The people Vladimir Putin once tried hardest to appease are up in arms as his war on Ukraine hits them where it hurts.
Ukrainian drone strikes on warehouses belonging to the “Russian Amazon,” online retailer Wildberries, are leaving small business sellers counting the cost. The attacks, which began last Saturday, have killed at least nine people and wiped out billions of dollars’ worth of inventory, the Financial Times reports.
The entrepreneurs who depend on the platform for their livelihoods, many of them part of Putin’s core voter base, are now speaking out as their losses pile up.
“Right now, 4,000 of my fur coats, worth more than Rbs20mn, are burning in the warehouse. What can I do to help myself? . . . Nothing,” seller Tatiana Mikhaleva captioned a video posted on Instagram, in which she is seen standing in front of a cloud of smoke rising from one of the warehouses that was hit.
According to Russian newspaper Kommersant, cited by the Financial Times, around 444,000 square meters of warehouse space was destroyed in the strikes, accounting for roughly 8 percent of Wildberries’ total storage capacity.
Wildberries processes almost a million orders a day and is the country’s leading e-commerce company.
“I can’t calm down. I’m in shock. Every entrepreneur is in shock. I have no strength left,” cosmetic brand founder Svetlana Dodo said in an Instagram video, adding that she had lost around a million rubles, equivalent to $12,800.
Dodo, who said she is the mother of a disabled child and built the business herself, went on to say: “We’re already getting screwed over from every direction as it is.”
Tatiana Kim, Wildberries’ co-founder and chief executive, said insurers would not cover damage caused by drone strikes. The company also changed its terms of service two weeks before the first attack, absolving itself of responsibility for compensating sellers.
Kim, 50, who is Russia’s richest woman, said that only 88,000 of the “smallest and least protected” sellers would receive compensation. However, even those receiving payouts have complained that the payments cover only a fraction of their losses. One seller wrote on Telegram that he received 37,000 rubles ($473) for inventory worth 1.5 million rubles ($19,000).
The growing anger among small business owners is the latest challenge to Putin’s message at home. The 73-year-old Russian dictator has spent years insisting that the “special military operation” he launched in Ukraine four years ago is going to plan.
Yet a punishing months-long Ukrainian drone campaign targeting critical Russian oil infrastructure has knocked significant portions of the country’s refining capacity offline, triggered fuel shortages, and created growing frustration even among some of the war’s staunchest supporters.
On Sunday, one of Putin’s top television propagandists, Vladimir Solovyov, opened his evening broadcast by attempting to reassure viewers, insisting that “there is no panic” despite admitting that “things are difficult.”
President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine claimed in a national address on Thursday that figures close to the Russian president have reached out to say he alone caused Russia’s war and the losses it has suffered.
