The employees streaming out of the warehouse in Zelenodolsk, a shipbuilding city on the Volga River in Russia’s republic of Tatarstan, seemed panic-stricken as they glanced again over their shoulders and hurried into the parking zone. Cell phone footage from the July 31 drone assault confirmed a plume of white smoke rising close to the achievement heart run by Ozon, Russia’s second-largest on-line retailer. Someplace past the warehouse, a drone struck the bottom with a uninteresting explosion. The employees watched for a second. Then they went again inside. Earlier than lunch, the conveyor belts have been shifting once more.
No person was harm, and Ozon mentioned the evacuation took only some minutes and the logistics heart escaped injury. Within the brutal math of Ukraine’s drone marketing campaign, that counts as day. Since July 18, Ukrainian drones have hit greater than a dozen websites throughout Russia’s community of on-line retail hubs, killing at the least 9 warehouse employees and wounding scores extra. The drones have reached as far east as Yekaterinburg, roughly 1,000 miles from Ukraine. That warehouse survived unscathed and operations resumed hours later, however the disruptions to enterprise operations attributable to the drones are nonetheless expensive.
That is the worth of enterprise as typical in Russia’s wartime economic system. The speedy prices for Ozon and its bigger competitor, Wildberries, which collectively deal with about three-quarters of Russia’s on-line retail, are straightforward to see: shuttered warehouses, suspended operations, delayed deliveries and broken stock. The extra urgent query is what comes subsequent.
