August 11, 2026
- 1Warehouses are burning: how is the Ukrainian drone campaign against Wildberries unfolding?
- 2Who created Wildberries and why did they succeed?
- 3Divorce amid Russian dispute between two business entities
- 4Archaic style triumphed over modernism
- 5Warehouses, mountains, and houses are burning: How Wildberries is escaping the war in Kazakhstan.
Just a few years ago, Wildberries was one of the symbols of the new Russian economy – a massive marketplace with ambitions of becoming a “Russian Amazon,” with millions of customers, thousands of sellers, and a warehouse network stretching across the country. Today, Wildberries remains a symbol of Russia, but one of the modern Russian reality, where Ukrainian drone attacks have become commonplace.
The attacks on its warehouses are already forcing the company to count its losses and restructure its logistics, seeking infrastructure outside of Russia. It’s also beginning to carefully consider how to repay the loans generously extended for the construction of new hubs.
But the story of Wildberries is interesting not only because of the war. Over the past two decades, a small family business has transformed into a model corporate empire, for which its owners themselves eventually began to fight – involving the Kremlin, Ramzan Kadyrov, Suleiman Kerimov, and even weapons.
Channel 24 investigated what’s happening with Wildberries today, who the Bakalchuks are, who Tatyana Kim is now, why a supposedly private business in Russia is still causing a showdown on par with the “crazy 90s,” and how the company is trying to escape the Russian-Ukrainian war, despite being deeply involved in it.
Warehouses are burning: how is the Ukrainian drone campaign against Wildberries unfolding?
Another night, another destroyed Wildberries warehouse. On the night of August 11, 2026, Ukrainian drones attacked a Wildberries logistics complex in the Voronezh region . The explosions were followed by a massive fire. Russians likely won’t vote for such stability in the fall, but they’re no longer being asked.
Interestingly, this isn’t just some minor warehouse, but a rather important facility. The damaged logistics complex is relatively new and only became fully operational in November 2025. It covers approximately 153,000 square meters and has a capacity of over 90 million units. Construction of this Voronezh complex cost the company nearly $135 million.
Wildberries logistics complex on fire in the Voronezh region / Photo – exilenova+
In other words, the Ukrainian drones didn’t just hit another hangar full of boxes. They struck one of the newest nodes in the entire logistics system, which Wildberries had long and carefully built around the core advantage of its business—the ability to quickly and safely move huge volumes of goods across Russia.
Voronezh became the latest link in an already long chain of attacks. Since the first massive strike on July 18, the company’s logistics centers across Russia have been targeted. Facilities in the Tambov, Moscow, Leningrad, Samara, Tula, and other regions burned or shut down. On August 7, drones carried out a second attack in a relatively short period of time, targeting a warehouse in Yekaterinburg, located almost 2,000 kilometers from Ukraine.
As of early August 2026, at least 20 attacks had been carried out on Wildberries facilities , and the total area of lost or disabled warehouse capacity exceeded 1.2 million square meters. In other words, approximately one-fifth of the company’s entire warehouse infrastructure was lost or disabled.
Moreover, the consequences are already being felt by more than just marketplace owners. Ordinary sellers have been hit the hardest. Relatively small businesses are losing entire batches of goods, private pickup points are left without new supplies, and the company itself is forced to reroute shipments and restructure logistics, which further increases costs.
At the same time, it was precisely this “local” nature of the supply chain, where a person could open a pickup point in the Russian hinterland for little money, that was the key idea that allowed the company to soar on the Russian marketplace scene. This means that Wildberries is difficult to destroy in a single blow, as it is a huge digital platform with thousands of sellers and pickup points across Russia.
However, despite its dispersed nature, this business model relies heavily on large-scale physical facilities—those warehouses. Individual sellers don’t store tons of Chinese phone cases, vibrators, or Putin t-shirts in their apartments. Storage and transportation are handled by the company itself, so it’s essential to consistently decommission the warehouses that underpin the entire business.
And now Wildberries’ problem is no longer just the cost of burned goods, separate compensation for sellers, or changes to logistics routes. The company is facing a far more pressing question: how to maintain a system built to effectively monopolize the needs of vast Russia, when the territory itself is gradually becoming the company’s primary risk.
Who created Wildberries and why did they succeed?
But what’s most interesting is that this business “miracle,” which today accounts for the lion’s share of Russia’s budget, certainly didn’t originate in Kremlin offices or through government contracts. At least not at first.
In 2004, Tatyana Bakalchuk (now Kim), an English teacher on maternity leave (she has seven children), and her husband, Vladislav, who had amassed his start-up capital selling computers in the 1990s and had some knowledge of IT, began selling clothing from the catalogs of the German company Otto online.
The business, named Wildberries because it simply sounded good, grew rapidly, practically in tandem with the development of the Russian internet. So, rather quickly—from a home-based business where goods had to be stored literally in their own apartment—the couple gradually transformed “Yagodki” into the largest marketplace in the country.
At the same time, there are other marketplaces in Russia, quite large companies like Ozon. They began their journey into online retail even earlier than Wildberries. However, the key difference with Wildberries was that the Bakalchuks weren’t simply trying to create a Russian equivalent of Amazon or Alibaba.
Besides warehouses and sorting centers, the company’s main advantage was its vast network of pickup points, which ordinary people opened in their provinces. Incidentally, Nova Poshta was doing the same thing in Ukraine at the same time.
For Russia, with its eleven time zones, this proved to be a near-perfect model. Customers didn’t have to wait for a courier or travel to a shopping mall or neighboring city with a large pickup point. The order was delivered to the nearest village or town, and the pickup point itself was often located in a regular grocery store somewhere on the ground floor of a residential building.
By the mid-2020s, Wildberries had already transformed into an entire ecosystem, without which the average Russian couldn’t even imagine online ordering. The company controlled a vast logistics network, worked with millions of sellers, and effectively became one of the main channels through which Russians buy and sell goods. Tatyana Kim officially became Russia’s richest woman (unofficially, Alina Kabaeva is the richest woman), and then the problems began.
Divorce amid Russian dispute between two business entities
In Russia, large private businesses can remain truly private only for a limited period of time. Therefore, such a huge company could not escape the attention of both the state and criminal elements, which are practically synonymous in Russian reality. And that’s exactly what happened to Wildberries. And it happened quickly and unexpectedly.
In June 2024, Wildberries announced a merger with Russ Group, Russia’s largest outdoor advertising operator, owned by businessman Robert Mirzoyan and billionaire senator from Dagestan Suleiman Kerimov.
The merger itself immediately raised suspicions that it went beyond the bounds of traditional business activity, as it immediately began to resemble a marriage between a bulldog and a rhinoceros. At the time, Russian Forbes valued VB at over $7 billion, and Russ Group at roughly half that. Experts cautiously hinted that even this estimate was too high and the advertisers’ true value was somewhere around 80 billion rubles, or less than $1 billion. But this in no way deterred Tatyana Bakalchuk, who once again became Mrs. Kim and, obediently, as if following the Pied Piper of Hamelin, went through with the deal, leaving her husband and business partner behind.
Everything soon became clear. Vladimir Putin himself supported these processes. A “folder” from Suleiman Kerimov landed on his desk, containing a letter from Kim and Mirzoyan, explaining that the merger would create a superpowerful monster that would destroy SWIFT, expose it to all sorts of sanctions, and, in general, become the flagship of a sovereign Russian tech economy—no longer like Amazon, but a full-fledged “Russian Google.”
The process of the merger of the smaller and the larger was actively supported by the Russian authorities, with Maxim Oreshkin, the deputy head of the presidential administration, overseeing the merger. Furthermore, the son of a Putin administration official, Alexei Gromov, had served as Russ’s deputy director since 2021, and traces of VTB, the Russian state-owned bank headed by Andrey Kostin, began to be seen in the deal itself.
Meanwhile, things were going badly for the Bakalchuk family. The couple was already divorcing, and their versions of what was happening to the company were increasingly divergent. Tatyana claimed that Vladislav owned only about 1% of Wildberries and no longer controlled the once-family business. He, for his part, called the merger with Russ a hostile takeover and claimed that his wife was effectively being stripped of control of the company.
Then Ramzan Kadyrov entered the picture and, in keeping with the norms of crime films about the “crazy 90s,” offered Vladislav Bakalchuk his support in the distribution of the company’s assets. Kadyrov publicly sided with him, calling the deal with Russ a “hostile takeover,” and accused people associated with the advertising group of attempting to seize Wildberries from its rightful owner.
Russians wouldn’t be Russians if they didn’t turn a corporate and family conflict into a full-blown criminal showdown. So Tatyana Kim turned to another influential businessman and oligarch, Suleiman Kerimov. As a result, one of Russia’s largest private businesses found itself at the center of a struggle between the Bakalchuk family, the people from “Russ,” the Kremlin, Kerimov, and Kadyrov.
What happened next would be considered absurd in most countries, but seemed almost organic to Russian cultural identity. On September 18, 2024, Vladislav Bakalchuk arrived at Wildberries’ Moscow office with a group of about two dozen people (from Kadyrov), known in Ukraine as “titushki.” He claimed he had come to negotiate the company’s future.
Tatyana Kim herself stated that no meeting had been planned and that her ex-husband had attempted to force his way into the office. A skirmish broke out between two armed groups, followed by gunshots in the very center of Moscow, not far from the Kremlin—the same Kremlin that for decades has been telling Russians that only it can save the country from a return to the horrific 1990s.
Ultimately, two security guards were killed, seven more were injured, and more than two dozen participants in the conflict were detained by police. In other words, the struggle for a digital empire, which once began with clothing sales through a home depot, culminated in a shootout almost under the windows of the Russian presidential administration. Kadyrov then rushed to declare bloody vengeance on Kerimov, but quickly cooled down and stepped aside. It seems he was quickly and clearly explained that a conflict between two de facto feudal lords is not the same as a confrontation between a defiant, passionate man and a submissive ” sucker .”
Archaic style triumphed over modernism
There’s something symbolic about this whole situation. Wildberries was one of the symbols of the “new” Russia, defined by fast internet, smartphones, marketplaces, cashless payments, and billion-dollar turnover. But when the question of who would own this empire arose, the rules of the game turned out to be much older than Wildberries itself.
The family business turned into a corporate war, and the corporate war quickly acquired a political and even criminal dimension, in which the “grown-ups” intervened, making the previous participants in this scheme redundant.
Ultimately, the merger with Russ took place, and the new company, Wildberries & Russ, became the de facto successor to the old structure. In 2025, a court upheld the legality of the transaction, dismissing Vladislav Bakalchuk’s claims. The battle for Wildberries ended not in negotiations between shareholders, but in a system where the final say rests with those with the best connections to the government and security forces.
The irony is that now this empire itself is forced to reckon with another force. Not the Kremlin or Kadyrov, but Ukrainian drones. And if the Bakalchuks’ main threat once was the question of who would own Wildberries, now the company itself faces a much more practical question: where to store the goods so they don’t burn down along with the warehouses?
Warehouses, mountains, and houses are burning: How Wildberries is escaping the war in Kazakhstan.
For Wildberries, the problem of the Ukrainian attacks isn’t just the destroyed goods and damaged buildings. Far worse, it’s called into question the very logic on which the company has built its empire for the past twenty years.
The marketplace operates thanks to its scale and the initiative of individual users. The more goods a company can collect in one large logistics center, the cheaper it is to sort, store, and distribute them across the country. This is why Wildberries has invested billions of rubles, financed by loans, into massive warehouses, often hundreds of thousands of square meters in size.
But such a business, although it sells goods in the “everything for the military” category, is in fact completely unsuited to the war unleashed by Vladimir Putin and therefore suffers from the “commotion .” This concentration has become a very convenient target for long-range strikes. A single strike on a large complex can affect the income of thousands of retailers and destroy millions of dollars’ worth of merchandise. But if such strikes become systematic and literally everything burns, the company is forced to find a way out.
Following a series of successful attacks from Ukraine, Wildberries found a way to mitigate risks in neighboring Kazakhstan. In late July, it was announced that the company was seeking approximately 100,000 square meters of warehouse space in Kazakhstan. According to Russian media, the company is willing to lease a significant portion of the country’s available modern warehouse space.
And it seems this is the only possible solution, because to prevent logistics hubs from burning, they need to be moved far away from the Russian-Ukrainian war, where in today’s reality the concept of “rear” can only exist far beyond the border.
But Kazakhstan isn’t a magic wand capable of solving all problems at once. The neighboring country simply doesn’t have sufficient large, modern logistics facilities. This means Wildberries will either have to compete with local companies for existing space or build new ones. Both options cost money and, most importantly, complicate logistics.
For sellers, this means longer product journeys. For buyers, it means potentially longer and more expensive delivery times. For Wildberries itself, it means additional costs for transportation, sorting, and customs procedures.
And all this isn’t being done according to the classic Western business approach, where a company moves part of its infrastructure abroad after discovering a new, promising market there. No, it’s simply that some of its former capacities are now too vulnerable to Ukrainian attacks.
And herein lies the key point: Wildberries isn’t leaving Russia entirely. The Russian market remains the company’s primary market, and completely relocating its entire physical infrastructure abroad is simply impossible. Wildberries is simply starting to create backup supply chains outside the country where it sells most of its products and conducts its core business.
However, there’s another key issue. The war is gradually changing Wildberries’ relationships with its sellers. The company has already attempted to legally limit its liability for goods damaged by drone strikes. For the marketplace, this is a way to shift some of the risk to its partners. For sellers, it’s a reminder that they will have to pay for most war damages themselves.
And this can have a long-term impact. If a seller realizes their product could burn out in a warehouse, with incomplete or no compensation, they begin to factor this risk into the price or seek alternative distribution channels. This is especially problematic for Wildberries, as the marketplace’s strength has always been its large number of sellers and the variety of affordable products available.
Ukrainian drone attacks against Wildberries are unlikely to destroy the company itself. It has too much scale, a large customer base, and sufficient resources to restructure. However, the economic impact of war is often measured by more than just what is destroyed.
Wildberries spent twenty years building a system optimized for the vast Russian Federation. Now, however, it has to spend money to ensure that the system isn’t overly dependent on Russia.
“Individual sellers don’t store tons of Chinese phone cases, vibrators, or Putin t-shirts in their apartments.”
😂😂😂