Over 11 Million Books Destroyed in Ukrainian Attacks on Wildberries Warehouses

More than 11 million books were destroyed in Wildberries warehouses following attacks by Ukrainian forces, according to data from the Russian Book Union, the Association of Russian Book Publishers, and the Association of Book Distributors. The lost inventory primarily consisted of fiction, children's, and popular science literature. The publishing group Eksmo-AST specified that the destroyed stock included a new edition of Russia's Constitution, road atlases, and books by Zakhar Prilepin and Margarita Simonyan. Copies of Ray Bradbury's novel Fahrenheit 451 were also among the losses. Additionally, exam preparation materials for the Unified State Exam (USE) and State Final Exam (OGE) were affected in huge quantities, prompting publishers to begin urgent reprints.

Ukrainian forces have been targeting Wildberries warehouses since mid-July. One such attack on August 14 damaged a logistics center wall in the Tver region. Total damages to the marketplace and its sellers are estimated by some sources to be in the hundreds of billions of rubles, with Forbes reporting a potential loss between 600 and 800 billion rubles. While the marketplace stated it has not recorded any publishers leaving the platform, reports from Kommersant indicate that some publishers, including Eksmo, have suspended sales on Wildberries to move supplies to their own platforms.

One report noted that Russia has also struck warehouses in Ukraine. According to Ukrainian publishers, Russian attacks have destroyed over 10 million books in recent months, including eight million copies at a children's literature publisher in Kharkiv on August 1.