Wildberries is one of the many production realities that in these years of war have been targeted, even before Ukrainian drones, by the Kremlin, which has orchestrated changes of ownership and restructurings as part of a redistribution of economic power made necessary by the conflict and the tightening of sanctions against Russia. Entrepreneurs close to the authorities acquire assets of foreign companies at discounted prices or the state confiscates assets of rising personalities in the nineties to reward a new generation of entrepreneurs considered more loyal. The company, which in 2023 had a turnover of 27.5 billion dollars, in 2024 had joined Russ Group, a leading billboard company founded in the 2000s by Rupert Murdoch, much smaller (with a turnover of one tenth). The merger, however, had taken place on equal terms and had been personally approved by Vladimir Putin, as the Kremlin had announced at the time.
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The stated goal was to “become the world’s largest digital and ruble payment banking network, surpassing the Swift system, with a potential user base across the ‘global south’”. In recent years, the company has indeed extended its interests, from freight transport, car sharing and taxis, to online hotel booking activities.
It is one of the companies with the highest number of employees in Russia. The forced corporate marriage had violently exploded the union between the company’s founders: Vladislav Bakalchuk, outgoing husband of Tatiana Kim, creator and owner of the Wildberries brand, created from scratch during maternity leave in 2004, who twenty years later had tried to break into, accompanied by a group of Chechens, the company’s headquarters at ‘Romanov Dvor’, a luxury office complex 500 meters from the Kremlin where Credit Suisse, Apple and Sotheby’s were based, later replaced by Russian and Chinese companies after the start of the war. In the complex, which also houses cinemas, restaurants, cafes, and an exclusive fitness club, there had then been a shootout between the Chechens and security guards, which had left several people on the ground.
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Tatiana had accused her ex-husband, who claimed to have played a leading role in the launch of the enterprise, of orchestrating an attempt to acquire the company, in which Vladislav continued to hold a minimal 1 percent stake, against his wife’s 99 percent. Bakalchuk had in turn denounced the involvement of Dagestani senator Suleiman Kerimov as a key figure in the merger, close to Russ Group CEO, Robert Mirzoyan and, notoriously, to the Kremlin. Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov had confirmed, pointing the finger at “well-known people from the Caucasus” for forcing Tatiana to proceed with the merger. Bakalchuk had thanked Kadyrov “for the help given to stay alive and out of prison”, in the context of the dispute that degenerated into a shootout, the worst example of economically motivated violence since the crazy days of the nineties. Bakalchuk had candidly explained that he had turned to the Chechen leader in the summer of 2024 to avoid the merger, and that he had become friends with the Chechens, along with his wife, several years earlier. “They have been helping us for eight years. When the Wildberries/Russ Group issue started, I turned to him again for advice.” The breakup with his wife had occurred precisely because of this request “to 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 recurring destiny of the country,” Moscow Times had written, recalling the killing, in 1996, of American entrepreneur Paul Tatum, co-founder of a joint venture for the Radisson Slavyanskaya hotel, involved in a dispute over the sale of his shares to Russian partners.
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