The Purple Empire Under Drones: Wildberries is the Future of Russia After Oil, But Also the Dark Side of Its Algorithmic Capitalism

Wildberries’ vast warehouses were at once shops, distribution centres, banks, workplaces and the final link connecting millions of Russian customers with an enormous number of small sellers. When Ukrainian drones struck logistics hubs in Kotovsk and Elektrostal on 18 July, the flames consumed more than goods stacked on shelves. Eight workers were killed and dozens injured, while the attacks spread over the following days to Krasnodar, Nevinnomyssk, St Petersburg and the Leningrad region. By 30 July, at least seven warehouses had been badly damaged, roughly 10% of the company’s storage capacity had been destroyed or put out of service, and the death toll had risen to at least nine.

The choice of target marks a new phase in Ukrainian strikes deep inside Russia. Refineries, airfields, weapons factories and railway junctions have long been on the target list, but Wildberries belongs to a new category. It is part of the infrastructure of everyday life, the system through which people buy clothes, household appliances, medicines, cosmetics, pet food and thousands of other products. Kyiv claims that the logistics centres were used to supply the Russian military with drone components and other equipment, something both the Kremlin and the company deny. Yet Ukraine’s justification has not been limited to military logistics. A representative of one of Ukraine’s leading arms manufacturers has openly discussed Wildberries’ credit exposure and the possibility that an attack on the company could trigger problems throughout the Russian banking system.

In other words, the objective is no longer simply to prevent a particular box from reaching a military unit. It is to provoke a chain reaction in which a burned warehouse becomes a defaulted loan, a tax shortfall, a broken supply line and a source of political discontent. The war is moving out of industrial zones and military bases and into the realm of everyday consumption. Ukrainian drones are seeking to do to Russians what Russian attacks have already done to millions of Ukrainians: destroy the sense that there is still a safe rear area somewhere, insulated from the battlefield.

To understand the significance of these attacks, it is necessary to look beyond the Western nickname "Russia’s Amazon", which is both useful and misleading. Wildberries processes around 20 million orders a day, while its warehouses cover approximately three million square metres. Collecting a parcel from one of its purple pick-up points has become as routine for many Russians as going to a shop. Wildberries and its largest competitor, Ozon, together with smaller platforms, facilitate the sale of goods and services worth the equivalent of roughly 8.5% of Russia’s GDP. Directly or indirectly, the platforms provide work for around four million people, more than 5% of the Russian labour force.

It began far more modestly. Former English teacher Tatyana Kim and her then-husband Vladislav Bakalchuk launched Wildberries from their apartment in the Moscow region in 2004. The company rode the expansion of internet access, rising consumption and the realities of Russia’s immense geography, where traditional retail networks had never been able to serve major cities, provincial towns and remote regions equally well. Kim eventually became Russia’s richest woman, with Forbes estimating her fortune at around $7 billion. Her biography acquired the status of a home-grown entrepreneurial legend: proof that a vast business empire could be built outside oil, gas, metals and the well-connected privatisations of the 1990s.

Wildberries became even more important after the outbreak of the war and the imposition of Western sanctions. The departure of some foreign companies, the disruption of established supply routes and reduced access to international services created even more room for domestic digital platforms. Russian online retail grew by 28% in 2025, reaching 11.5 trillion roubles, while Wildberries became the principal link between more than one million registered sellers and customers spread across eleven time zones. As high interest rates, a strong rouble, sanctions and military expenditure weigh on the wider economy, e-commerce remains one of the few major areas of civilian growth.

The Kremlin saw more in this development than a successful retail business. Maxim Oreshkin, one of Vladimir Putin’s most influential economic advisers, described digital platforms as a new form of planned economy. Unlike the Soviet Gosplan, where officials compiled production tables for steel, tractors and shoes, the modern plan is produced by algorithms. In real time, they can see what people are buying, where goods are in short supply, how much warehouse space is required and which route a parcel should take. The larger the platform becomes, Oreshkin argued, the lower its relative coordination costs and the greater its economic efficiency.

There is intellectual appeal in that comparison, but also a considerable amount of ideological fog. Wildberries’ algorithm can calculate how many pairs of winter boots will be sold in Perm, where a warehouse should be opened and which seller should be favoured in search results. But it cannot decide for itself that Russia must develop a new generation of machine tools, medicines, passenger aircraft or microprocessors. It plans the circulation of goods, not the long-term structure of the economy. Its criteria are not politically defined social needs, but turnover, delivery speed, margins and customer retention.

Even so, it would be a mistake to underestimate the strategic value of such a system. Across a country the size of Russia, logistics is almost as important as production. Through Wildberries, a small company in a remote region can reach customers it could never have found on its own. The platform collects data, processes payments, builds warehouses and connects cities that would otherwise remain at the margins of the national market. In a country under Western financial and technological pressure, such a network begins to resemble sovereign infrastructure, even if it formally remains in private hands.

That ambition became clear in 2024, when Wildberries merged with Russ, Russia’s largest outdoor advertising operator. The stated objective was not merely to sell more products inside Russia. The new RWB Group was intended to build a high-tech commercial platform combining e-commerce, advertising, finance, media, logistics and industrial services. The project was conceived for Russia, the post-Soviet space and the Global South, from Asia and the Middle East to Africa, India and China—a potential market of almost six billion people. The merger received the Kremlin’s blessing, showing that the authorities no longer regarded the new company as an ordinary retailer.

The dispute that soon erupted around the deal revealed how much was at stake. Bakalchuk described the merger as an asset grab, Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov became involved, and in September 2024 the confrontation ended in a shootout outside Wildberries’ Moscow headquarters that left two people dead and seven wounded. On the surface, it was a marital and ownership dispute. Behind it, however, lay a struggle for control of one of Russia’s most important new pieces of economic infrastructure.

After the merger, the RWB Group continued expanding far beyond e-commerce. It acquired Magas Airport in Ingushetia, a stake in Uzbekistan’s postal service UzPost, the Rive Gauche cosmetics chain and the Fun&Sun tour operator. In spring 2026, it bought three ride-hailing and delivery companies, putting it in direct competition with Yandex. During 2025, the group recorded net profits of 175 billion roubles and invested 310 billion roubles in logistics, information technology and new projects.

Of particular importance is its agreement with the state-owned bank VTB, which in May agreed to acquire an initial 5% stake in WB Bank, with the option of increasing its share later. Wildberries gained access to the branches, cash machines, loans and other products of Russia’s second-largest bank, while VTB gained access to the platform’s technology and tens of millions of active users. Together, VTB branches and Wildberries pick-up points are intended to form the largest physical financial and retail network in Russia. It is an extraordinarily ambitious attempt to create a domestic combination of Amazon, Alibaba, a bank, an advertising network, a delivery service and a digital identity provider.

This is precisely where the dividing line lies between genuine economic diversification and its attractive illusion. Wildberries creates jobs outside the energy sector, broadens the tax base, develops domestic financial and logistics technology, and makes it easier for small companies to do business. But the platform cannot replace the revenue generated by oil and gas exports. It largely moves goods and money around within the existing economy, while many of the products sold through it still depend on imports, Chinese industry and the purchasing power of Russian households.

Russia’s problem is also that Wildberries has become too important. The logic of the platform demands concentration: vast warehouses, automated centres, huge quantities of goods under one roof and as few steps as possible between seller and customer. In peacetime, such a system reduces costs. In wartime, it creates highly visible, highly flammable and extraordinarily expensive targets. What was yesterday the pinnacle of logistics efficiency is today a coordinate in the navigation system of a Ukrainian drone.

The consequences of the attacks are therefore serious. Sberbank has reported that around 300 companies connected to Wildberries have already requested loan restructuring. Russia’s largest bank is considering increasing its provisions for potential losses as the credit quality of online retailers and their suppliers deteriorates.

Behind the language of banking lie very real individual stories. A pet-food seller from St Petersburg, for example, told Reuters that she had lost stock worth around 1.5 million roubles in the fires. Wildberries initially gave her just 8,000 roubles in credit that could be spent on advertising on the platform. The company said it would need at least 30 days to assess the full extent of the damage, reduced some storage fees and promised assistance to affected sellers. The Russian government, meanwhile, is considering loans from state banks, tax relief and subsidies, with VTB likely to play a central role in the programme.

Before the public’s eyes, a private company is being transformed into an institution the state can no longer allow to fail. This is not merely a story about rescuing a billionaire or a corporate balance sheet. Behind Wildberries stand tens of thousands of small businesses, warehouse workers, couriers and households that rely on the platform for essential supplies. State intervention may therefore be necessary. At the same time, it reveals how much power has been concentrated inside a system that increasingly resembles public infrastructure, yet remains privately managed and governed by algorithms over which sellers, workers and customers have almost no control.

For Ukraine, that concentration is precisely what makes the company attractive as a target. Denys Shtilerman, co-founder and chief designer of Ukrainian arms manufacturer Fire Point, described Wildberries as an exceptionally large debtor and argued that its collapse could pull down banks, including VTB. Under Russian accounting standards, the company has reported around 830 billion roubles in debt. Shtilerman is not a government official, and his words should not automatically be treated as official Ukrainian strategy. But they reveal the thinking of at least part of Ukraine’s military-industrial community: the explosion is supposed to travel from the warehouse into the banks, the state budget and the public mood.

The attacks are unlikely to bring down either Wildberries or the Russian economy. Losing 10% of warehouse capacity is a serious blow, but the company can redistribute goods, build new centres and receive state assistance. Russia still possesses the financial, construction and logistics capacity required for reconstruction. Yet the true success of Ukraine’s strategy would not be measured by an immediate collapse. It is enough to force Russia to spend more on air defences, insurance, reserve storage facilities, dispersed inventories and the protection of thousands of civilian sites. Every such expense diverts resources from some other part of the state.

Wildberries was supposed to demonstrate what Russia might look like after the age of oil dominance, Western platforms and foreign financial networks. It was never a complete alternative to the old resource economy, but it represented something Russia rarely creates: a civilian technological system capable of expanding across borders, connecting small producers and building its own financial and logistics infrastructure. Now its warehouses are burning precisely because it became important.

Here lies the deepest contradiction of Russia’s wartime economy. The state is attempting to fight a long and increasingly expensive war while simultaneously building technological sovereignty and preserving a normal life for its population. Ukraine, with the fullest possible backing of the West, is trying to prove that all three cannot be sustained without an ever-rising price. The greatest danger for Moscow is therefore not merely the loss of goods, but the possibility that the war will begin devouring precisely those parts of the economy that were supposed to represent the future that would come after it. And the greatest tragedy of such a strategy remains painfully ordinary: before economic pressure reaches the people at the top, it passes through warehouse workers, small traders, debtors and families who receive nothing from grand geopolitical schemes except bills they can no longer afford to pay.