Standing in front of a vast warehouse engulfed in flames outside Moscow, Tatyana Mikhailova watched as her entire stock of 4,000 fur coats, bought months in advance for the winter season, burned.
“It’s not just a warehouse that’s burning,” Mikhailova said in a video she shared on Instagram. “It’s the time you’ve invested, the immense stress you’ve endured, your money, and your last bit of hope. All I feel is emptiness.”
Mikhailova is one of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Russian entrepreneurs whose small businesses have been devastated by a wave of Ukrainian drone strikes targeting warehouses belonging to Wildberries, Russia’s largest e-commerce company and the country’s answer to Amazon.
Ukrainian drones have hit at least nine Wildberries warehouses on four of the past seven days, striking logistics centres from southern Russia to the outskirts of St Petersburg, killing at least nine people and destroying inventory worth billions of dollars.
Most of the losses fall not on Wildberries itself but on the independent merchants whose stock was stored in the warehouses.
Maria, who asked for her surname to be withheld, added: “I’m raising a child on my own and I’ve lost everything. How am I supposed to stay calm? Yesterday you had a peaceful, normal life. You could make plans. Today I have nothing.”
Looks like it is the norm in modern warfare to inflict maximum economic damage by targeting civilian facilities. It is hard to ask Ukraine not to do it when Russia has done it Ukraine (the victim of Russia invasion) since 2022.
But is not just Russia and Ukraine that attack civilian infrastructures. The US is doing it, Israel is doing it, Iran is doing it, Saudi have done it, Syria has done it.