Startup Stories

Wildberries: The “Russian Amazon”

Until this summer, Wildberries was one of the largest retailers most people outside Russia had never heard of. It handles 45% of the country’s online retail, turns over around $75 billion a year, and employs enough people to make it one of Russia’s biggest private employers. The name reached the Western news cycle only when Ukrainian drones began setting its warehouses on fire.

The company deserves attention for more than the strikes. Its history compresses the whole story of modern Russian business into a single firm: an accidental empire, built in a bedroom, propelled by two external shocks its founder never chose, and eventually swallowed by the politics it tried to stay clear of.

What Is Wildberries?

Wildberries is Russia’s dominant online marketplace, the closest thing the country has to Amazon. Shoppers use it to buy clothing, electronics, and household goods for home delivery, and sellers use it to reach the whole of Russia through its warehouse and logistics network.

The scale is easy to underestimate from the outside. Wildberries holds roughly 45% of Russian e-commerce, well ahead of its nearest rival Ozon at around 32%, and dominates categories such as clothing and non-food goods. Following a 2024 merger, the combined Russ Wildberries group reported 2025 turnover of 6.1 trillion rubles, about $75 billion.

Almost none of that reputation has travelled beyond Russia’s borders, partly because sanctions have walled the company off from Western markets and partly because its story has only recently turned dramatic enough to export.

An English Teacher’s Side Hustle

Wildberries began in a Moscow apartment in 2004. Tatyana Bakalchuk, then a young English teacher on maternity leave, started reselling clothes online to make money while raising her children. She had no retail background, no capital, and no plan beyond a hunch that Russians would rather shop from home than trek to a mall.

The timing turned out to matter more than the plan. Over the following decade, Russians abandoned shopping malls for their phones, and Bakalchuk’s small clothing reseller grew into the infrastructure underneath that shift. She kept 99% ownership of the company as it expanded; her husband and co-founder Vladislav held the remaining 1%.

By the early 2020s she had become the richest woman in Russia and one of only two female billionaires the country has produced. A teacher who started with a website and a stockroom of resold coats had built the retail spine of a nation of 140 million people.

Grown by the Sanctions Meant to Hurt Russia

Two events accelerated Wildberries far beyond what Bakalchuk could have engineered, and she chose neither of them.

The first was the pandemic. COVID lockdowns pushed a generation of Russian shoppers online almost overnight, and Wildberries was already the default destination waiting to receive them.

The second carries a sharper irony. When Western countries imposed sanctions on Russia and Western brands withdrew, they cleared the shelves that Wildberries then filled. Sellers who once competed against imported goods found the imports gone, and shoppers who once bought Western products through Western channels bought local ones through Wildberries instead. Sanctions designed to squeeze the Russian economy handed its largest online retailer a captive market. The policy meant to punish the country strengthened the company.

A Shootout Near the Kremlin

In 2024 the company that Bakalchuk built became the prize in a fight that turned deadly.

Bakalchuk moved to merge Wildberries with Russ, an outdoor advertising firm many analysts considered far smaller and a strange match. Her husband Vladislav publicly opposed the deal, describing it as a hostile takeover of the business he had helped run. The couple’s marriage collapsed alongside their business partnership; Bakalchuk filed for divorce and reverted to her maiden name, Kim.

The dispute stopped being corporate on 18 September 2024. Vladislav arrived at the Wildberries headquarters in central Moscow, roughly 300 metres from the Kremlin, with around twenty men, several of them Chechen. A gunfight broke out. Two security guards were killed and several people were wounded, and around thirty were detained. Vladislav was charged with murder and other offences. He maintained that the company’s own security had fired first, and the charges against him were later dropped.

The violence pulled powerful patrons into view. Vladislav had sought the backing of Ramzan Kadyrov, the strongman leader of Chechnya, while the merger was associated with the billionaire senator Suleiman Kerimov. Reports indicated the deal had been approved personally by President Putin. Russian state television, which covers far smaller events in detail, largely ignored a fatal shootout at a household-name company in the heart of the capital.

What the Fight Revealed

The Wildberries war exposed something true about where the company’s control actually sat.

On paper, Bakalchuk owned 99% of a business she had built herself. In practice, the future of that business was settled by a contest between a Chechen leader, a billionaire senator, and a president, played out through a merger and an armed raid rather than a shareholder vote. A company can be legally owned by its founder and effectively owned by the people powerful enough to decide its fate. In Russia, those are frequently not the same people.

The merger went through. The entity that emerged, Russ Wildberries, is the $75 billion group whose warehouses are now burning.

The Drones Arrive

Since July 2026, Ukraine has struck Wildberries warehouses in repeated waves of drone attacks, hitting facilities near Moscow and St Petersburg, across southern Russia, and as far east as the Urals.

Ukraine says the company has supplied the Russian military with drone components and other equipment, a claim Wildberries has not confirmed and which cannot be independently verified. President Zelensky has framed the strikes as part of a campaign to bring the economic cost of the war home to Russia. The human cost has been real: at least nine warehouse workers have been killed and dozens injured, several of them migrant labourers from Central Asia.

The logic behind targeting a retailer becomes clearer against the company’s scale. When one firm handles nearly half of a country’s online commerce, its warehouses stop being ordinary buildings and become national infrastructure. Concentrating a nation’s goods into a handful of vast logistics hubs delivers enormous efficiency, and it also creates a small number of places where an entire economy can be disrupted at once.

The damage has landed hardest on people far from the war’s front line. The warehouses were full of inventory belonging to thousands of small Russian sellers, many of whom have described losing their entire stock overnight. Restoring one set of damaged facilities has been estimated at up to 35.8 billion rubles, roughly $457 million, a bill insurers are reportedly unlikely to cover in full. Shares in the rival retailer Ozon fell on fears that it might be next.

One Company, the Whole System

The arc of Wildberries is difficult to improve on as a portrait of Russian capitalism.

Wildberries was built from nothing by an outsider with talent and timing, the kind of self-made success any market economy would celebrate. It was then accelerated by a pandemic and by sanctions, two external shocks that had nothing to do with the founder’s skill. It was fought over with guns rather than lawyers, and its ownership was ultimately decided by proximity to power rather than the share register. Now it absorbs drone strikes as a strategic target in a war, while the small sellers who relied on it count their losses.

An English teacher started a business in her apartment and, twenty years later, that business sits at the intersection of Russian commerce, Kremlin politics, and a live war. Wildberries is worth knowing not because drones found its warehouses, but because almost everything about how it rose and who now controls it explains the country that produced it.