagers), recreated Lenin’s fateful journey, in October 1917, from his hideout in the Vyborg District to the Smolny Institute. Although several dozen people were with us at the start of this second Lenin walk, only five or six of us made it, several hours later, to the Smolny. I sarcastically thought at the time that this was a stark illustration of modern-day Russia’s utter lack of “revolutionary potential,” and subsequent events have only confirmed my intuition.

Like the nineteenth-century Russian revolutionary movement, Sunday Cafe was nearly always a marathon of sorts and thus prey to attrition and low attendance, especially in the “unseasonable” part of the year, which often makes up most of the year in Petersburg. But sometimes these marathons didn’t entail walking for hours “god knows where” in deplorable weather. In a memorable series of walks, Sunday Cafe saw everything there was to see on the two blocks of Pushkinskaya and three blocks of Kolomenskaya, two adjoining streets (where we both also happened to live at the time) in the city center, conducted over three Sundays in gloriously perfect summer weather. There were whole other words right under our noses, as we discovered, and to sharpen our focus Dima had printed out little tags, reading “This is good” and “This is bad,” to affix to the good and bad things we found along the way, including cars parked on sidewalks (bad) and grassroots efforts to turn parts of the downtown’s notorious labyrinth of courtyards into little oases of greenery and recreation (good).

It was also Dima who dragged me, finally, into the Soviet-era ryumochnaya (“shot bar”) right across the street from our house, the now (supposedly) “legendary” Dvadtsatochka (it was nicknamed that because it was in the commercial, first floor of house no. 20 — dvadtsat’, in Russian — on our street). For years, I had been too afraid to go in there alone, having witnessed many an outright fight there from our balcony, and seen several men removed from the establishment feet first after such scuffles or after particularly earnest drinking bouts. Dima enticed me there with the promise of cheap drinks and eats and a supremely colorful cast of regulars and staff. Although the two of us stuck out like sore thumbs — like the one and a half sociologists we were at the time — nobody minded us being there at all, while I, for one, appreciated being somewhere that the city’s burgeoning pseudo-middle class and then-upsurging hipsters still feared to tread. Unfortunately, the bar was shut down, a few years later, by the discount supermarket chain that had already taken over the old-style neighborhood grocery next door. Fittingly, just after Dvadtsatochka shut down, it served for a week as a location for a retro crime drama that was shooting in the city. Even more fittingly, my tender friend Dima persuaded the outgoing owners to give him the official sign board that had hung just inside the bar’s entrance, seemingly for decades. Among other helpful information, the board listed the categories of patrons who were entitled to be served without queuing: as I recall, they included veterans of the Great Fatherland War (World War Two) and exonerated former political prisoners, along with “invalids” (i.e., people with disabilities). Knowing how much I (literally) admired this sign, Dima presented it to me as a Christmas or New Year’s gift later that year.

It has been forty days since Dima died, which is an important milestone in the Russian mourning tradition. Today in Petersburg, Dima’s friends and loved ones convened Sunday Cafe on a route that took them to the cemetery where his remains are buried. As on the day of his funeral, over a month ago, I wish that I could have “teleported” to Petersburg to go on this walk, although, following its progress on social media in the early hours of the morning here on the other side of the planet, I couldn’t help but notice just how sad everyone looked in the photos, naturally. It is not that just Dima, had he been present, would have found a way to liven things up. (For example, by lining us against a wall and making us strike absurd poses while having our pictures taken, an entertainment he called (za)bashit’ luki.) He was one of a vanishing breed of Petersburgers, one almost never captured in the city’s world-famous “text.” The characters in the Petersburg-Leningrad writer Konstantin Vaginov‘s novels, published in the late 1920s and early 1930s, have been cited as prototypes for the city’s late-Soviet, perestroika-era and post-perestroika bohemians, and it’s true that when I came across these novels, quite by accident, in the mid-1990s, I had the distinct impression that Vaginov was describing many of my own friends and acquaintances.

But a lot happened in Vaginov’s hometown between his death in 1934 and the childhoods and youths of Leningrad’s “last Soviet generation,” in the 1960s and 1970s. Since I’m definitely not even half of a sociologist anymore, and I’m definitely not an anthropologist, I won’t venture to describe that generation at all. But I will say that its brightest and best members, especially as exemplified by Dima, are worldly, adventurous, warm, funny, open-minded and absurdly well-educated “patriots” of their city in a way that has been utterly at odds with the regime established by its now sadly most famous native son. This blog was conceived, in part, as a chronicle of the “cold civil war” between this group of Petersburgers (and Russians) and the regime, a war that now seems to have been conclusively won by the latter.

But even as I write this, solemnly and grimly, I recall an argument I had with Dima after one Sunday Cafe many years ago. We were having supper in a real cafe, a welcoming place in our neighborhood that served cheap, decent food and doubled as a venue for readings, concerts and other events (meaning that it was just the kind of “democratic,” low-profile, grassroots venture that Dima adored and was uniquely capable of discovering in every corner of the city), and there were several other V-kafeshniki with us. I must have been preachifying, as I was wont to do then, about the sad state of civil society in the face of the regime’s growing ugliness and repressiveness. Angered by my sermon, Dima said something to the effect that it wasn’t “our” (Russian? Petersburgian?) way to oppose the regime in the sense I was suggesting it should be opposed.

It’s not that now I realize he was right and I was wrong. But Dima knew a thousand times more than I did about the fine grain of Petersburg’s grassroots anti-regime and “a-regime” subcultures, and he hoped, I think, that however bad things actually were then, those communities of grassroots activists, artists and entrepreneurs would still have enough space and light and nourishment to grow into something bigger and better and more powerful that, over time, would simply shunt the regime aside and render it irrelevant.

In any case, as a friend pointed out soon after his death, there was nothing more incompatible than the lifelong pacifist Dima Vorobyev and the regime’s invasion of Ukraine and subsequent “mobilization” of Russia’s draft-age population, which, blessedly, kicked off after his death.

But there was a time — which happened to be the time when Dima and I met — when there was a hope, however faint, for a better future. The article that we wrote together reflected that strange interregnum (which was nothing of the sort, of course), and so I will close with a brief excerpt from it, below, and a plea to Dima, wherever he is, that he forgive me for writing so clumsily about him. (This is just a first draft, my friend.)

You should have known him. ||| TRR

What has caused ordinarily apolitical Petersburgers to swell the ranks of protest movements headed by political parties whose ideologies otherwise leave them suspicious or cold? The multi-pronged viral assault on the city on the part of bureaucrats and developers that we have briefly described. Strange as it may seem, in contemporary Petersburg, class conflict has been translated into opposed visions of urban renewal and historic preservation. It is precisely the preservation of Petersburg as a gigantic open-air architecture museum and the very particular places people live (with their unique ‘ensembles’ of stairwells, courtyards, archways, streets, squares, and local curiosities) that has become the point around which a more general sense of rampant social injustice has crystallised. A shattering series of crimes and indignities have been visited upon the bodies of Petersburgers in recent decades: widespread corruption, police violence, bureaucratic abuse, racist and xenophobic attacks, the dismantling of the social safety net, alcoholism and drug abuse, a high mortality rate, environmental pollution of all sorts. And yet, since Soviet times, all these risks and dangers have usually been felt to be part of life’s grim ‘common sense’ and thus inaccessible to sustained critical reflection or direct collective intervention.

Why do we see mass mobilisation in defense of the city rather than against such widespread albeit de-individualised injustices? Is it because the destruction of the city is something specific — a matter of real, lived places, places that can be seen and touched and remembered? Is it because the threat of injustice now takes the form of an alien skyscraper on a horizon that used to be peacefully uncluttered? Is it because people wake up one morning and find a fence erected around the humble square where they used to walk their dogs and play with their kids?

The answer to these questions would seem to be yes. First, the now ubiquitous and visible destruction of the city its residents are used to (which includes ‘unbecoming’ tree-filled green spaces in late-Soviet housing projects as well as neoclassical masterpieces), which we have likened to a kind of cancer or virus, has provoked an ‘anti-viral’ reaction. This reaction has taken very different forms. Future activists have followed a number of routes to mobilisation and collective action. Moreover, their first experiences of political engagement, while not always successful, have usually been ‘safe’ enough to encourage further involvement. The usually high threshold to political participation amongst ‘apathetic’ post-perestroika Russians has thus been lowered considerably.

Source: Dmitry Vorobyev & Thomas Campbell, “Anti-Viruses and Underground Monuments: Resisting Catastrophic Urbanism in Saint Petersburg,” Mute, vol. 2, no. 8 (2008)