Ukraine’s repeated drone attacks on warehouses operated by Wildberries, Russia’s largest online retailer, represent a potentially important development in the targeting of commercial infrastructure.
The attacks have reportedly damaged around 10% of the company’s warehousing capacity, destroyed substantial quantities of stock and affected tens of thousands of independent merchants. The consequences have spread beyond Wildberries: Russian banks are considering support for borrowers affected by the losses, while the Kremlin may have to help stabilise a business regarded as important to Russia’s consumer economy.
Ukraine says Wildberries supports the Russian military by transporting sanctioned electronics, drone components and other potentially military goods. The marketplace also sells equipment such as body armour, drone accessories, and field supplies, although most of its business remains ordinary consumer retail. A Ukrainian defence industry executive has additionally highlighted the company’s relationship with state-controlled VTB and its wider importance to Russia’s banking system.
The significance therefore lies less in the fact that a retailer was attacked than in why it was selected. Wildberries is simultaneously a marketplace, fulfilment network, payments platform, and financial ecosystem. Damaging a relatively small number of major warehouses can affect merchants, lenders, consumers, tax revenues, and public confidence. This case suggests retail infrastructure can be considered according to its systemic function rather than simply its commercial classification – though it is one case, not yet evidence of a settled doctrine shift.
For Western retailers, this does not mean that shops and warehouses automatically become military targets. Economic importance alone is not sufficient to make a civilian facility a legitimate military objective under international humanitarian law. Nor is there public evidence that global retailers operating in Ukraine have been placed on Russian target lists.
Nevertheless, the Wildberries campaign could strengthen Russian narratives that retailers operating in or supporting Ukraine are part of the conflict’s logistics infrastructure. Russian state media has already attempted to use the attacks to justify strikes on Ukrainian supermarkets, despite producing no evidence of military activity at those sites.
Outside Ukraine, the most plausible retaliation would remain below the threshold of conventional military action. Russian-linked actors have already been implicated in an arson attack on an IKEA store in Vilnius, the burning of a London warehouse holding aid for Ukraine, and incendiary devices introduced into DHL and DPD parcel networks. Separately, on the cyber side, the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre has previously warned of a GRU campaign targeting Western logistics and technology organizations involved in supplying Ukraine – an espionage operation rather than physical sabotage, but evidence of the same strategic interest in the sector.
On this precedent, exposure falls into two categories rather than one. The first is operational: retailers that transport aid, supply Ukrainian state or military bodies, operate regional distribution centres in countries such as Poland or the Baltic states, or connect their Ukrainian operations directly to global identity, ERP, and logistics systems. The second is symbolic: as the IKEA case shows, a retailer can become a target simply by virtue of having exited Russia or being publicly associated with Ukraine, regardless of any operational link to the supply chain.
Retailers should map these connections, review the separation of Ukrainian and group-wide systems, review security at warehouses and parcel interfaces, and exercise compound scenarios involving physical damage, cyber disruption, and disinformation. Insurance exclusions, force majeure clauses, and liabilities to marketplace sellers also require attention.
Wildberries does not turn Western retail into a new battlefield. It does, however, demonstrate that a sufficiently interconnected retailer may now be viewed as strategic infrastructure – and targeted for the cascading disruption its failure could produce.
The author
David Honour – editor of Resilience Forward
