Wildberries, the Russian Amazon, in Kyiv’s sights. An empire born in a couple’s living room and seized by Moscow

Wildberries is one of the many businesses that, during these years of war, have been targeted – even before Ukrainian drones – by the Kremlin, which has orchestrated changes of ownership and restructuring as part of a redistribution of economic power made necessary by the conflict and the tightening of sanctions against Russia. Businesspeople close to the authorities acquire assets from foreign companies at discounted prices, or the state confiscates assets from figures who rose to prominence in the 1990s to reward a new generation of entrepreneurs deemed more loyal. The company, which had a turnover of $27.5 billion in 2023, merged in 2024 with Russ Group, a leading billboard advertising company founded in the 2000s by Rupert Murdoch, which was much smaller (with a turnover of one-tenth). The merger, however, had taken place on an equal footing and had been personally approved by Vladimir Putin, as the Kremlin had announced at the time.

The stated aim was to “become the world’s largest digital and rouble-based banking network, surpassing the SWIFT system, with a potential user base across the ‘Global South’”. In recent years, the company has indeed expanded its interests, from freight transport, car-sharing and taxis to online hotel booking services.

It is one of the companies with the highest number of employees in Russia. The forced corporate merger had caused the relationship between the company’s founders to implode: Vladislav Bakalchuk, the soon-to-be ex-husband of Tatiana Kim, founder and owner of Wildberries brand, which she built from scratch whilst on maternity leave in 2004, and who, twenty years later, had attempted to storm the company’s headquarters at ‘Romanov Dvor’, accompanied by a group of Chechens, a luxury office complex 500 metres from the Kremlin which housed Credit Suisse, Apple and Sotheby’s, later replaced by Russian and Chinese companies after the war began. In the complex, which also houses cinemas, restaurants, cafés and an exclusive fitness club, a shootout had taken place at the time between the Chechens and the security guards, leaving several people dead.

Tatiana had accused her ex-husband – who claimed to have played a leading role in the company’s launch – of orchestrating a bid to take over the firm, in which Vladislav continued to hold a minimal 1 per cent stake, compared with his wife’s 99 per cent. Bakalchuk, in turn, had denounced the involvement of Dagestan Senator Suleiman Kerimov as a key figure in the merger, a close associate of Russ Group’s CEO, Robert Mirzoyan, and, notoriously, of the Kremlin. The Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov had confirmed this, pointing the finger at “well-known figures in the Caucasus” for having forced Tatiana to go ahead with the merger. Bakalchuk had thanked Kadyrov “for helping him stay alive and out of prison”, in the context of the dispute that had escalated into a shooting – the worst example of economically motivated violence since the turbulent days of the 1990s. Bakalchuk had candidly explained that he had approached the Chechen leader in the summer of 2024 to avoid the merger, and that he and his wife had become friends with the Chechens several years earlier. “They’ve been helping us for eight years. When the Wilberries/Russ Group issue began, I turned to him again to ask for advice.” The break-up with his wife had come about precisely because of this request he made “to his friends in Grozny”. “This is not an isolated incident.”

“It is a sign that the chaos of that time has not passed but is part of the country’s recurring fate,” wrote *The Moscow Times*, recalling the 1996 murder of the American businessman Paul Tatum, co-founder of a joint venture for the Radisson Slavyanskaya hotel, who was involved in a dispute over the sale of his shares to his Russian partners.