An ugly divorce, Russia’s richest woman and two dead in Moscow

The Russian businesswoman Tatyana V. Bakalchuk has been locked in a dispute with her estranged husband for months over the fate of her company, Wildberries.

He came with armed men he called “colleagues”. She stationed guards in the lobby of her billion-dollar business.

Their divorce, and their dispute over the fate of Russia’s biggest online retailer, appeared to escalate into a full-blown shootout in downtown Moscow on Wednesday, leaving two dead, five injured and dozens detained just across from the Kremlin.

The dispute between the couple, Tatyana and Vladislav Bakalchuk, has been at the centre of Russia’s business world for months, even drawing the involvement of the strongman leader of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov. At stake is not only their marriage but the fate of the company Tatyana Bakalchuk founded, Wildberries, a marketplace that processes more than 12 million orders every day and had sales that neared US$27 billion ($43b) in 2023, according to Bakalchuk and Tass, a state news agency.

The shooting took place just opposite the Kremlin, in the lobby of one of the most prestigious office buildings in Moscow, according to a video from the scene published by state news agencies. The video showed burly men bickering, with at least one of them brandishing and then shooting a gun.

Vladislav Bakalchuk told RBC, a Russian business news outlet, that he had arrived at the offices Wednesday with “colleagues” to conduct “peaceful negotiations” about the construction of new warehouses.

“But at the entrance I was attacked by security guards,” said Bakalchuk, who has a small stake in the company. He added that one of his associates was wounded in the skirmish.

Tatyana Bakalchuk denied her husband’s claims, saying in a statement posted on social media site Telegram that no negotiations between them were planned. She is the majority owner of Wildberries, and added that her husband had made a “failed attempt” of a “corporate raid”.

In a later video statement posted on Telegram, Bakalchuk, said, crying: “Armed men raided our office, initiated a shootout, a mayhem, young men died.”

“Vladislav, what are you doing? How are you going to look in the eyes of your parents and our children?”

Russian Investigative Committee, the country’s equivalent to the FBI, opened a criminal case into the incident. The agency said in a statement that two Russian law enforcement officers who arrived at the scene were wounded, without providing further details.

Two people died in the shootout, investigators said. Russian state news agencies identified them as guards of the office building. Twenty-eight people were detained, according to Tass.

Some of the men involved were martial arts fighters, Russian news media reported.

The conflict over the company became public in July after Vladislav Bakalchuk said he opposed plans to merge Wildberries with Russ, an outdoor advertising firm. In July, he told RBC that if the couple divorced, he would want half of the company. At the end of July, Tatyana Bakalchuk filed for a divorce.

The dispute has also been cast in terms of a culture war over conservative family values, a recurring theme in Russian media. In July, Vladislav Bakalchuk made a public appeal to Kadyrov, the Chechen leader, saying that his wife “left home” and “got connected with a strange company”.

In a video with Vladislav Bakalchuk posted on YouTube in July, Kadyrov said that he was against the destruction of a family and that Wildberries had been attacked in a corporate raid. Kadyrov vowed to “stand” on the husband’s side “until the end”.

“The wife must return home,” Kadyrov said in the video.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Written by: Ivan Nechepurenko

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