On 4 August, Kazakhstan’s Trade and Integration Minister, Arman Shakkaliyev, confirmed that Russia’s largest online retailer is building 260,000 square meters of warehousing space in Almaty and Astana.

In the same appearance, he told Kazakh shoppers to favor domestic marketplaces instead. Take the construction money, steer the customers away: that is Astana’s answer to a war that has driven Wildberries to look abroad for shelter.

The warehouses aren’t new—they’ve been under construction for years. And officially, the ministry says, Wildberries hasn’t asked to move its Russian operations to Kazakhstan at all. Astana is drawing a careful line: a Russian company can build here, but it cannot relocate its business here to escape the drones.

The wariness predates the strikes. Kazakhstan already taxes foreign marketplaces at 12% and can block those that fail to register. Of marketplace complaints logged in 2024, 73.7% concerned Wildberries, even as home-grown Kaspi held more than 70% of the market to Wildberries’ 17.2%. Astana was fencing the platform in before the first drone struck.

The bill reaches the neighbors

Kazakh sellers put their losses at roughly 2 billion tenge ($4.2 million) by one count, and the Ecommerce-KZ association estimates more than $2.1 million—neither figure has been confirmed, and the minister has told people not to trust the numbers circulating online.

More than 120,000 Kazakh entrepreneurs were on the platform at the end of 2025, and Wildberries says it is repaying them in stages, working with the ministry and the business chamber Atameken.

Kyrgyzstan is hit harder. Its garment industry leans heavily on Wildberries, and individual producers have lost between 1 million and 100 million soms ($11,400 to $1.14 million) each—enough that Bishkek offered a tax holiday to garment firms through year-end.

What Wildberries wants sheltered is not neutral cargo. Ukraine says it strikes the retailer because the platform is used to trade body armor, drones, and their components that reach Russian forces.

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That leaves Kazakhstan exposed: it has spent the past year tightening dual-use export controls to avoid Western secondary sanctions, and now a company that sells to the Russian military wants to move its logistics onto Kazakh ground.

For now, the shelter barely exists. Wildberries wants to rent about 100,000 square meters—close to every empty warehouse Kazakhstan has—and the complexes it is building will not open until 2027. By then, Astana may have made up its mind about how much of Russia’s retreat it actually wants on its soil.

A Ukrainian drone strike set fire to a Wildberries logistics center in Oleksin, Russia's Tula Oblast, overnight into 5 August, according to the monitoring Telegram channel Exilenova+ and Russian outlet ASTRA. Tula Oblast Governor Dmitry Milyaev confirmed one person was injured and said a drone came down on the sorting center's territory before the fire broke out.

The strike extends a Ukrainian campaign against Russia's largest online retailer that has hit 15 Wildberries logistics sites in 18 days, Unmanned Systems Forces commander Robert "Madyar" Brovdi said on 4 August, before the Oleksin strike. Thirteen of those 15 were knocked out of action or seriously damaged, he said. Ukraine's deep-strike drones have turned Wildberries hubs — repeatedly described by Ukrainian officials as Russia's answer to Amazon — into a recurring target as they widen a campaign against the fuel and freight networks that keep Russia's war economy running.

Wildberries confirmed the fire at its Oleksin site, saying it evacuated staff in advance and temporarily redirected new deliveries to other warehouses. Milyaev also reported damage to two apartment buildings in Venyov district and two industrial sites in Novomoskovsk and Uzlovaya district from the same overnight barrage.

The Oleksin center covers about 194,500 square meters, according to Exilenova+, and opened in 2022. It supplies Tula, Kaluga, Oryol, Bryansk, Kursk, Lipetsk, Ryazan, and other central Russian oblasts, and partly relieves logistics centers in the Moscow region.

The strike follows fires at two other Wildberries sites — in Krasny Bor, Leningrad Oblast, and Chekhov, Moscow Oblast — overnight into 4 August, and comes as Wildberries has begun restricting employees to camera-free phones after staff filmed and shared footage of the strikes.

The White House has recommended terminating U.S. funding for multiple programs that investigate war crimes worldwide, including Russian war crimes in Ukraine, Reuters reported on June 26.

Since U.S. President Donald Trump's inauguration in January, the administration has imposed sweeping layoffs and budget cuts, targeting foreign aid, media outlets, and federal workers. Many of the cuts have directly impacted programs assisting Ukraine.

The Trump administration's Office of Management and Budget (OMB) on June 25 recommended canceling funds for nearly two dozen programs that investigate and seek accountability for war crimes, two U.S. sources familiar with the matter told Reuters. The outlet also reviewed internal government documents to support their claims.

The targeted programs include groups investigating Russian war crimes in Ukraine, as well as atrocities in Myanmar, Syria, Iraq, Nepal, Sri Lanka and the Gambia.

Multiple programs designated for termination are operating in Ukraine, three sources told Reuters. One of the groups is Global Rights Compliance, which gathers evidence of Russian war crimes across the country, including torture and sexual violence. Another is Legal Action Worldwide, a legal aid organization that supports efforts to prosecute suspects accused of perpetrating war crimes in Ukraine.

The State Department will have the opportunity to appeal the OMB's recommendation, though two U.S. officials told Reuters that Secretary of State Marco Rubio is not likely to advocate for most of the programs.

Rubio could potentially argue to preserve a few key programs, such as those supporting the prosecution of Russian war crimes in Ukraine, one source said.

According to an internal State Department email viewed by Reuters, the department has until July 11 to submit their arguments on behalf of preserving any of the targeted war crimes accountability programs.

The Trump administration's funding cuts have already impacted humanitarian aid and civil society programs across Ukraine as the country faces its fourth year of Russia's full-scale invasion. One of Trump's first acts in his second term was to freeze all U.S. foreign assistance for 90 days. He then worked alongside former ally Elon Musk to dismantle the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).

Among the defunded organizations is Ukraine Conflict Observatory, the leading U.S.-backed initiative documenting Russia's abduction of Ukrainian children. A part of Yale University's Humanitarian Research Lab, the group will end its efforts to track and monitor illegally deported Ukrainian children as of July 1 due to funding cuts.  

The White House also previously disbanded the U.S. Justice Department's War Crimes Accountability Team and fired a coordinator responsible for collecting data on Russian war crimes in Ukraine.

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The Kyiv IndependentMartin Fornusek