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.”
Occasionally but rarely. And Ukraine is doing some funky stuff https://kyivindependent.com/expressly-prohibited-ukraines-largest-defense-firm-illegally-stored-weapons-near-civilian-targets-in-vyshneve-zelensky-says/
If Russia was systematically targeting large civilian infrastructure the civilian vs military casualty rate of the war would look a lot different than it does now. There’s a point to be made for the oil refineries but online shopping warehouses is just nonsense.