Ukraine targets Wildberries again as Russia hits Kharkiv publishing house
· France 24More than 200 firefighters were battling a fire at a warehouse run by Russian online retailer Wildberries east of Moscow following a Ukrainian drone attack on Monday, as Kyiv's campaign against the e-commerce giant intensified.
Alexander Avdeyev, the regional governor of Vladimir, said 203 firefighters and 67 pieces of equipment had been deployed to tackle Monday's blaze, which measured 100,000 square metres (1.07 million square feet), equivalent to about 14 soccer fields.
Wildberries confirmed the attack and said all staff had been evacuated and deliveries and shipping orders had been rerouted to other warehouses.
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The company's founder and CEO, Tatyana Kim, has called the Ukrainian attacks – which have targeted more than a dozen Wildberries sites since July 18 – "acts of terrorism".
Since mid-July, Ukraine has struck around 20 sites belonging to Wildberries across various parts of Russia and in annexed Crimea.
The initial attacks on the night of July 17-18 left eight people dead and nearly 90 wounded at sites in the Moscow and Tambov regions.
Kyiv has sought to disrupt the operations of the company that is often described as Russia's answer to Amazon and is a linchpin of the consumer economy.
Kim said businesses across 10 countries had suffered significant losses as a result of the attacks and that Wildberries was working with the Russian government to mitigate the impact on vendors using its platform.
Avdeyev said a young man had sustained a non-life-threatening head wound in the attack and was being taken to hospital. Another young man had an injured finger, while a woman had also suffered what the governor described as minor injuries to one of her legs.
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Kyiv says the aim is to force the Kremlin to negotiate an end to the war in Ukraine.
Meanwhile, a Russian strike on a warehouse in northeastern Ukraine over the weekend destroyed eight million books, the publishing house said Monday, slamming it as an attack on Ukrainian culture.
It is not the first time Russia has struck a major publishing centre, drawing accusations from Kyiv that Moscow was specifically targeting them.
"This is the largest loss to Ukraine's book infrastructure since the beginning of the full-scale war" in 2022, the publisher, Ranok, said.
An AFP reporter on Saturday saw firefighters battling to contain the blaze at the warehouse in Kharkiv hours after Russia launched a drone and missile attack.
"More than 8 million books have been destroyed in the fire, among them textbooks for children," Ranok said in a statement on social media.
"The blaze is still raging. The enemy is trying to burn out our education and culture," it added.
The publisher's director Viktor Kruglov called it an "attack on Ukrainian education and culture".
A strike on a warehouse near Kyiv last month burnt 800,000 books to ash, the publisher – whose portfolio includes works by George Orwell and Barack Obama – said.
Throughout its invasion, Russia has frequently hit Ukrainian museums, galleries, film studios, churches and other sites of cultural importance.
(FRANCE 24 with Reuters and AFP)