The damage from Ukrainian Armed Forces attacks on Wildberries warehouses, at least 12 of which were mega-hubs that burned almost completely to the ground, continues to grow. According to analysts, goods worth 480 billion rubles have now been destroyed—a sum comparable to the annual budgets of large and wealthy Russian regions, UNN reports, citing The Moscow Times.
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Russia’s largest marketplace, Wildberries, which has nearly one hundred thousand order pickup points and sells 6 trillion rubles’ worth of goods annually, has currently lost one-third of its warehouse capacity, analysts at Data Insight estimate.
According to analysts’ calculations, goods worth 480 billion rubles burned in the warehouses hit by the attacks—a sum comparable to the annual budgets of large and wealthy Russian regions such as Krasnoyarsk Krai (527 billion rubles) or the Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Okrug (476 billion rubles). The annual budget of Irkutsk Oblast, for example (303 billion rubles), was exceeded by the losses from the attacks on Wildberries by 1.6 times; the annual budget of Smolensk or Penza Oblast by almost four times; and the budgets of Kalmykia, the Jewish Autonomous Oblast, or the Nenets Autonomous Okrug by 14–17 times.
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Wildberries has "practically no large warehouses left," Data Insight analyst Sergey Semko told The New York Times: "Every day, one warehouse after another is methodically destroyed." The Russian government is preparing a package for sellers who lost goods, but it does not include direct payments to those affected. Payment holidays, preferential loans, and tax relief are being considered. The Russian budget currently does not have the hundreds of billions of rubles needed to help sellers, a source close to the Kremlin told Reuters.