Ozon’s Military-Goods Sales Help Explain Ukraine’s Warehouse Campaign—but Not Its Legal Answer

Verstka’s analysis of Ozon’s internal analytics describes a major civilian e-commerce channel for goods that can also support military activity. Between August 2025 and July 2026, users ordered more than 2.13 million such items across 33 categories, worth over 25 billion rubles—roughly $290 million. 2818

That finding helps explain why Ukraine has expanded its campaign against Russian online-retail logistics networks. It does not, however, establish that the purchases were made by Russian troops, reached the front, or were concentrated in any particular warehouse. Nor does it answer whether a specific Ozon or Wildberries facility was a lawful military target.

What the Verstka investigation found

The investigation grouped the products into four broad classes:

• Military-tactical gear: More than 527,000 items worth 9.14 billion rubles, including body armor, helmets, load-bearing equipment, armor plates and adapters, and neck-and-shoulder protection. 1823
• Optics: Nearly 350,000 items worth 7.22 billion rubles, including optical, red-dot, digital and thermal sights, night-vision devices, thermal imagers, and related mounts and covers. 1728
• Drones and components: 6.26 billion rubles in sales, including completed drones, batteries, frames, propellers, receivers, cameras, and other accessories and components. 1822
• Firearm parts and accessories: Nearly 2.46 billion rubles across 13 categories, including stocks, grips, handguards, rails, muzzle devices, and laser-aiming equipment. 2328

The largest spending category was tactical equipment, followed by military optics. Drones and their components formed another substantial portion of the total, while firearm parts and accessories accounted for the remainder of the four-group breakdown. 1823

What the numbers do—and do not—show

The figures are marketplace order and sales analytics, not a military procurement database. The available reporting does not identify individual buyers, end recipients, shipping destinations, or intended uses. Many products in the categories can also serve civilian, sporting, hobbyist, security, or commercial purposes. 172224

The strongest supported conclusion is therefore limited but significant: Ozon moved large quantities of equipment with potential military applications through an ordinary retail platform. The data does not show that all of those products—or any defined share—were delivered to Russian military units.

That distinction matters when connecting the investigation to the war. A marketplace can make military-relevant goods easier to obtain without being formally embedded in a defense-ministry supply chain. Reporting on Wildberries, Ozon’s larger rival, likewise found military-related products and fundraising activity but no evidence that the platform was systematically integrated into Russia’s Defense Ministry infrastructure. 2025

Why Ozon became a target

Ukraine’s warehouse campaign initially focused on Wildberries logistics facilities before expanding to Ozon. The first reported strike on an Ozon warehouse took place in Chapayevsk in the Samara region on August 22, 2026. Ozon said the attack halted operations at the site and caused injuries. 413

Further reports described attacks or attempted attacks involving Ozon facilities in southern Russia, followed by reports concerning warehouses in Orenburg and Ufa. 1315 Within three days, six Ozon warehouses had reportedly been targeted, and the company’s shares fell by almost 30 percent. 39

Kyiv has presented the campaign as an effort to disrupt commercial logistics and the supply of equipment connected to Russia’s war effort. 626 Verstka’s figures give that argument a factual basis in one narrow sense: Ozon’s retail network handled substantial volumes of body armor, optics, drones, components, and other products that can be used in warfare.

But the data does not establish that every targeted facility stored or dispatched military goods. Marketplace-wide sales figures cannot, on their own, identify what was present at Chapayevsk, Orenburg, Ufa, or any other individual logistics hub at the time of an attack.

Does selling dual-use goods make a warehouse a military target?

Under international humanitarian law, civilian objects are protected unless they qualify as military objectives. The relevant test asks whether an object, by its nature, location, purpose, or use, makes an effective contribution to military action and whether its destruction, capture, or neutralization offers a definite military advantage in the circumstances at the time. 374041

The term “dual-use” does not create an automatic legal category of target. The legal assessment turns on the object’s actual military connection and the expected advantage from attacking it. 47

That means:

• A civilian e-commerce warehouse is not automatically a lawful target merely because its marketplace lists military or dual-use products.
• A particular facility could potentially qualify as a military objective if reliable, target-specific evidence showed that it was being used to store, consolidate, or dispatch goods that effectively supported military action, and that neutralizing it would provide a definite military advantage. 323440
• Even when an object qualifies as a military objective, the attacker must still apply distinction, proportionality, and feasible precautions. Civilian employees and nearby residents remain protected. 363738
• Infrastructure that merely contributes to a general war effort, without the required close connection to military action, does not automatically become a lawful target. 43

On the evidence available here, the legal status of the specific Ozon and Wildberries facilities cannot be determined. The Verstka investigation shows the scale and nature of potentially war-relevant goods moving through Ozon; it does not provide the target-specific evidence needed to decide whether any individual warehouse met the international-law threshold at the moment it was attacked.

The bottom line

Verstka’s central finding is about scale: more than 2.13 million potentially military or dual-use items, worth over 25 billion rubles, were ordered on Ozon during the year from August 2025 through July 2026. 28

That makes Ozon’s logistics network relevant to the debate over Russia’s wartime supply chains and helps explain Ukraine’s decision to target the company after striking Wildberries facilities. But the finding is not a military end-use record, and it does not by itself establish that the targeted warehouses were lawful military objectives.

The decisive unanswered question is not simply what Ozon sold. It is what each facility was doing, what evidence attackers had about that use, and what concrete military advantage an attack was expected to produce at the time.