Kazakhstan neither runs Wildberries nor chose this war, yet both now reach its traders. More than 120,000 Kazakh sellers list on the platform, and their stock sits in Russian warehouses that Ukraine has been striking through July, targets it calls legitimate for the drone parts and electronics it says move through them.
Atameken, the national chamber of entrepreneurs, put the damage to its members above 1 billion tenge ($2.1 million) across more than 100 sellers, and said it was still gathering figures from the regions. The e-commerce association ECOMMERCE-KZ, whose chairman Khamit Kashikov has kept a running count, estimated about 2 billion tenge ($4.2 million) across 250 members, with more than 150 sellers hit and the tally climbing daily. Single losses run from a few hundred thousand tenge to hundreds of millions. Wildberries is still counting stock, so the real number is not yet fixed.
The paperwork decides who carries the risk. Wildberries’ Russian offer treats the strikes as force majeure and lifts the platform’s liability; the wording in its Kazakh offer is looser, and that gap is where the associations are pressing, through Atameken and the trade ministry, for compensation at least at cost.
Warehousing is shifting as well. Wildberries is hunting for space in Kazakhstan after losing several distribution hubs in Russia, its main Koledino centre among them, hit on 20 July. Market participants put the lost capacity near 444,000 square metres, about 8% of the company’s warehouse network. Ozon, whose Russian centres escaped the strikes, is speeding up its own build-out in Almaty and Astana.
Moving the boxes south buys safety at a Moscow price: warehouse space in Kazakhstan now rents for about what it costs there.
The relocation would add warehouses and jobs to Kazakhstan’s e-commerce map. The rents undercut the gain. Modern warehouse space in Kazakhstan has climbed to roughly 10,300 roubles a square metre a year against about 10,500 in Moscow, so the move brings safety and higher fixed costs at once, and investors are already pricing more into security and insurance, and into the cost of holding capacity in reserve across the sector.
Kazakhstan’s gain here is a new kind of exposure. Its traders are tied to a platform whose logistics have become a target, and its warehouse market is asked to soak up the overflow just as its own rents hit a ceiling. The bill for the strikes is being split, and Kazakhstan is holding a share it never priced in.