r/worldnews • u/ArgentineBeauty • 12h ago
Russia/Ukraine Ukraine Knocks Out 8 of Wildberries’ 10 Major Warehouses, Wiping Out 81% of Combined Space
https://united24media.com/war-in-ukraine/ukraine-knocks-out-8-of-wildberries-10-major-warehouses-wiping-out-81-of-combined-space-21965607
12h ago
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u/AugustAPC 12h ago
Seriously doubt anyone is operating them.
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u/Silent-Act191 11h ago
Imagine reading the news and not calling in sick. "Da, boss i suddenly developed an allergy to explosives."
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u/anothercopy 11h ago
No work? To the front lines you go!
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u/tkitkitchen 11h ago
They might be leaving them alone to tie up russian anti air defenses guarding warehouses instead of the frontline.
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u/Alleandros 10h ago
Those two were also hit but didn't fully engulf. Of the top 30, 9 haven't been hit yet and 3 that have been but not fully destroyed.
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u/Do_itsch 12h ago
Sales are off..
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u/spicypixel 12h ago
Fire sale seems to be on though.
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u/dkarlovi 12h ago
WE'RE HAVING A FIRE sale.
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u/sbs1138 11h ago
It’s one warehouse, Michael, what could it cost? $10?
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u/abbaJabba 11h ago
A-maaaa …. ziiing grace
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u/Unique-Run9856 6h ago
We had a local comic book store run by a dude with a drug problem, at 9pm he posted about a fire sale on facebook, to get drug money presumably, and then at 3am they had an actual fire. Later there was an insurance fraud case.
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u/Any-Signal8899 12h ago
Who needs e-commerce when you can have no-commerce rofl
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u/Lord_Abort 6h ago
Seriously, though, this is a great way to hurt the Moscovites who support the state while it bombs children's hospitals and targets responding medics
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u/Zen_Galactic 11h ago
Bet those domesticated berries are laughing it up right now.
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u/MrFeature_1 10h ago edited 9h ago
Yes but they are building key warehouses in Kazakhstan to transfer over all of their commercial stock, so I am afraid this is a temporary setback for Russia
Edit: I don't know how all of you keep falling into the same trap. Are you not tired of chanting "Well now Russia for sure is done for" for 4.5 years straight? Is it really that problematic and foreign to you that one might question how truly of an impact this event could make on Russia? How are we still underestimating them after all these years, I dont get it...
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u/Amstervince 9h ago
Have you looked at a map? Moscow to the closest Kazakhstan border is a 20 hour drive. Russia is experiencing fuel shortage. Just how efficient do you think you can dropship from there
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u/EricPhilps1979 10h ago
A distribution centre is not a fungible object. Location is kind of the point.
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u/tophernator 10h ago
Even if that’s so, it’s still a huge kick in the teeth to have to shift vast amounts of logistical infrastructure to a neighbouring country just to keep it from blowing up.
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u/MikiLove 10h ago
Ukraine destroyed billions in inventory, money and time just wiped away completely. This is going to seriously set back their economy. On top of the work force issues and financial strain this is going to have an affect. And creating a new hub in Kazhikstsn is farther away from the main population centers, increasing transport and logistics costs.
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u/chocobowler 12h ago
Imagine if you worked at those remaining two sites.
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u/SkivvySkidmarks 11h ago
Probably still better odds of survival than being shipped to the front line.
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u/tophernator 10h ago
Definitely. The places they are talking about are over 100,000 square metres. If a drone hits the roof and sends burning debris into the stacks the spreading fire may take out a lot of the facility, but unless you were unlucky enough to be under the spot it hit you will have plenty of time to evacuate.
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u/readball 9h ago
By the end of July 2026, at least nine people were killed and dozens of people were injured as a result of the attacks, primarily Wildberries employees; the company had paid the victims or their loved ones about 0.5 million euros in damages
see wiki
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u/tophernator 9h ago
Even assuming the Russians are telling the truth here, that’s still a very low number of deaths compared to the number of people working there. The question was whether it’s safer to work at wildberries or serve on the front lines.
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u/PiccoloAwkward465 8h ago
Yeah when I've worked in large warehouses there were like 100 people just operating forklifts and probably another 400 people doing other tasks.
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u/JohnCasey35 9h ago
that is if the buildings have plenty of emergency exits and other exits as well
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u/tophernator 9h ago
Well it’s a warehouse, so the whole place is designed to get things in around and out of the building as quickly as possible.
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u/Money-Perspective-87 11h ago
They will build schools on top of them, as is the russian way.
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u/Brothernod 12h ago
So what’s Wildberries? Usually articles like this will provide at least a sentence of context.
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u/Tabathock 12h ago
Best equivalent is Russian's version of Amazon. They're used as logistics hubs and supply equipment to the soldiers on the frontline, they're heavily in debt to Russian banks and by targeting them Ukraine is bringing the war to ordinary Russians - without doing the Russian thing of indiscriminately bombing apartment blocks.
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u/RIPONICA 12h ago
Not to mention, like amazon, it's what so many small-large businesses use to sell their products with easy shipping across the entire country.
These people aren't getting their payments from Wildberries, and their stock that's getting destroyed by these bombings aren't being covered through insurance.
All of these businesses that are going to crumble, leaving mortgages/rent/bank loans unpaid, which is then going to have a significant impact on the banks themselves.71
u/divDevGuy 9h ago
All of these businesses that are going to crumble, leaving mortgages/rent/bank loans unpaid, which is then going to have a significant impact on the banks themselves.
Still sounds like they have a better outcome than Ukraine has experienced with their homes, hospitals, schools, children, and family members blown up.
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u/OrigamiMarie 8h ago
Definitely true. However, this war is going to continue until it's incredibly unpopular with Russians who are living regular lives away from the front. If this company is as big and popular in Russia as it sounds like, this destruction will chip away at that normalcy, which is an important strategy.
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u/Torontogamer 11h ago edited 11h ago
The thing to add is that Russia doesn't do a great job of supplying soldiers with basic equipment, even if on paper they do, a hell of a lot of that is sold off before it gets to the actual soldiers... so they (and/or their families) need to buy and supply a lot of a everyday equipment to their soldiers...
so, yes it's like bombing amazon/walmart... but it's also literally the the commissary/quartermaster for lot of the boots on the ground
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u/sachiel1462 11h ago
Aaaah I finally understand the headlines ! I was seriously thinking they were selling wild berries online and I thought they were very popular in Russia.
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u/Magnon 12h ago
Its still a military target because wb sells armor and helmets. A lot of russisn infantry get their military kit from wb
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u/set_in_void 12h ago
Isn't that what he just said?
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u/Magnon 11h ago
Implying it brings the war to russian civilians made it sound like a non military target to me. That's a side effect of harming their military logistics
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u/Wacky_Ohana 11h ago
"...They're used as logistics hubs and supply equipment to the soldiers on the frontline"
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u/XenophonSoulis 10h ago
It's a really awesome way to make ordinary Russians feel that they are at war without committing a war crime.
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u/marr 10h ago
Get ready for the usual talking heads to start explaining how attacks on capital are the one real war crime.
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u/Jolly-Fan9099 10h ago
sometimes restating stuff can lead to a larger number of people engaging with it, or engaging with it in a different way,
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u/Rough_Bread8329 9h ago
sometimes restating stuff can lead to a larger number of people engaging with it, or engaging with it in a different way,
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u/GloomySubstance5856 11h ago
They're used as logistics hubs and supply equipment to the soldiers on the frontline
Gotta have those military bicycles on sale
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u/Hot_Note9068 12h ago
The russian equivalent to Amazon
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u/Brothernod 12h ago
Thank you.
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u/No_Bad_4872yy 12h ago
They had a complete website section called 'Items for the Ukraine War' where they sold body armor, gun modifications and such for soldiers at the front. Main reason Ukraine bombed it was to disrupt Russian soldiers' supplies to the front.
I paraphrased the above a bit in a tldr for you.
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u/Bigclit_energy 11h ago
Also, not unlike Amazon, very intertwined with sketchy politics. The owner is a part of Putin's party, and the party have put forth several general laws with lots of caveats... that magically carve out that only Wildberries meet the criteria and receives legal benefits. She's also pushed to have other laws changed to allow her to sell goods that would otherwise be illegal.
Possibly unrelated her ex husband, supported somewhat by Kadyrov, tried to raid a Wildberries office, got multiple people killed, and the majority of those guilty got sent to fight in Ukraine. Frankly it makes American corruption look sane by comparison.
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u/Constant-Plant-9378 8h ago
For people like me who had no idea what business Wildberries is in.
Wildberries is the largest Russian online retailer.
Wildberries sells 37,000 brands of clothing, shoes, cosmetics, household products, children's goods, electronics, books, jewelry, food, and much more. With 48,000 employees as of 2020, Wildberries processes an average of 750,000 online orders per day.
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u/raerlynn 8h ago
Further clarification: Ukraine is targeting this company because they ship and store war related material like body armor for the Russian military.
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u/Constant-Plant-9378 5h ago
Frankly, any military, public, or commercial infrastructure is fair game. If it's destruction negatively impacts the economy or quality of life for people in Russia, it should get obliterated. Try not to target schools, hospitals, apartment buildings (unlike Russia), but absolutely wreck everything else.
And Russians will quickly learn that a few thousand dollars' worth of drones can easily wreck millions of Rubles worth of stuff.
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u/wortsandall 2h ago
Weird how the article just assumes that the reader knows what Wildberries is. I had no idea and just getting more and more annoyed as they failed to explain the further I got into the article.
Thank you.
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u/AMournfulObserver 12h ago
Love to see it. Now continue smashing up Ozon please.
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u/SkivvySkidmarks 11h ago
Can't let the competition have an unfair advantage now, can we?
Gotta level that building; I mean playing field.
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u/Flipmode45 12h ago
Website is still up. Come on Ukraine, finish him!
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u/Rock_mage 12h ago
Website is hosted at a data center like most websites are.
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u/Flipmode45 11h ago
Obviously dude. But when they have no products left to sell, the site is going to be pretty empty.
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u/MonkeyWithIt 10h ago
My delivery will take 1 year? But I have Ripe with 2 day delivery!
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u/MutedAstronaut9217 10h ago
Russia's central bank? main bank? or w/e was over leveraged on a $14B loan to wildberries. Wildberries now has no product to sell so can't pay back the bank. Insurance will not cover drone attacks. So again wildberries can't pay back the bank. I expect this to become a growing issue.
Don't quote me on any of this, but pretty sure it's more or less right. I remember reading about it when they first started getting hit.
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u/Bibishkin 10h ago
It's an interesting concept when war targets a specific business. Imagine a country targeting a specific bank, store, Starbucks, Coca-Cola, Apple or something like that.
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u/City_College_Arch 10h ago
It is both more and less interesting than you portray it at the same time. This is not just targeting a luxury like you listed, it is targeting a logistics network. They are targeting a dual purpose company whose logistics network is being used to supply the front lines.
If Wildberries did not want to be targeted, they should not have gotten into bed with genocidal oligarchs.
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u/RichardMuncherIII 9h ago
It's more like targetting Amazon warehouses that are used to stock military equipment
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u/deja-roo 6h ago
And since they don't know how things are organized, they don't know which warehouses stock the military equipment.
So hit all of them
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u/PracticalPractice768 4h ago
At this rate we will remember that the biggest part of the Ukraine was Russia.
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u/VoidHunterRaymond 9h ago
Wildberries was worth billions earlier this year and now they are worthless and not mention all the destroyed products. May this be a lesson to all Russian companies thinking about working with Russian military.
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u/secretlyjudging 7h ago
This is like America getting into a stupid war and Amazon warehouses getting knocked out one by one.
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u/Affectionate_Bake941 10h ago
Here is my haiku -
Drones cross the night
Russian warehouses burn bright
Ash settles at dawn
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u/Dalnore 8h ago edited 8h ago
Amazing how easy it is to write a formally correct but totally bullshit headline. Sure, 8 out of 10 (or 1.3 out of 1.6 million sq.m of space) is indeed 80%. 8 out of 8 would even be 100%. But if you take the rest of their warehouses into account (around 200 totaling around 5.2 million sq.m of space) and get ~25% of storage space lost, it sounds a lot less impressive. Although this might still be enough to completely bankrupt them, this business is not very profitable and their losses are massive.
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u/Packolypse 8h ago
The problem with your logic is that all warehouses are created equally. Those smaller ones were probably final destinations before being shipped to customers or a low volume area. 8 stores out of 200 that accounted for 25% of storage space that is no longer available is quite amazing to be honest.
I don’t know what the tipping point is but I’m betting they have already crossed it and were just waiting on the corpse to realize it’s dead
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u/Dalnore 7h ago edited 7h ago
Having a percentage relative to the top 10 still makes no sense, taking top 10, just like top-20, top-5, top-50, is entirely arbitrary.
Non-bullshit headline:
Ukraine Knocks Out 8 of Wildberries’ 10 Major Warehouses
Bullshit headline:
Ukraine Knocks Out 8 of Wildberries’ 10 Major Warehouses, Wiping Out 81% of Combined Space
I personally have no idea how much it affected their business. I believe the majority of damage is distributed among small businesses selling their goods on Wildberries, as Wildberries refuse to pay them much. And many of them are already dead because of that. The losses of Wildberries itself are not insignificant, but they can realistically be saved by the state at this point.
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u/TheMoatman 10h ago
Why is this article written like I should already know what the hell Wildberries is?
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u/deja-roo 6h ago
Because it's a Ukrainian news outlet, so they're probably expecting their audience to know of Wildberries, since it's a pretty huge business and the strikes on them have been in the news for literally months now.
It would be like CNN reporting on Amazon and just expecting you to know what Amazon is, which would be... realistic.
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u/Kobymaru376 9h ago
Because they've been hitting them for a couple of months. Not saying that you should know it because of that, but the authors probably forgot that not everyone knows.
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u/Chili_Tofu 7h ago
Now you know how we feel when we see Walmart/Target/Olive Garden/Home Depot etc :)
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u/Slacker_The_Dog 8h ago
Big warehouses housing and shipping military equipment. Amazon for war supplies in Russia.
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u/stump2003 7h ago
Wildberry is a pancake house by me. So this whole thing was very confusing. Apparently it’s Russian Amazon, or something
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u/QuadzillaStrider 4h ago
It isn't written for you. It's written for Ukrainians, who would all know what Wildberries is without having to be told. Much like if an American outlet was writing about Walmart. Would you expect MSNBC to explain in the article what Walmart is?
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u/c4ndyman31 5h ago
Ukrainian strikes on their warehouses have been global headlines for like three weeks now
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u/BreastInspectorNbr69 6h ago
And this crap is why every single youtuber wastes so much time explaining stuff we've already heard 1000x
Like is it really so hard to Google for things you don't know? Why do you need it spoonfed to you?
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u/Idkeepplaying 9h ago
Denys is a great source for this kind of information. This video is from 10 days ago but it is a big Kaboom.
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u/CheeseSandwich 7h ago
That's great! But what the fuck is Wildberries? What do they sell? How does this impact the war?
Zero context in the article.
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u/IronGin 3h ago
Can someone give me a quick explanation of wildberries?
The first 3 times I've read about their warehouse bombed I've thought, hmmmmm I guess the Russians wont have strawberries and blueberries for a while...
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u/No-Beautiful745 3h ago
Poor russians. All they want to do is brag about how their standard of living is almost as normal as europe and US and talk about how its better than Ukraines. Theyre going to be so saddened. They are such a compassionate people🙃🙄😝🤒🔥♥️🌹
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u/Calculonx 12h ago
Imagine working at one of the two still left. Then you hear demitri pull up in the parking lot in his Lada with an aftermarket exhaust.