Wildberries said that when its warehouses in Elektrostal and Kotovsk were hit during a Ukrainian attack, the safety systems functioned normally and employees were able to leave the premises without obstruction.
The company’s press service said the emergency automation and access control system responded in time. Wildberries also rejected Telegram channel reports alleging evacuation violations at the Elektrostal warehouse.
The company says that once the emergency began, all evacuation exits opened automatically and workers left the building in line with the established evacuation plan.
A day earlier, employees of the warehouse near Moscow described a different sequence of events. According to them, during the attack and the fire that followed, managers did not allow people to leave the building, and some workers had to open cargo gates themselves in order to get out.
One employee wrote in an unofficial trade-union chat that instead of an immediate evacuation, supervisors gathered workers from Block 10 and sent them to hand in their item-picking terminals. She said managers started leaving only after the neighboring Block 9 began to crumble, and the others followed them through a narrow passage with a turnstile.
A worker from another block and the sister of a man who was on shift that night described similar circumstances. According to them, after the strikes, one supervisor urged people to stay calm and would not let them out even though the warehouse was already on fire. In the end, workers from Block 7 opened a loading door and escaped through it on their own.
According to the latest figures from Governor Andrey Vorobyov, 61 people were injured in the strikes on the Moscow region: 57 in Elektrostal and four more in Noginsk. The main strike hit the Wildberries warehouse. As Important Stories reports, employees are still writing in a chat that they cannot reach some colleagues who were working the night shift. The company had earlier also acknowledged that contact with some workers had been lost. In addition, an oil depot in Noginsk was attacked the previous day; according to Bogorodsky district head Denis Semyonov, the fire there was extinguished only on the morning of July 19.