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  • ✇Euromaidan Press
  • Why did Ozon fall as much as 29% while Russia’s market lost 2.9%?
    Ukrainian strikes on Ozon’s warehouses sent the listed retailer’s shares down 29.09% from Friday’s close at Monday’s low, RBC’s market report said. The Moscow Exchange shifted Ozon’s main trading session to a 30-minute auction, while other trading modes remained open, exchange rules show. Unlike privately held Wildberries, Ozon’s listing made investors’ response to the disruption immediately visible. Unlike privately held Wildberries, Ozon’s listing made investors’ r
     

Why did Ozon fall as much as 29% while Russia’s market lost 2.9%?

24 août 2026 à 08:42

Thick black smoke and flames rise from an Ozon warehouse in Chapayevsk, Russia, at sunset.

Ukrainian strikes on Ozon’s warehouses sent the listed retailer’s shares down 29.09% from Friday’s close at Monday’s low, RBC’s market report said. The Moscow Exchange shifted Ozon’s main trading session to a 30-minute auction, while other trading modes remained open, exchange rules show.

Unlike privately held Wildberries, Ozon’s listing made investors’ response to the disruption immediately visible.

Unlike privately held Wildberries, Ozon’s listing made investors’ response to the disruption immediately visible. The sell-off came before Ozon had calculated the physical damage, which the company said it would assess later in its statement on Chapayevsk.

Since 22 August, Ozon has reported disruption at six facilities: warehouses in Chapayevsk and Orenburg, three facilities in southern Russia, and another warehouse in Krasnodar.

Thick black smoke and flames rise from an Ozon warehouse in Chapayevsk, Russia, at sunset.
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Russia was simultaneously attacking Ukraine’s retail and logistics infrastructure. Russian strikes burned two Epicentr hypermarkets in Odesa on Monday morning and caused fires at food warehouses in the city, regional authorities said.

Two days earlier, President Vladimir Putin had said Kyiv should “expect a response targeting your most sensitive economic sectors” in comments published by state journalist Pavel Zarubin.

Ozon falls farther than the market

The MOEX index fell about 2.9% on 24 August. Ozon’s 29.09% decline went far beyond the broader sell-off, indicating that investors were reacting to company-specific risk rather than merely following the Russian market.

That risk had appeared before Ozon’s warehouses were struck. Its shares fell 2.3% on 22 July over concerns that the retailer might become a target. Six days later, VTB Bank fell 2.5%, with analysts attributing part of the decline to uncertainty surrounding its Wildberries partnership.

Wildberries, Ozon, and their smaller rivals sell goods and services worth the equivalent of 8.5% of Russia’s GDP and employ 4 million people—more than 5% of the country’s workforce.

The August attacks turned that risk into operational disruption. Ozon reported fires at its Makhachkala facility and Krasnodar warehouse. In Chapayevsk, the company evacuated more than 500 workers, suspended operations, and redirected shipments. The following day, it evacuated more than 300 workers and closed its Orenburg warehouse.

dagestan stavropol krai adygea ukraine's drones worked straight down delivery russia's 2 online store · post fire ozon logistics complex tyube settlement 24 2026 пожежа на території логістичного комплексу у
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Rerouting allowed Ozon to keep orders moving by transferring the workload to facilities that remained open. That is the business risk investors were pricing: a distributed warehouse network can absorb an isolated closure, while repeated attacks progressively reduce the capacity available to absorb the next one.

ozon delivery truck outside of a warehouse
An Ozon delivery truck outside one of the Russian retailer’s logistics centers. Photo: Retail.ru

Each strike leaves fewer warehouses

Ukraine’s campaign against Wildberries shows how warehouse losses accumulate across a retail network. By the end of July, Verstka counted eight affected warehouses covering 860,000 square meters, or 15.4% of the company’s total warehouse space.

By mid-August, ISW counted seven of its ten largest hubs knocked out. The two estimates measure different things, but both show disruption spreading through the network.

A distributed warehouse system can absorb an isolated closure by moving shipments through other hubs. As more sites are lost, fewer alternatives are available to carry out that work. The economic effect, therefore, depends not only on the value of the buildings or goods destroyed, but on how much spare capacity remains after each strike.

Russia’s attacks on Ukraine illustrate the same logistical resilience. Two strikes destroyed warehouse buildings at Aurora’s distribution center, CEO Taras Panasenko said, but the retailer kept its stores open. Ozon similarly redirected shipments after closing warehouses in Russia.

Continued sales do not mean that the strikes had no economic effect. They show that retailers can absorb individual losses by relying on the rest of their networks. Repeated attacks gradually consume that protection, and Ozon’s public listing allowed investors to price the risk before the company could calculate the damage.

  • ✇Euromaidan Press
  • How did Sberbank’s record dividend end up frozen for Western shareholders?
    Sberbank has reported another jump in profit, on course to pay a dividend even bigger than the record one it handed shareholders earlier this summer. Shareholders in the European Union, the United States, and every other country Moscow calls “unfriendly” will not see a ruble of it.The bank earned more than 1 trillion rubles ($12 billion) in the first half of 2026 alone, up nearly a fifth on the year, a gain in an economy the Central Bank of Russia itself describes as only
     

How did Sberbank’s record dividend end up frozen for Western shareholders?

17 août 2026 à 05:44

german gref, ceo of sberbank

Sberbank has reported another jump in profit, on course to pay a dividend even bigger than the record one it handed shareholders earlier this summer. Shareholders in the European Union, the United States, and every other country Moscow calls “unfriendly” will not see a ruble of it.

The bank earned more than 1 trillion rubles ($12 billion) in the first half of 2026 alone, up nearly a fifth on the year, a gain in an economy the Central Bank of Russia itself describes as only moderate after a downturn at the start of the year.

For a shareholder in New York or Frankfurt, none of it is money he can spend.

Full-year profit hit a third straight record in 2025. Sberbank pays out half its profit, and the dividend it set for 2025 was already the biggest it had ever paid.

For a shareholder in New York or Frankfurt, none of it is money he can spend. About a quarter of the 2024 payout was set aside in restricted “type-C” accounts for holders from “unfriendly” countries, and nothing has changed since: the dividend is credited to him and then locked.

The Russian state, which owns just over half of Sberbank, faces no such block. It collects roughly half of every payout, while its budget deficit runs past 6 trillion rubles ($71 billion) in five months.

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The market moves the other way

The records are landing on a market that has barely moved in four years. The MOEX index, the main gauge of the Moscow Exchange, had fallen 17 straight weeks by mid-July, its longest losing streak since 1997, back near where it stood the week Russia launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022; anyone who bought Russian shares at the start of the war has made almost nothing since.

Sberbank yields more than 10% on paper, but the stock has fallen about 14% over the past year, so the record dividend does not even cover the price drop, and the foreign holder takes that loss without the payout that might soften it.

Moscow keeps tightening the lock

Russia built the type-C system in 2022 as a countermeasure to Western sanctions that froze its reserves abroad, and officials say the money stays until those reserves are freed.

Within that system, dividends owed to “unfriendly” foreigners are deposited into blocked ruble accounts that they can spend only on Russian taxes, government bonds, and fees.

In June 2026, the block reached ordinary bank deposits after a few words were added to the founding decree: “bank deposits (deposits).” Repayments and interest above 10 million rubles (about $120,000) a month now go the same way.

One court opens a crack

In a ruling dated 14 April 2025, the Supreme Court held that a bank cannot refuse to swap an investor’s frozen depositary receipts—certificates that stand in for shares held abroad—for the actual Russian shares, merely because those securities sit in a blocked type-C account.

A Moscow court then sided with the investor, Vladimir Pelevin, and fined Raiffeisenbank for the delay. The ruling allows a holder to swap receipts for shares, but it does not affect the dividends those shares pay, which still land in type-C.

A compensation scheme, based on a March 2024 decree, pays out only when no “unfriendly” foreigner is anywhere in the ownership chain.

A draft law before Russian lawmakers would allow the state to seize the balances in type-C accounts outright. The decree that created them, in 2022, is titled “On the temporary procedure.”

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