2 Dead in 'Corporate Raid' at Russian Online Giant

Tatyana Bakalchuk, Russia's richest woman, says her company was the target of a corporate raid on Wednesday—and she doesn't mean the Gordon Gekko kind. Two people were killed and seven others, including two police officers, were injured in a shootout at the Moscow offices of Wildberries, an online retail giant seen as Russia's equivalent of Amazon, reports Reuters. Lawyers for Vladislav Bakalchuk, Bakulchuk's estranged husband, said Thursday that he had been arrested and charged with crimes including murder and attempted murder. They called the charges "absurd."

• Background. Tatyana Bakalchuk filed for divorce in July amid a dispute over the business the 48-year-old founded in 2004, the New York Times reports. Vladislav Bakalchuk publicly objected to plans to merge Wildberries with the advertising firm Russ and said he would want half the company if they divorced. Tatyana Bakalchuk was the sole owner of Wildberries until she transferred a 1% stake to her husband in 2019. The former English teacher is Russia's first female self-made billionaire.

• The raid. Tatyana Bakalchuk said her husband led an armed raid of the offices, which are a few blocks from the Kremlin, CBS News reports. According to his lawyers, he brought a team including a lawyer to the offices for a pre-arranged meeting to resolve business differences. She called the claim "absurd" and said no meeting was scheduled. According to Russian media, around 30 people were detained after the incident, per RadioFreeEurope.
• "Vladislav, what are you doing?" In a video statement posted on Telegram, Tatyana Bakalchuk said, "Armed men raided our office, initiated a shootout, a mayhem, young men died." She asked, "Vladislav, what are you doing? How are you going to look in the eyes of your parents and our children?" The couple have seven children.

• Friends in high places. Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov spoke in support of Vladislav Bakalchuk in July, vowing to stop the merger. Tatyana Bakalchuk, however, is believed to have ties to powerful figures in the Russian government, RFE reports. Reuters reports that Vladimir Putin has said he supports the merger.
• Echoes of the '90s. Reuters notes that the shootout is reminiscent of the 1990s, "when deadly corporate turf battles were commonplace as huge swathes of property were redistributed after the fall of the Soviet Union."
• Culture war. The business dispute has been "cast in terms of a culture war over conservative family values," as the Times puts it. Vladislav Bakalchuk said in an appeal to Kadyrov to stop the merger that his wife had been "manipulated" and had "left home." The Chechen leader vowed that he would be on the husband's side until "the end," saying, "The wife must return home."

(More Russia stories.)