When three ballistic missiles destroyed Rozetka's main automated logistics hub outside Kyiv in August, they did more than wipe out a $70m facility capable of processing more than 100,000 orders a day.
They exposed a growing dilemma for retailers: supply chains designed for maximum efficiency can also create dangerous points of failure.
For Rozetka, Ukraine's largest e-commerce platform and online marketplace, the answer is increasingly to decentralise.
The company is relying more heavily on marketplace sellers, smaller regional facilities and cross-border supply chains. Other Ukrainian retailers and logistics businesses are taking a similar approach, spreading inventory rather than concentrating it in large distribution centres.
Ukraine is therefore becoming an extreme real-world test of a question with implications far beyond the country: what happens when the most efficient retail supply chain is not necessarily the most resilient?
Rozetka suffered its most serious infrastructure losses in August 2026.
A drone strike on 1 August hit a company facility in the Kyiv region, killing one employee and injuring seven others. Further attacks followed in the days afterwards.
The most damaging came on the night of 4–5 August, when three ballistic missiles destroyed Rozetka's main automated logistics hub in Brovary.
The facility was valued at about $70m and processed more than 100,000 orders a day. More than 200 employees survived the attack after taking shelter in an on-site bomb shelter.
The financial consequences have also been substantial. Rozetka co-founders Vladyslav Chechotkin and Iryna Chechotkina said direct losses from the attacks had reached billions of hryvnias.
With insurers largely unwilling to provide war-risk cover on this scale, the company has had to absorb much of the damage itself.
But the destruction of Brovary created a strategic problem as well as a financial one.
Modern retail logistics has long favoured scale. Large automated fulfilment centres can consolidate inventory, lower unit costs and process huge numbers of orders efficiently.
In a war zone, however, that concentration can create a catastrophic single point of failure.
For Rozetka and other Ukrainian retailers, resilience is therefore changing the economics of distribution.
Rozetka has responded by accelerating its shift towards a more distributed operating model.
One element is greater reliance on its marketplace platform. Instead of Rozetka holding and distributing all inventory itself, independent small and medium-sized businesses can increasingly fulfil orders directly.
The company is also using smaller regional facilities rather than depending on a handful of major distribution centres.
The principle is straightforward: spreading stock across multiple locations reduces the impact of losing any one site.
Nova Poshta, one of Ukraine's largest delivery companies, also suffered the destruction of an advanced fulfilment and sorting centre in Kyiv Oblast in August.
Rather than simply replacing one large distribution centre with another, it has moved towards converting branches around the country into smaller local warehouses. This allows inventory to be distributed across hundreds of locations.
The shift turns conventional supply-chain thinking on its head.
In peacetime, retailers have strong incentives to move greater volumes through fewer, increasingly automated facilities. In a conflict, geographical concentration itself becomes a risk.
Efficiency still matters. But resilience increasingly requires redundancy.
The transformation is not confined to Ukraine's domestic logistics network.
Retailers and distributors are increasingly using Poland and other EU countries as alternative locations for inventory. Rozetka and other businesses are using cross-border logistics connections to move goods from Polish and EU warehouses directly into the Ukrainian market.
Holding more inventory outside vulnerable domestic locations reduces reliance on major fulfilment centres inside Ukraine. It also gives retailers access to the wider European logistics network.
This highlights a broader role for cross-border fulfilment.
Locating inventory in multiple markets has traditionally been associated with expansion, faster deliveries and access to new customers.
In Ukraine, it has also become a form of business-continuity planning.
The approach can reduce concentration risk, but it introduces additional transport, handling and inventory costs.
The destruction and disruption of warehouses and transport infrastructure is putting pressure on retail prices and margins.
Around 90% of Ukraine's food logistics infrastructure operated by retail chains has reportedly been heavily disrupted or destroyed. More than 400,000 square metres of warehouse space was also lost in a single month.
The National Bank of Ukraine expects logistics restructuring and higher operating expenses to add between 0.4 and 0.6 percentage points to annual consumer inflation by the end of 2026.
Retailers may be unable to pass all these additional costs on to shoppers.
Logistics and storage typically account for about 8% of an average retail consumer price. Strong competition and weaker consumer demand mean retailers are likely to absorb some of the increase themselves, putting further pressure on margins.
Insurance creates another problem.
Rozetka's losses demonstrate the difficulty of obtaining conventional commercial cover for major assets in high-risk areas. The company has called for greater government support for war-risk insurance, alongside measures such as tax relief.
Ukraine is working to expand its state-backed war-risk insurance framework. Proposed changes include extending coverage to Kyiv and Kyiv Oblast, allowing businesses to insure leased warehouse space and inventory, and introducing a model under which the state would cover the first losses on major claims.
The government has also introduced preferential financing for large retailers affected by recent attacks to help replenish working capital and maintain the supply of goods.
Where retailers hold inventory is therefore becoming inseparable from what can be insured, how much redundancy costs and who ultimately carries the financial risk.
Rozetka's marketplace provides another layer of operational flexibility.
By allowing independent merchants to sell and fulfil orders through the platform, Rozetka can maintain a broad product offering without necessarily owning or physically holding all the inventory itself.
This can make the business less dependent on centralised fulfilment infrastructure.
But decentralising operations does not make risk disappear. It can redistribute it.
The destruction of the Brovary hub left third-party merchants facing substantial losses after inventory stored at the facility was destroyed.
More than 44 marketplace sellers reportedly joined a collective action group after initially estimating their combined losses at almost UAH 112m.
Disagreements subsequently emerged over compensation, contractual force majeure provisions, fees and the documentation merchants needed to record their losses.
The dispute exposes a more complicated aspect of the marketplace model.
Platforms can distribute inventory and fulfilment across a wider ecosystem, reducing dependence on a single operator. But when shared infrastructure is destroyed, determining who bears the loss can become considerably more difficult.
The issue has relevance beyond Ukraine. Marketplace operators everywhere rely on complex relationships between platforms, sellers, logistics providers and insurers. Severe disruption can make responsibility for losses considerably less clear.
Ukraine's experience is also changing the role of physical retail networks.
Rozetka's collection points have increasingly served as community facilities during periods of power disruption. Some have provided electricity, internet connectivity through Starlink and access to basic goods.
Under these circumstances, a collection point is no longer simply somewhere to retrieve an online order.
Stores, collection points, warehouses and delivery networks can become part of the infrastructure that keeps communities functioning.
The circumstances in Ukraine are exceptional, but the principle has wider relevance.
Extreme weather, natural disasters, cyber attacks and prolonged power outages can similarly transform commercial networks into important points of physical and digital access.
That gives retail redundancy a value that cannot always be measured through conventional logistics efficiency.
For Rozetka, the destruction of its Brovary hub represents an enormous human, financial and operational loss.
But it has also accelerated a transformation already under way.
The company is moving towards a more marketplace-driven and decentralised model. Ukraine's retail sector more broadly is reconsidering where inventory should be stored, how goods should move across borders and how much fulfilment capacity should be concentrated in any one location.
The result is likely to be a less centralised retail system. It may not offer the same economies of scale as the model it replaces.
But it could prove considerably more resilient.
Retailers have spent decades using automation, consolidation and scale to remove cost and friction from their supply chains. Those advantages have not disappeared.
However, geopolitical instability and other systemic risks are placing a higher value on redundancy, flexibility and the ability to continue operating when a critical facility is lost.
Ukraine is demonstrating, under the most extreme circumstances, that the most efficient retail network and the most resilient one may be two very different things.
"Rozetka: How Ukraine's retail sector is adapting to war" was originally created and published by Retail Insight Network, a GlobalData owned brand.