Putin LOSES HIS MIND as Ukraine OBLITERATES 18 More WILDBERRIES Warehouses
Russia’s sprawling e-commerce logistics network is burning at a pace that has become difficult for Moscow to hide. Over the past two days alone, two more Wildberries warehouses inside Russia have been struck by Ukrainian drones, bringing the total to 18 warehouses hit in just 13 days. The company, often described as Russia’s answer to Amazon, has become one of the most consistent targets of Ukraine’s deep-strike campaign — and the fires themselves, fueled by the same cardboard packaging that keeps next-day deliveries running, have proven strikingly difficult to contain once they start.
Why These Fires Burn So Intensely
Footage circulating from recent strikes shows warehouses engulfed in flames well beyond what a typical industrial fire might produce, and the explanation appears to lie in the buildings’ contents rather than any special munition involved. Like Amazon, Wildberries relies heavily on cardboard packaging to ship goods across the country — and cardboard, stacked floor to ceiling across hundreds of thousands of square meters of warehouse space, functions as ready-made fuel once a fire takes hold. A single drone strike igniting a section of a warehouse can trigger a blaze that consumes the entire structure, leaving little behind but a burned-out shell. Recent video from a warehouse struck just two days ago shows exactly that outcome: a facility reduced to charred wreckage once the flames finally died down.
A New “Bingo” Card for Russian Infrastructure
Ukrainian observers tracking the campaign have adopted a grimly playful shorthand for it: warehouse bingo. The concept follows a pattern established earlier in the war around Russian oil refineries, when Ukrainian drone strikes on refining facilities became frequent enough that trackers began marking off targets on a bingo-style card as each was hit. Now that Russia’s refining sector has absorbed sustained damage over many months, attention has shifted to its warehouse network, with a similar tracking card ranking Wildberries’ largest facilities by size.
According to that tracking, the single largest facility — located in the Moscow region — has not yet been struck, though few expect that to remain the case for long given the pace of the campaign. The second-largest facility, also in the Moscow region, has already been completely destroyed, along with the third and fourth largest. A fifth facility has been hit but not yet destroyed, described as damaged rather than eliminated. A sixth has also been destroyed. In total, out of Wildberries’ 24 largest warehouses by size, ten have reportedly been destroyed and three more damaged.
The Numbers Behind the Campaign
The cumulative toll on Wildberries’ operations is substantial. Since the current wave of strikes began on July 18, drone attacks have reportedly knocked out more than 15 percent of the company’s total warehouse capacity in Russia. At least eight Wildberries facilities, with a combined footprint of roughly 860,000 square meters — an area comparable to, and by some estimates roughly double, the size of Monaco — have been struck, accounting for an estimated 15.4 percent of the company’s overall warehouse capacity nationwide.
According to Russian media coverage of the campaign, the most significant losses have come from the two largest Moscow-region facilities and a warehouse in the Ryazan region. Fires have also broken out at additional Wildberries facilities in St. Petersburg and in Russian-occupied Simferopol, extending the campaign’s reach beyond mainland Russia into occupied Crimean territory as well.
A Geography That Favors Ukraine
Mapping the strikes reveals a pattern rooted in Russia’s own demographic and economic geography. Despite the country’s vast size, the overwhelming majority of Russia’s population — and, correspondingly, its economic infrastructure, including warehouses, logistics hubs and major businesses — is concentrated in the western portion of the country, closer to the European side of Russia than to its sprawling eastern territories in Siberia and the Far East. That concentration works to Ukraine’s operational advantage: targets clustered in western Russia sit considerably closer to Ukrainian territory and within easier reach of Ukraine’s drone fleet than facilities located thousands of kilometers to the east. This isn’t to say eastern Russia is unpopulated or economically irrelevant, but the sheer density of valuable targets in the west helps explain why this particular campaign has concentrated so heavily in a relatively compact geographic band.
Public Reaction Inside Russia
The visible destruction has not gone unnoticed by ordinary Russians living near affected facilities. Footage circulating on social media shows residents reacting with open frustration and anger as they watch warehouses near their homes go up in flames — a reaction that would likely be familiar to residents of any city watching major infrastructure burn nearby, regardless of the broader political context. For a population that has, for much of the war, remained largely insulated from its direct consequences, watching a familiar local landmark reduced to rubble appears to be landing differently than more distant battlefield news.
Russian social media has also produced a wave of dark humor around the crisis, with some users floating the idea of moving warehouses underground to protect them from further strikes. One widely shared response to that suggestion joked that Vladimir Putin might need to make room in his own bunker to store some of the company’s inventory — a comment reflecting both the scale of public awareness around the strikes and a degree of skepticism, evident in the joke itself, about whether ordinary citizens would ever be granted access to whatever protective infrastructure Russia’s leadership maintains for itself.
Part of a Broader Pattern
The Wildberries campaign fits into a larger trajectory in Ukraine’s approach to long-range strikes over the course of the war. Ukrainian forces spent much of the preceding period targeting Russia’s oil refining infrastructure, a campaign that inflicted substantial and repeated damage on refineries across the country and contributed to fuel shortages and rationing in multiple Russian regions. With that campaign having already degraded a significant share of Russian refining capacity, attention has shifted toward logistics infrastructure that, while nominally civilian and commercial, plays a documented role in distributing goods — including, according to earlier reporting on the topic, military-adjacent supplies — across Russian territory.
That dual-use character has made Wildberries’ warehouses a target that Ukrainian officials can justify on operational grounds, even as the strikes simultaneously generate the kind of visible, disruptive damage that reaches into the daily commercial life of ordinary Russians in a way that battlefield reporting from Ukraine typically has not. Whether the primary intent behind these strikes is disrupting military logistics, straining Russia’s banking and business sector — Wildberries reportedly carries substantial debt owed to major Russian banks — or simply making the costs of the war more visible and inconvenient for the Russian public, the practical effect has been the same: a rapidly growing list of destroyed or damaged facilities, tracked almost sportively by outside observers, and a steady stream of footage showing some of Russia’s largest commercial buildings reduced to smoking ruins.
What Comes Next
With ten of the top 24 facilities already destroyed and several more damaged, the pace of this campaign shows no clear sign of slowing. If the pattern established with Russia’s refining sector is any indication — where sustained strikes over an extended period produced significant, cumulative degradation of national capacity — Wildberries’ warehouse network may be facing a similarly prolonged and costly campaign, one already reshaping how the company operates and how visibly the war’s costs are landing inside Russia’s own borders.
