Russia’s biggest online retailer becomes target in Ukraine drone war

Russian online retail group Wildberries pitched President Vladimir Putin that it could be more than just the country’s answer to Amazon. It could also challenge the US-led payment system around the world.

But after Ukrainian strikes hit four of the company’s warehouses in the past week, Wildberries has instead emerged as yet another weak spot in the Russian president’s war economy.

The attacks are part of a new Ukrainian campaign using largely homegrown advances in long-range drone technology to bring the impact of Putin’s invasion, now in its fifth year, home to ordinary Russians.

Ukrainian strikes have damaged Russian refineries in the heart of Moscow and as far away as Siberia, forcing one of the world’s largest energy producers to introduce rationing at the pump and import fuel.

Now, the attacks on Russia’s ecommerce sector are threatening to upend one of the country’s largest companies, which reported turnover of Rbs6.1tn ($78bn) last year and pitched Putin on an audacious global expansion in 2024.

Wildberries is a mass-market platform aimed at Putin’s core electorate: lower-income Russians living outside Moscow and St Petersburg. Its network of collection points extends into small towns and villages, where they have become some of the main hubs of local life.

The strikes, which began last Saturday, have killed at least nine people and reportedly destroyed several billion dollars’ worth of inventory in fires that sent enormous plumes of black smoke billowing over cities in five Russian regions.

Alexander Kolyandr, a director at Eurasia Group, said the economic impact would go beyond the lost inventories. ‘‘The loss of the goods will put thousands of traders out of business, resulting in unpaid taxes, defaulted loans and the like,’’ he said, adding that the strikes would deprive the state of tens of billions of roubles in taxes from a major taxpayer.

Ukraine has justified the attacks as retaliation for the Russian strikes on the warehouses of Nova Posht…