In 2004, a then 28-year-old English teacher in Moscow named Tatyana Kim found herself looking for some extra income while on maternity leave, since she could no longer work as a tutor. She tried, but the baby would start crying and she would have to interrupt her lessons. Kim knew that many Russian women, including herself, were ordering clothes from German catalogues by mail. So she invested $700 in a Web site that made foreign-catalogue shopping easier by taking orders online. Twenty-two years later, one out of every two online purchases in Russia is made on that Web site: Wildberries.
In July, Ukraine launched a drone campaign against Wildberries, targeting the retailer’s warehouses across Russia, up to 1,200 miles from the Ukrainian border. Within weeks, at least 20 facilities had been hit and more than 3.87 million square feet of warehouse capacity destroyed—more than a fifth of the company’s total. The Ukrainians have been striking Russian oil refineries for months, which has created a gasoline shortage in the country, but Wildberries is a different kind of target. Attacking the backbone of Russia’s consumer economy was designed to bring the war home and further erode the Russian people’s support for the conflict.