Ukraine Shifts Drone Strikes From Russian Oil to Russia's Amazon, Hitting Wildberries Warehouses

Ukraine's drone campaign has found a new target: Russia's e-commerce backbone. Wildberries, the Russian retail giant often compared to Amazon, evacuated a warehouse in the central city of Ryazan on Wednesday after Ukrainian drones struck several industrial facilities nearby, according to CNBC, citing the company itself. It's the latest in a string of strikes on Wildberries logistics centers as Kyiv shifts tactics after months focused on long-range attacks against Russian energy infrastructure. For most of the war's fifth year, Ukraine's deep-strike drones went after oil refineries, fuel depots, and energy terminals, aiming to squeeze the revenue that funds Vladimir Putin's war machine. Now Kyiv is going after the plumbing of ordinary Russian commerce. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has defended the targeting choice directly, saying the warehouses hit were tied to military supply chains, providing Russian forces with drone components, navigation equipment, and other hardware, according to CNBC. That's the justification Kyiv is offering for treating a retail company like a legitimate military target: if Wildberries facilities are moving parts that end up in Russian weapons systems, they're fair game under the laws of war.

Moscow Is Already Bracing for the Fallout

The Russian government has acknowledged it may need to prop up Wildberries, Reuters reported Tuesday, citing two unnamed sources, with state-controlled bank VTB expected to play a key role in any bailout. Russia's Foreign Ministry did not respond when CNBC asked for comment. Separately, Russia's Sberbank has reportedly built a loan restructuring program specifically for Wildberries vendors, according to CNBC's reporting, amid fears that Ukraine's strikes could trigger a wave of bankruptcies among the small and medium-sized businesses that sell through the platform. Wildberries employs roughly 48,000 people directly, but the number of independent merchants who depend on its warehouses for storage and shipping is far larger, and it's those smaller operators facing the most immediate financial exposure. Wildberries isn't just a website. It's the logistics spine for a huge chunk of Russian small business, and if that spine gets disrupted enough, the pain doesn't stay confined to one company's balance sheet.

A Broader Pattern of Economic Strain Natalya Kovaleva, a

researcher in the Russia and Eurasia program at Chatham House, laid out the wider picture in comments Tuesday. Western sanctions have already fractured Russian supply chains, she said. Tax increases have squeezed business margins. Internet blackouts, often imposed by Russian authorities themselves in response to drone threats, have disrupted operations. Fuel shortages have driven up costs while adding to inflation. "Russia's business owners have largely absorbed these shocks," Kovaleva said, "but Ukrainian strikes on Wildberries present a significant new development, reflecting Kyiv's broader effort to ratchet up economic pressure on business and ordinary Russians." The theory behind Kyiv's approach is straightforward: raise the cost of doing business in Russia high enough, and internal pressure builds on Putin either to negotiate an end to the war or at least to scale back missile and drone bombardment of Ukrainian cities. Whether that theory holds up is another matter. Kovaleva was candid about the uncertainty. "It remains to be seen if this strategy will have the desired effect," she said. "Even as it becomes even harder to do business in Russia, the country's elites appear more dependent on and wary of the Kremlin than ever before." Ukraine can make Russian commerce more expensive and more chaotic. It has clearly succeeded at that much, given that Moscow is already discussing a state-backed rescue for the country's largest retailer. But Russian business elites operate under a political system where open criticism of the Kremlin carries real personal risk, and nearly 4½ years into the war, there's no public evidence that economic pain has translated into elite pressure on Putin to change course. A key question emerges: does a state-directed economy like Russia's actually transmit business pain into political pressure at the top, or does the Kremlin just absorb it through bailouts, subsidized loans, and directives to banks like VTB and Sberbank? So far, Moscow's response, propping up Wildberries with state banking muscle rather than letting it fail, suggests the Kremlin intends to buy its way past this pressure point rather than change its war policy because of it.