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In the last month, Ukraine has set its sights on a new target in Russia, a business by the name of Wildberries. This company is an e-commerce giant, the largest of its kind in Russia, with a market share of almost half of all online retail. At the heart of its business is a network of massive warehouse facilities. When the warehouses burn in the aftermath of Ukrainian drone strikes the footage shows smoke plumes that billow for miles.
There are many valid reasons behind why Wildberries became a focus of Ukraine long-range drone warfare, alongside the continuing attacks on oil and gas infrastructure and strikes to military facilities manufacturing parts for Russia’s deadly ballistic missiles. As the sanctioned Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska recently said, “the old maxim is that if you owe the bank a million, that’s your problem. If you owe the bank a billion, that’s their problem.” Wildberries has borrowed heavily to build its business, it owes not a billion, but lots of billions. $18.4 billion, more or less.
Put simply, the intent of Ukraine’s Wildberries strategy is to ratchet up pressure on the banking sphere. Much of the lending to Wildberries has come from VTB Bank, a state-owned bank, indicating the strategic importance of this company to the Kremlin.
If a business is strategically important to the Kremlin, it is strategically important to Ukraine too.

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So far, the attacks on the warehouse network have destroyed 10 of the 15 largest warehouses that the group operates, another 3 in the top 15 have also been severely damaged and are offline. With such a significant impact on its operations (another 5 of the next tier of 15 warehouses by size have also been destroyed) there’s no doubt that this company will be facing difficulty servicing its mountain of debt. This, and a combination of other factors, are leading towards a crisis in the wider banking sector.
While the main business cannot repay its debts, Wildberries acted as an incubator for many small and medium-sized businesses. Approximately 500,000 individual traders use the services (storage, delivery, hosting of their stores, payment processing, etc.) of Wildberries, and many of them face bankruptcy with their goods having gone up in smoke.
Interestingly, a week before the Ukrainian strike campaign began, the company changed their Terms & Conditions to state that they would not be liable for losses caused by drone damage. Maybe they’d been tipped off. But entrepreneurs across Russia have lost their incomes. Those potential new bankruptcies will likely all have bank exposure too. They’ll certainly not be contributing to the tax revenue that the state depends on.
Bankruptcies in Russia were already up 30% year-on-year in the first quarter of 2026, a sign of the pressures Vladimir Putin’s “Special Military Operation” is putting on the economy as a whole. In fact, the only part of the Russian economy that has shown any sign of growth over the last few years has been the war economy. Wars are expensive things, but where does the money come from for the war economy? Well, again, the answer is the banks.
At the beginning of the war, Putin signed an order instructing banks to extend loans to defence contractors on preferential terms established by the Government. As a result, the war-linked loan book amounted to 58% of all commercial lending in 2025. While financing of consumer-related businesses fell from 31% pre-war to 20% of the loan portfolio in 2025. At some point those loans are going to mature, or will require refinancing. How much – considering the high probability of the contractors themselves being picked clean of anything of value by their owne…