‘We lived in peace, and now they’re bombing us’: Ukraine hit two huge Wildberries warehouses near Moscow and in Tambov, killing eight. A correspondent went to see how one town is coping.

Meduza reports that overnight on July eighteenth, Ukrainian forces struck two of the largest warehouses operated by Wildberries, the Russian online retailer — one in Elektrostal, outside Moscow, and the other in Kotovsk, a small city in the Tambov region. Eight employees at the Kotovsk site were killed, and the two strikes left eighty people injured. In a dispatch published Tuesday, Meduza describes a correspondent's visit to the area, where taxi drivers refused trips to the burned-out site, pickup points fielded complaints over delayed and canceled orders, and students described sirens at night. Wildberries management announced payments of two million rubles to the families of those killed and one million rubles to the seriously injured, and Tambov's governor promised further sums from the regional budget. Sellers who lost goods in the fire, however, will not receive compensation from the marketplace — it is instead offering free delivery to regional warehouses, discounted loans, and insurance consultations — and a local lawyer says small-business owners have been arriving at his office since the attack to ask whether they can sue.

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