MOSCOW, July 30 (Reuters) – Ukrainian drones struck two more warehouses belonging to Russian online retailer Wildberries overnight, sparking fires at both sites, the company and a regional official said.
Ukraine has attacked about a dozen Wildberries sites since July 18 in a bid to disrupt the operations of the company, a linchpin of the consumer economy that is often described as Russia’s answer to Amazon.
Oleg Melnichenko, governor of the Penza region in western Russia, said one person was injured and around 200 people were evacuated from the Wildberries site there.
Wildberries said a fire had also broken out at its logistics facility in Sarapul in Russia’s Udmurtia region after a Ukrainian drone attack.
The company said staff had been evacuated in advance, that there were no preliminary reports of casualties, and that deliveries were being rerouted through other facilities.
Several Russian news outlets reported a third attack on a Wildberries site in the Urals region of Perm, but the company said its sorting centre there was operating normally.
The regional governor said Perm had come under heavy Ukrainian drone attack overnight.
Ukraine, whose own cities are under constant Russian attack, describes its strikes deep inside Russia as “long-range sanctions” designed to sap Moscow’s war-fighting capacity and force it to end the 4-1/2-year conflict.
DISRUPTING RETAILER’S DISTRIBUTION CHAIN
Several of the attacks on Wildberries have caused massive damage to warehouses, disrupting the company’s distribution chain and threatening heavy losses for tens of thousands of small businesses who use it as their main marketplace.
Wildberries says it has started to pay out compensation to sellers. The government is exploring ways to support the company and related businesses, sources told Reuters this week.
Alexander Drozdenko, governor of the Leningrad region which surrounds St Petersburg, said on Thursday that around 1,500 sellers had seen goods destroyed or damaged in an attack on a Wildberries warehouse there last week.
He said the region would set up a regional task force to address the situation, and would provide low-interest loans to help the affected businesses to quickly replenish their stock.
(Reporting by Gleb Bryanski in Moscow and Jekaterīna Golubkova in Tokyo; writing by Mark TrevelyanEditing by Gareth Jones)
