Ukraine has found an unlikely new pressure point in its pushback against Vladimir Putin’s invasion.
In the last week, Ukraine has attacked five warehouses of the Russian e-commerce company Wildberries. At least nine people have been killed in the drone strikes, which left plumes of black smoke billowing over parts of Russia.
The attacks are part of a Ukrainian campaign to hit Russia where it hurts – at home.
Kyiv is leveraging advances in long-range drone technology to strike deep into Russian territory, hitting oil refineries, fuel storage, ports, roads and other infrastructure.
According to Ukraine, the strikes are having an impact at the highest echelons of Russian society. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky claimed on Thursday that Putin’s aides had signalled that the Russian leader was increasingly isolated over the war.
“The situation on the front, together with our long-range sanctions and mid-range strikes, is creating a new atmosphere around Putin,” Zelensky said. “A very toxic atmosphere.”
Wildberries is one of Russia’s biggest companies, with a reported turnover of 6.1tn rubles (£58bn) last year with roughly 48,000 employees. It controls nearly half of the Russian e-commerce market, according to the Financial Times.
The strikes have reportedly destroyed millions of pounds worth of stock – including from small businesses that sell on the site – and destroyed around 8 per cent of the firm’s storage sites.
A satellite view of smoke rising from a Wildberries facility in Nevinnomyssk, Russia (Photo: European Union/Copernicus Sentinel-2/Reuters)Russian newspaper Kommersant reported that it could cost the company the equivalent of £346m to rebuild.
The first strikes, on warehouses in Elektrostal near Moscow and Kotovsk in the south, may have destroyed the equivalent of Wildberries’ net profit last year in stock, the Russian edition of Forbes reported.
Zelensky said the strikes targeted logistics hubs handling dual-use electronics and drone components, and came in response to Russian attacks on Ukrainian civilian infrastructure.
Russian households feel the hit
The air strikes are likely aimed at damaging public opinion within Russia over the ongoing war. Unverified videos circulate online purportedly showing Russians distressed over the strikes.
A Ukrainian account on X shared a video showing a woman crying, claiming she was a Russian who had lost her husband and her goods in the Wildberries warehouse attack. In another, shared on Instagram and translated by the Financial Times, a seller called Tatiana Mikhaleva stands in front of a cloud of smoke saying that nearly £200,000 worth of her fur coats were burning in a warehouse.
Another Wildberries seller said on Instagram that she was in “shock” and that she understood the company “won’t reimburse us a f***ing thing’’.
Earlier this year, Wildberries changed its terms to absolve itself of compensation responsibility in the case of a drone attack, although an official has since said it will compensate the smallest sellers.
Smoke billows into the sky in St Petersburg following Ukrainian drone strikes on warehouses belonging to online retailer Wildberries (Photo: UGC/AP)Jaroslava Barbieri, a research fellow at Chatham House, said that for many Russians outside border regions, “the war has long felt like distant news. However, burning warehouses and plumes of smoke over major cities shatter the illusion of peacetime normalcy and the myth of Russia’s invincibility”.
The attacks appear to be one of the costliest commercial infrastructure attacks of the war, he said, and “social media has erupted with outpourings from sellers facing ruined livelihoods”.
“By demonstrating its ability to overwhelm Russian air defence, Ukraine directly undermines the Kremlin’s tacit social contract with its public: leave the war to the military, and your everyday life will remain untouched.”
Natia Seskuria, a senior fellow in Russian and Eurasian Security at the Royal United Services Institute, said the attacks “directly challenge one of Putin’s key promises that the war would remain distant from the daily lives of most Russians”. This could reduce public support for the invasion.
“Wildberries’ disruption strikes directly at Russian households,” she said.
The attacks also compound existing economic strain in Russia, with growth stalling under the weight of labour shortages, exhausted production capacity and reduced hydrocarbon export revenues. This leaves the Kremlin with “little fiscal or industrial slack left to absorb further shocks to consumer-facing sectors,” Seskuria said.
Ukraine’s attacks also seem to be having the desired psychological effect. “Since Ukraine launched its long-range strike campaign, a growing share of Russians have voiced support for bringing the war to an end,” Seskuria said.
“While this dissatisfaction falls short of altering Putin’s strategic calculus, rising domestic tension is precisely what the Kremlin wants to avoid.”
Confidence is dropping
The Wildberries attacks follow Ukrainian strikes on oil and gas infrastructure, which have led to fuel shortages, with authorities in Russian-occupied Crimea imposing rations on petrol.
A report this week from Oxford Economics described the fuel crisis as “arguably the most visible shock for ordinary [Russian] citizens since the mobilisation of new troops in September 2022”.
Cars queue for fuel at a gas station in Saki, Crimea after local authorities restricted fuel sales amid a supply shortage following Ukrainian attacks on logistics routes (Photo: Alexey Pavlishak/Reuters)Putin’s approval rating fell from 79 per cent to 74 per cent in May, according to a report by the Levada Center.
Confidence is also dropping among businesses. A survey of 145 enterprises across 45 Russian regions, conducted by the Institute of Economic Forecasting at the Russian Academy of Sciences in the spring, showed that corporate sentiment had worsened markedly, according to Oxford Economics.
But the extent to which this will change Putin’s position is unclear. Oxford Economics concluded that the crisis is “unlikely to alter the results of the upcoming parliamentary elections, which the ruling United Russia is likely to win.”
It also said that Russia had enough economic and political resilience to continue with the invasion, aided by higher global oil prices which have “boosted the budget and have allowed the government to begin replenishing its sovereign fund, reducing its fiscal incentive to end the war”.
Even so, Nigel Gould-Davies, a senior fellow for Russia and Eurasia at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, said that “on its present course, Russia’s war on Ukraine is likely to prove economically unsustainable”.
Demand for troops and staff in military factories has soared, while casualties and young men fleeing have shrunk the workforce, he said. Russia is now losing more troops than it can recruit, and to sustain the invasion it may have to forcibly mobilise young men to fight – something that would be deeply unpopular among the Russian public.
Like the attacks on the Wildberries facilities, this may not be enough to topple Putin, but it may force him to tighten his grip further. “The limits of the regime’s capacity to inflict violence on its own society, and of what society is prepared to tolerate, are no longer clear,” Gould-Davies said.
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