Nataliya Vasilyeva, Paul Sonne, Alina Lobzina and Oleg Matsnev
She built Russia’s answer to Amazon. She navigated wartime Kremlin politics. And she outmanoeuvred her ex-husband — the father of her seven children — in a rancorous business feud that involved a deadly shooting near Red Square.
But Tatyana Kim, billionaire co-founder of the online marketplace Wildberries and the richest woman in Russia, is now facing a far greater challenge. Ukrainian airstrikes are decimating her company’s facilities and threatening her business empire’s survival.
After months of attacks on Russian oil refineries that caused nationwide gas shortages, Ukraine has expanded its air campaign to Wildberries warehouses across Russia. Kyiv has targeted at least 23 Wildberries facilities so far, hitting them night after night since mid-July, with billions of dollars in merchandise going up in smoke. Nine of the company’s workers have been killed.
The attacks mark a new stage in the conflict, with Kyiv aggressively targeting a single private business for the first time. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is attempting to bring the war home for more Russians, hoping that rising discontent and inconvenience in Russian society will increase the pressure on President Vladimir Putin to end the war.
Kyiv has argued that Wildberries, which accounts for about 10 per cent of all Russian retail sales, is a legitimate target because it provides goods to Russian soldiers.
Kim, speaking in a video address late last month, condemned what she described as “terrorist attacks.” She said the goods Wildberries was selling were no different from what was on offer by platforms like Amazon or the Chinese giant Alibaba.
“There is no logic, common sense or rationality in the actions of the terrorists, nor can there be,” Kim said, referring to the Ukrainians. She said the “enemy” was trying to “apply pressure, destabilise and provoke panic and shock among a large number of people.”
The strikes are hurting Wildberries, and the Russian retail market in general, at a time when the country’s economy is already facing difficulties, though the damage pales in comparison to the destruction Russia has caused in Ukraine.
Consumer spending in Russia for nonfood items on marketplaces like Wildberries has plummeted in recent weeks, amid the airstrikes, according to a research note by SberIndex, a research arm of state-owned Sberbank.
Wildberries has lost up to one-third of its warehouse space and as much as 480 billion roubles’ worth of goods ($8.3 billion) in the Ukrainian attacks, according to Moscow-based Data Insight, an e-commerce consultancy.
Wildberries “has almost run out of its biggest warehouses,” said Sergei Semko, an analyst at Data Insight.
“Every single day, one warehouse after another is getting methodically destroyed,” he added.
What ultimately happens to Wildberries will depend in part on how long Ukraine’s strikes continue and how effectively and quickly Kim adapts the company’s logistics. It will also depend on what sort of redress she is able to win from the Russian state.
Born into a Russian family that is ethnically Korean, Kim is a former English teacher who launched Wildberries in 2004 along with her husband, Vladislav Bakalchuk, as a website that sold clothes from European catalogues.
Over the years, Wildberries grew into a linchpin of the Russian consumer economy, with nearly 95,000 pickup points opening across the country and more than half the nation’s population making purchases at least once a month. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine made the platform all the more important, as Western companies retreated from the market.
In 2024, Kim navigated a merger with a Russian outdoor advertising firm that was reportedly mediated by the Kremlin. The deal was denounced as a corporate raid by her husband. At one point, he showed up at the Wildberries office in Moscow with a retinue of armed Chechens, leading to a shootout that left two people dead and seven wounded. Kim and Bakalchuk finalised their divorce the following year.
Faced with a new, broader crisis, Kim, 50, is scrambling to adapt.
In her video address, she said Wildberries was moving to decentralise its distribution and redoing its logistics infrastructure as quickly as possible. In an online post Thursday, she said the company was holding meetings with regional governments and sellers, adding that “broad support measures at the federal level are also being actively developed.”
The company has made two rounds of voluntary payouts to more than 80,000 small and medium-size sellers and rolled out limited insurance that sellers can buy for drone attacks. The Russian government is also working on an aid package for Wildberries’ sellers that will involve tax breaks and grace periods, Alexei Sazanov, the deputy finance minister, said this past week.
But while sellers are finding some relief, Kim’s staff is now worried about their safety. One 24-year-old Wildberries warehouse worker from St. Petersburg, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of security concerns, said she had felt a terrible inner fear as Ukrainian drones blew up Wildberries facilities in the region.
After the one where she worked and another near her house were hit, she decided to stop working there, even though she had liked the job.
The independent entrepreneurs who sell goods through Wildberries are also feeling anxiety.
Katerina Kordik, 44, had built a business selling boho jewellery from Asia that grew successful enough to support her family of five.
She lost about a third of her inventory, including her most expensive artisan pieces, in the first Ukrainian strike on a Wildberries warehouse, near Moscow, last month. She still had many items stored elsewhere, but as more Wildberries warehouses were blown up by the day, she was unable to retrieve her merchandise.
Then, an attack this past week on a Wildberries warehouse in Tula, south of Moscow, took out half her merchandise. Today, only about 100 of her roughly 2,000 items are available for sale, she said.
For the first time in her life, she has sought the help of a psychiatrist, she said.
“If you live in a country that is at war, it would be strange to expect that it wouldn’t get you at some point,” Kordik said. She added that she was trying to take it as a lesson, “to learn to cope with situations where nothing depends on you, where you can’t do anything and you just hang out in this uncertainty.”
Kim is also facing pressure from the competition. Industry watchers are already seeing signs that sellers are fleeing to Ozon, Russia’s second-largest e-commerce platform, which has a more decentralised logistics setup and has not been singled out by Kyiv.
In many places, Wildberries is still functioning normally. The company has such a sophisticated logistics and information technology infrastructure that it is not going to fold simply because a number of its warehouses have been damaged or destroyed, said a former Wildberries executive who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of previous contractual obligations.
While Ukraine has accused Wildberries of selling military-related goods, including replacement parts for drones and navigation equipment, Kim has denounced the strikes as “attacks on peaceful people.”
What ultimately happens to Wildberries will depend in part on how long Ukraine’s strikes continue and how effectively and quickly Kim adapts the company’s logistics. It will also depend on what sort of redress she is able to win from the Russian state.
Wildberriecyeates
A review by The New York Times found that first-person-view drones were for sale on the site in early August, as were spools of fibre-optic cable, which can be attached to drones to guide them.
One listing — marked as “out of stock” — offered a drone with a dropping system for explosives. In the “questions” section, some users expressed legal concerns. Others inquired about bulk discounts, naming the Russian military unit for which they intended to buy the drones.
One review, using a Russian slang term for Ukrainian soldiers, said: “Drone is good, chops the Ukrops :)))))” The Times was unable to verify whether any of the drones were purchased or shipped.
One potential buyer asked in the questions section whether the drone could be used for the special military operation, the Kremlin’s term for the war. The seller replied, “Hello, yes.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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