Wildberries says Ukraine’s drone strikes are force majeure. Does that actually get the marketplace off the hook in Russia?

On July 18, Ukrainian forces began striking the logistics warehouses of Wildberries, Russia’s largest online marketplace. By July 29, drones had hit 11 of the marketplace’s warehouses. Much of the stock burned, and sellers suffered losses — some of them losing millions of rubles. The marketplace has already announced relief measures for sellers, but it began paying out only several days after the first strikes, and the payouts came to far less than the losses. Meduza asked a lawyer whether sellers should insure their stock, and looked at what recourse they have — before a strike, and after their inventory has gone up in flames.Use the pop-up table of contents to navigate this article.Is there anything sellers can do in advance?Who is responsible for keeping goods safe if a warehouse catches fire?Short answer: the marketplace.A lawyer who spoke with Meduza said that in law, “provisions on warehouse storage are subject to the rules on storage agreements.” Those rules, in turn, are governed by Russia’s Civil Code, which specifies that a custodian is responsible for the safekeeping of goods handed over to it. That applies to fires as well, unless the fire was caused by force majeure — circumstances beyond a party’s control.“As it applies to Wildberries, the risk of accidental loss [of goods] rests with the marketplace once it has accepted the goods and processed them through its internal electronic system with an ‘Accepted’ status,” the lawyer said.A seller can insure the stock to reduce potential risk and losses, he added: “There can definitely be a benefit to that, especially if the storage or transportation of the cargo could be at risk.”The lawyer also said insurance doesn’t replace the marketplace’s obligation to pay compensation if goods are lost, including in a fire — though that applies only to incidents unrelated to drones. Wildberries’ seller agreement states, however, that a seller who has already been compensated by an insurance company cannot also seek reimbursement for the same goods from the marketplace.What liability does Wildberries have to sellers, and why won’t the marketplace’s insurance help them?Short answer: liability turns murky in a drone attack, and Wildberries’ insurance doesn’t cover goods stored in its warehouses at all.Beyond its Civil Code responsibility for the safekeeping of goods in its warehouses, Wildberries offers its own insurance. But that coverage takes effect only at the moment when “the buyer has ordered the goods, from the moment the goods are shipped from a Wildberries warehouse, including sorting and distribution centers.” It doesn’t cover the period when goods sit in storage.Wildberries insures goods together with the insurance broker Tsunami and the IT platform Zunami One (the near-identical names are not a typo). Coverage can be arranged only for goods sold inside Russia, whether they are stored at a marketplace warehouse or at the seller’s own.Wildberries’ coverage applies both to transporting goods to a pickup point — one of the neighborhood shopfronts where Russian shoppers collect online orders — and to shipping them back to the warehouse if the buyer refuses to collect an order. The company’s website lists the insured events as a buyer refusing or failing to collect an order, a buyer returning goods after purchase, and damage to or loss of goods if something happens to them in transit.Not covered: defects or damage caused by the seller, logistics costs incurred because the seller packed an order incorrectly, returns the seller initiated, and the cost of disposing of goods.When an insured event occurs, a seller can recover up to 100% of the price the buyer paid. But the insurer calculates the final sum after the seller files a claim, taking the nature of the damage into account.Wildberries also offers insurance for goods that have already been delivered to a pickup point. It offers that option together with AlfaStrakhovanie. In that case, goods can be insured against theft, fire, flooding, and natural disasters, and a policy can also be taken out against business interruption if the pickup point stops operating. Such coverage can cost 8,500 to 19,000 rubles, with the sum insured running from 300,000 rubles to 1 million, depending on the policy’s plan.An updated version of Wildberries’ seller agreement took effect on July 7 — 11 days before the first strike on the warehouses. Under it, drone attacks count as force majeure, and the marketplace is released from any obligation to compensate sellers whose goods burned in fires at company warehouses. Ani Bagdasaryan, founder of the law firm Triumph, said the new rules apply only to sellers whose goods were delivered to a warehouse after July 7 — that is, after the new version took effect.According to Sergey Khudyakov, co-owner of the insurance broker Mains, the major platforms’ seller agreements explicitly exclude drone attacks and crashes, along with other forms of military action — meaning marketplaces bear no liability to sellers for goods damaged in such incidents.Are there insurance options outside Wildberries?Short answer: yes, but they don’t always cover losses from drone attacks either.Some insurers do sell policies that account for drone attacks. Sberstrakhovanie, the insurance arm of Sberbank, Russia’s largest lender, has one. The policy covers the risk of damage to or loss of goods, including while they are in storage at a warehouse. The minimum sum insured under the product is 200,000 rubles; the maximum is 120 million.Dmitry Shnaidman, a partner at the law firm Belsky and Partners, said sellers can also take out standard policies, though such policies are unlikely to protect against losses as things stand. After the wave of Ukrainian drone attacks this spring and summer, many insurers have begun writing in clauses that let them treat drone strikes as force majeure and deny claims outright.“A standard insurance policy can cover the risk of fire at a marketplace warehouse. However, it’s important to keep in mind that a drone attack could be classified as force majeure if that risk wasn’t originally included in the policy. In that case, the insurance payout could be denied,” the lawyer said.Insurers working with sellers who use marketplace warehouses face another problem: stock is constantly moving, so the volume in storage is never fixed. That makes it hard to calculate the insured value, which determines the size of any payout.Coverage is harder to arrange for another reason. Sellers often don’t know exactly where in a warehouse their goods are stored, or how good the risk protection is. Ilya Mironov, deputy head of the international clients department at the insurance broker Remind, said marketplaces can sometimes tell sellers exactly where their goods are, but not the building’s technical specifications.One caveat: There is no publicly available rate for the Sberstrakhovanie policy covering drone damage, and terms vary widely from one policy to the next. To find out what coverage would cost, sellers have to request a detailed quote based on their own circumstances.So what can sellers actually do to reduce the risk of losing their goods?Short answer: don’t store goods — or at least not all of them at once — in Wildberries warehouses.Finding an insurer willing to cover warehouse goods against drone strikes, given all the complications, and not treat an attack as force majeure, is extremely difficult, so sellers will have to find other ways to protect their stock. And for now the best option appears to be storing nothing in warehouses that face a high risk of attack.Representatives of MoySklad, an inventory-management service, advise moving from marketplace warehouses to selling from the seller’s own. Under that model, a seller uses local warehouses with no connection to Wildberries and works with the marketplace only at the transport and delivery stage.Pavel Litvak, an e-commerce entrepreneur, also recommended not keeping all the stock in one warehouse but spreading it across several sites to diversify the risk. That can raise logistics costs, though: shipping one large batch to a single warehouse is cheaper than distributing smaller batches among several.What can sellers do if their goods are destroyed?Is there any chance of getting compensation?Short answer: the possibility exists, but resolving it will take a long time.One seller, Yevgeny, said sellers could still be paid compensation, because “writing ‘force majeure’ in a contract doesn’t make it force majeure.”“Under the Civil Code, a circumstance has to be extraordinary and unavoidable. And it’s the court that assesses that, not the seller agreement. There’s already case law — the mere fact of an attack in a region doesn’t absolve anyone of liability, so the question is still open,” Yevgeny said.Bagdasaryan also cited Article 401, Paragraph 3 of the Civil Code, under which even the existence of a clause disclaiming liability for possible damage in a drone attack “doesn’t mean the company is automatically released from liability.” She said she expects court proceedings to begin in Russia after the strikes on the warehouses, and that it will be the courts that decide “who will bear the multibillion-ruble losses.”Sergey Zhorin, a lawyer, said that for Wildberries to be released from liability, the marketplace would still have to prove the goods were lost specifically because of force majeure — meaning a drone strike — and not for some other reason.“Claims against Wildberries may still stand if the damage arose or increased due to a faulty fire alarm system, the absence or malfunction of fire suppression systems, violations of storage rules, a failure to take reasonable measures to contain the fire and preserve surviving goods, or other actions by the warehouse itself,” Zhorin wrote on his Telegram channel.In that case, he said, the drone attack would count only as the triggering event, not the cause of the loss — and violations in the warehouse’s own operations would not qualify as force majeure. In that situation, Zhorin advised approaching the marketplace with a compensation claim first, and going to court if the seller is refused.The lawyer who spoke with Meduza took a similar view. He said the marketplace “definitely must compensate for damage if the harm to property occurred through its fault.””[This happens,] for example, due to failure to comply with fire safety rules, gross negligence, and so on. An insurer compensates for damage when the relevant risk was specified in the policy and the insurance rules, and the event actually occurred,” the lawyer said.Companies usually deny payouts, he said, because sellers missed the deadline for filing an insurance claim, or because of force majeure that leaves no one liable.What should sellers do first, and in what order, if their goods burn?Short answer: gather and preserve every document possible, take it all to Wildberries, and go to court if necessary.The first step is to record the remaining stock and any damage to it, then save to a computer the data from the seller’s Wildberries dashboard on shipments and the movement history of the goods, along with warehouse reports. That is needed to obtain compensation from the marketplace, write the losses off correctly in the books, and report to the tax authorities. The figures in the reports may change later, so it is important to record the quantity of remaining stock straight away.Lawyers recommend collecting information about the goods three times over: as of the point before the new version of the seller agreement took effect, on the eve of the attack on the warehouse where the goods were stored, and on the day of the fire itself. That can be done through the Wildberries dashboard and through specialized Telegram bots — MPSTATS, for example.It is also important to keep documents proving the goods were at a Wildberries warehouse specifically, along with the paperwork stating their value. That can include transfer-and-acceptance records, invoices, electronic receipts, and other documents. They will be useful both to the insurer calculating compensation and in the event of going to court.Next, sellers need to request from Wildberries a certificate of loss of goods, official fire documents, and the inventory results. Tatyana Kim, who owns Wildberries, said assessing the consequences and calculating the scale of payouts to sellers can take up to a month. Once the inventory is complete, sellers will need information on the condition of the goods — intact, lost, or damaged — and write-off certificates if their goods were written off. That data has to be demanded from the marketplace as well.The figures on remaining stock in the documents Wildberries sends need to be checked against the ones the seller downloaded independently. Until that is done, it is recommended not to sign final compensation paperwork and not to click any button in the dashboard saying that the seller agrees with the compensation or has no claims.Zhorin also advised obtaining records from Russia’s Emergency Situations Ministry and the investigative authorities on the causes and progression of the fire, and, if necessary, commissioning an independent forensic fire examination and an expert appraisal of the goods.After that, sellers can send Wildberries a written claim with a damage calculation and supporting documents — and go to court if compensation is refused.What are Russian authorities and Wildberries promising?What initiatives are Russian authorities floating, and when will they be implemented?Short answer: options for state support for sellers are still only being discussed.Back in March, long before Ukrainian forces struck Wildberries’ logistics centers, Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin ordered several government agencies to prepare measures protecting the interests of domestic producers that sell goods on marketplaces. His instruction had nothing to do with the attacks; it concerned supporting competition and regulating the sales process.After the large-scale fires at Wildberries warehouses, Russian authorities and the Association of Electronic Commerce Market Participants (AUREK), a Russian e-commerce industry group, put forward several proposals intended to protect sellers from losses. Ivan Abramov, first deputy chair of the economic policy committee in the Federation Council, the upper house of Russia’s parliament, said lawmakers want to require marketplaces to insure goods against terrorist attacks and drone strikes.Abramov said that before marketplaces take sellers’ goods into storage, they would have to disclose insurance information to sellers, explain its terms, and explain the rules for obtaining compensation if goods are lost.The Federation Council wants these measures included in amendments to the law on the platform economy, which takes effect in October. Abramov said another option could be a compensation fund to cover entrepreneurs’ losses.United Russia, the country’s ruling party, has meanwhile proposed creating a system of war-risk insurance for businesses. One element of that system would be reinsurance through the Russian National Reinsurance Company (RNRC). It is state-owned, and its sole shareholder is Russia’s central bank, which finances RNRC. The company, in turn, pays compensation to insurers in the event of major losses. If insurers have no way to turn to RNRC, they will not be able to write war-related risks into their policies, because the potential losses are too large, and they will refuse to offer that service to clients, said Alexander Kalinin, a member of United Russia’s general council and president of the small-business association Opora Rossii.Kalinin said that in building such a system it is necessary to spell out clearly what counts as a war risk — drone attacks should be on that list — to determine what will qualify as an insured event, and to establish how insurers should compensate for damage. He did not, however, offer specific proposals for what the insurance system should look like.At the same time, Dmitry Pavlov, leader of the New People party in the St. Petersburg Legislative Assembly — a party represented in Russia’s national parliament — came forward with a proposal to require marketplaces to create compensation mechanisms or insure goods in their warehouses:“I understand the business logic when companies don’t want to take on risks they can’t manage. But a natural question arises: why should a small business owner have to pay for this — someone who creates jobs, pays taxes, and has already given marketplaces 40 to 70 percent for commissions, logistics, storage, and advertising?”Pavlov said Russian legislation needs to change, but offered no details on what exactly marketplaces should be required to do.AUREK also wrote to the heads of the Finance Ministry and the Federal Tax Service, Anton Siluanov and Daniil Yegorov, asking for a six-month deferral of taxes and social insurance contributions for sellers whose goods were damaged or lost in drone attacks.The association stressed that many sellers have faced a halt to their business and major losses, and that a tax deferral would help them avoid closing and meet their obligations to counterparties. AUREK expects that sellers who can document damage or loss of goods will be able to use the deferral. The Finance Ministry confirmed receiving the letter, but no decision on it has yet been taken.So far, none of the proposals from officials or from AUREK has produced concrete changes to marketplace policy or to legislation. When such changes might come, or whether they will come at all, is unknown.How has Wildberries decided to support sellers, and is it enough?Short answer: relief measures already exist, but the size of the compensation doesn’t match the scale of the damage.After the first attacks on the warehouses — in Elektrostal, outside Moscow, and Kotovsk, in the Tambov region — Wildberries announced discounts on storage, low-interest loans, and payment deferrals with WB Bank, while Sberbank offered sellers loan restructuring and free consultations.Kim also said the company would pay compensation to the families of warehouse workers who were killed or injured. She later said compensation payments had begun for “the smallest and least protected entrepreneurs,” without specifying the amounts.On July 24, the marketplace announced that WB Bank and the microfinance company WB Finance had granted a repayment holiday to sellers whose goods were lost or damaged. That measure applied only to small and medium-sized businesses.Sellers, meanwhile, have complained that the payouts are far smaller than the damage. One seller who lost 40,000 rubles’ worth of goods received only 2,600 rubles; another, with 130,000 rubles in damage, got 2,900. Many sellers said they received no payment at all. A source at Wildberries told Meduza the payments are voluntary compensation. Forbes Russia calculated that damage to sellers could reach 150 billion to 170 billion rubles.Whether sellers can expect help from the state is still unclear: on July 28, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said authorities had not yet decided on support for Wildberries and its sellers. The government, he said, was keeping the situation under review and in talks with the marketplace — the same thing Peskov had said a week earlier.Lawyers are now advising sellers not to delay documenting their losses or contacting insurers in the wake of the warehouse fires. They also recommend that sellers no longer regard the marketplace’s warehouses as safe storage, avoid making decisions about their businesses’ futures in the heat of the moment, and stay alert to changes in marketplace rules, internal policies, and Russian law.At Meduza, we are committed to transparency about our use of artificial intelligence in the newsroom. The story you’re reading was written by one of our living, breathing journalists and translated from Russian using an AI model configured to follow our strict editorial standards. This translation process is the result of extensive testing and refinements to ensure our English-language coverage is timely and accurate. A Meduza editor reviews every draft before publication.If you find any errors in this translation, please contact us at [email protected].To read Meduza’s exclusive content in English, please subscribe to our newsletter.Meduza