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Ukraine takes aim at Russia’s economy and morale by attacking online retailer

Daily Briefing - World

The attacks began on a July weekend and have continued for a month, stretching from Moscow and St. Petersburg, to cities in the south, and eastward to the Ural Mountains. The targets weren't oil refineries, maritime hubs or arms plants hit by other Ukrainian strikes, but warehouses that bring the convenience of online shopping across the breadth of Russia.

Ukraine's drones have pummeled the giant depots belonging to Wildberries, Russia's biggest online retailer, burning billions of dollars' worth of merchandise and bringing the war home to the broad public.

The attacks on about 20 Wildberries facilities have underlined Kyiv's ability to strike far and wide inside Russia and posed a new challenge to President Vladimir Putin nearly 4½ years into his full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

They have badly shaken the empire built by Tatyana Kim, the country's richest female entrepreneur, whose fortune has been estimated at $8.1 billion.

Hundreds of thousands of individual sellers have lost their merchandise, sending shock waves across Russia's economy. Wildberries has drawn massive loans from VTB and other banks as it expanded and likely will have trouble repaying them, putting more pressure on the financial system.

An online giant began in a Moscow apartment

Kim, 50, was born in Grozny, the capital of the province of Chechnya, to an ethnic Korean family of an engineer and a teacher. She launched Wildberries in 2004 from her Moscow apartment soon after giving birth to her first child while working as an English teacher.

"The idea was born from my own needs, and turned out to be needed by hundreds of thousands," said Kim, now a mother of seven. "If a product or service makes your own life easier, you're on the right track."

Wildberries initially sold clothing before expanding to appliances, household items, cosmetics, books and more. The platform with its distinct purple logo has become an undisputed leader in e-commerce, accounting for about half of all online orders in Russia. Businesses big and small use it to store, ship and deliver merchandise across the country's 11 time zones.

An estimated 500,000 to 800,000 sellers use Wildberries, often described as Russia's Amazon. After Western brands fled following the war in Ukraine, online retailers filled the void with merchandise from China, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates and elsewhere.

The company also acquired a bank, expanded to tourism and even considered buying an airline.

In 2024, Kim divorced her husband, Vladislav Bakalchuk, triggering a fight for control of the company. Bakalchuk sought the support of Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov and his feared paramilitary forces but eventually lost the battle, which peaked in a shootout at a business center near the Kremlin that left two people dead and several wounded.

Wildberries depots are easy targets

Unlike smaller competitors Ozon and Yandex Market, the company has prided itself on relying on about two dozen mammoth warehouses as the core of its vast logistical network, stockpiling the goods before shipping to about 100,000 storefront distribution points.

As Ukraine embarked on a strategy of long-range drone attacks deep inside Russia, it has expanded from striking military bases, oil refineries and other infrastructure to Wildberries warehouses, which provided particularly soft targets.

Since the first attack July 18 in Elektrostal, just east of Moscow, and in the southwestern Tambov region, Wildberries depots burned one after another in massive fires that flooded social media.

The depots, some as big as 300,000 square meters (about 3.2 million square feet) were unprotected. It took three days to extinguish the fire in Elektrostal, a key Moscow region hub.

On Sunday, Ukraine set ablaze another such hub in Podolsk, also near the capital.

Seven of Wildberries' 10 largest logistics centers have been knocked out of operation, Ukraine's Defense Ministry said. Wildberries did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

"These are not military and high-value political targets, therefore they're not especially secured, they're not really built to be able to shrug off drone strikes," said podcaster Mark Galeotti, a Russia expert who heads the Mayak Intelligence consultancy.

The strikes have stretched from the European part of Russia to Yekaterinburg, over 2,000 kilometers (1,250 miles) from Ukraine's border.

There's scarce public data, but some estimates indicate up to 20% of the company's total warehouse space has been destroyed, with assessments of losses running as high as $6 billion.

Kim said Wildberries' sites have been "reinforced and strengthened" defensively, but the attacks continued. Some warehouses suffered only minor damage, and Ukraine tried to hit them again.

Wildberries said it's rearranging supply chains to create "partner hubs" for storing merchandise -- a challenging process, given its dependence on big depots.

Attacks cause a ripple effect

Ukrainian officials have said Wildberries sells gear and technical components, including drones, to the military. Moscow denied it, but such dual-use items as drone components, flak jackets or thermal weapon sights remain available on the platform.

Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, said the attacks were designed to disrupt military supplies, breed popular discontent and cause a domino effect in the Russian economy by putting stress on major banks, including VTB and Sberbank, that made massive loans to Wildberries.

Wildberries' debts were estimated at the equivalent of about $15 billion at the end of 2025.

Russia's small and medium businesses already have been hit hard by tax increases, regulatory hurdles and, most recently, a fuel crisis from attacks on oil refineries.

Chris Weafer, CEO of Macro-Advisory Ltd. Consultancy, said Monday the attacks have exacerbated Russia's business environment and are an attempt by Kyiv "to undermine public confidence."

"There is a segment of the manufacturing sectors in Russia and elsewhere that are definitely suffering significantly from that," he said.

Wildberries had recently changed its seller policy, exempting it from liability for stock damaged by a "force majeure" that includes drone attacks.

Kim pledged to support sellers with discounts on storage, free transfer of goods to other sites, discounted loans and other measures. Wildberries also issued some reimbursements that covered only a fraction of the losses.

Russia's Central Bank has asked lenders to restructure loans to small and medium businesses that lost merchandise.

Meanwhile, many owners of Wildberries pickup points face lost revenue amid the plunging deliveries. Some vented frustrations on social media about going out of business.

The lost goods mean tens of thousands of small businesses can't continue to operate, service their loans or pay taxes. Many are pleading for government support.

Galeotti said the strikes reflected Kyiv's effort to bring the war home to Russia.

"It's not just about seeing great clouds of black smoke over your cities because of some oil refinery on the outskirts being hit," he said. "You might be a small business whose inventory has just gone up in smoke in one of the Wildberries' warehouses. Or else you just simply might be an ordinary consumer who just suddenly is no longer going to get the goods that you plan to buy."

Some analysts warn the attacks could fuel stronger anti-Ukrainian and anti-Western fervor.

The Wildberries attacks have played into the hands of Russian hawks who urge escalating the war, said pro-Kremlin political expert Sergei Markov.

"It strengthens the view that it's necessary to hit Europe," he said. "And better sooner than later."

Former President Dmitry Medvedev sought to stir up anger at Ukraine for trying to destroy an essential daily routine for millions.

"Our enemy is fighting not the Russian leadership or the army, but ordinary citizens," he said.

Congo's fast-moving Ebola outbreak becomes the country's worst with over 2,300 dead

BUNIA -- Congo's fast-moving Ebola outbreak has now killed over 2,300 people and become the deadliest outbreak of the disease on record in the Central African nation.

The outbreak unfolding in one of Congo's most vulnerable regions is the fastest-growing Ebola outbreak ever, with 4,945 cases including 2,325 deaths, according to government data released overnight into Monday.

It's Congo's 17th outbreak, with a toll that has eclipsed that of the country's 2018-2020 outbreak when 2,299 deaths out of 3,481 cases were recorded.

The latest data shows 101 new cases and 33 deaths reported in the previous 24 hours. Over 1,000 people have recovered, while 730 remain in hospitals or isolation.

The outbreak has infected and killed more people at a greater speed than any other outbreak in history. The World Health Organization has said it is on track to surpass the 2014-16 Ebola outbreak in West Africa, the deadliest on record with more than 11,000 deaths.

Trish Newport, emergency coordinator with Doctors Without Borders, known by its French acronym MSF, said the limited community engagement in the outbreak remains a key challenge.

"The community needs to be aware about the outbreak," she told The Associated Press, adding that people "need to be involved in the response, and they need to know what the signs and symptoms are and what to do if they get sick. And this today is not happening in every single place where there are Ebola cases."

Starting from the first confirmed case, the outbreak reached the 2,000 death toll almost three times faster than in the 2014-16 outbreak.

Some families have lost up to 15 of their relatives in the epicenter, the Ituri province, said Newport.

"We rapidly need to scale up to be able to prevent more deaths from happening, more families and communities from being impacted," she added.

There are no approved vaccines or treatments for the rare Bundibugyo virus responsible for the current outbreak across six provinces in Congo's east. Trials for those are ongoing in Ituri.

Most new cases and deaths are being reported outside of the people being monitored. Challenges facing medical teams dealing with the outbreak also include strikes by some unpaid health workers, threats by rebel groups, anger from long-traumatized communities, bad roads making it difficult to reach all the affected territories, and misinformation claiming that Ebola isn't real.

WHO warned over the weekend that the outbreak is still moving at an "exceptional pace" ahead of efforts to track it, noting that it reached a weekly record of 579 cases and 304 deaths in the previous week.

"A substantial scaling up of response activities is underway to get ahead of the outbreak," the U.N. health agency said.

Experts believe the virus was spreading in the mining town of Mongbwalu as early as February -- months before authorities declared the outbreak on May 15.

On Friday, U.N. humanitarian chief Tom Fletcher announced the allocation of an additional $30.5 million and the deployment of 20 more staff to aid the response on the frontlines.

"This is a wake-up call," Fletcher said. "We need speed, scale and solidarity before this virus gets even further ahead of us."

Belgian wildfire approaches Germany as Greece probes deadly blaze

SOURBRODT -- One of Belgium's biggest ever wildfires blazed out of control Monday even as cooler weather and rain in the morning eased conditions for hundreds of firefighters in remote and hilly countryside. In Greece, a fire briefly flared up near the main airport on the outskirts of Athens.

A forest ranger said the fire in Belgium could continue for months underground in peaty soil and sporadically flare up.

Europe is sweltering through one of its hottest and driest summers on record, which a recent study said was fueled by climate change.

Rain helps, but Belgian blaze is not yet under control

Belgium's King Philippe interrupted his summer vacation to visit emergency services fighting the wildfire in the eastern High Fens, about eight kilometers (five miles) from the German border, as it spread east after moving into a pine forest on Sunday.

The fire in Liège province has burned an estimated 30 square kilometers (about 12 square miles), leaving blackened trees and smoldering ground.

While the fire did not significantly grow, due in part to favorable winds, it remained out of control in areas inaccessible to ground crews, the Wallonia region said in an update.

Some 500 firefighters were aided by aircraft sent from Norway, Sweden, Germany and the Netherlands and local police with drones after a cold front brought overnight rain. Farmers were helping supply water to firefighting efforts, regional officials said. Helicopters emptied huge sacks of water over the flames as smoke billowed from forests.

"We managed to maintain the fire where the firemen are situated but there's still a place which is totally inaccessible, where the fire is still going on in the direction of Monschau in Germany," said Nicolas Yernaux, spokesperson for the Wallonia regional public services.

He said overnight rains helped contain the blaze and dampen the possibility that smoldering fires will flare up again, but he said they did not significantly impact the center of the fire.

A forest ranger from the region told The Associated Press that the blaze could continue for months underground because of the peaty soil.

"What we see here is that the grassland has burned and the fire has gone into the soil to a certain depth, into the peat, and it is still burning," said Yves Pieper. "It can go down very, very low in the peat layer."

He said the fire can continue smoldering largely unseen underground for weeks or months before flaring up again, noting that new flames had already appeared nearby.

Precautionary evacuation orders remained in effect for hundreds of residents.

Veterinarian Hugues Guyvot, who was involved in animal rescue efforts, said large animals were able to flee but smaller ones like frogs and mice likely burrowed and were baked underground in a landscape of peat bogs.

"Maybe it will take decades to recover from this fire," he said.

Greece quickly extinguishes fire near main airport

In Greece, fire department investigators examined the area on the island of Salamina where a fast-moving wildfire on Sunday killed two people, injured another nine and destroyed several homes. The island lies just west of the Greek capital.

New wildfires broke out elsewhere Monday. Dozens of firefighters along with two water-dropping planes and two helicopters raced to tackle one in Spata, an area east of Athens that includes the main international airport. The fire department said the blaze was contained within 30 minutes.

Separately, the fire department said an 80-year-old man was arrested in the northern town of Kavala on arson charges for allegedly deliberately setting fire to dried vegetation. It was among 302 fire-related arrests since Jan. 1 in Greece, including 31 for deliberate arson and 271 for negligence that sparked fires, the department said.

France says a fire in the southwest is under control

In southwestern France, authorities said a fire in the Landes region was under control after four days of battling the flames, allowing about half of the evacuated residents to begin returning home.

More than 600 residents evacuated last week as the fire burned about 17 square kilometers (6.6 square miles) during a prolonged spell of extreme heat. Some respite was on the way Monday as temperatures began to drop.

French Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu said the state would provide a 12 million-euro ($13.9 million) aid package to Gironde and Landes, the regions hardest hit by the wildfires, to help rebuild homes and support affected businesses, including in Le Porge, where 183 homes were destroyed in a massive blaze last month.

Croatian police arrest arson suspects

In Croatia, four people are suspected of deliberately starting as many as 10 fires in the region around the coastal town of Zadar, a major tourism hub on the Adriatic coast.

The suspects were questioned by an investigative judge following their arrest on Saturday on a tip from residents.

The four are suspected of starting fires on Aug. 14 and 15 with an aim to "endanger lives and valuable property and inflict damage on a large number of residents in Zadar county," police said in a statement. There was no word on a possible motive.

Police said they were assessing the extent of the damage caused.