Credit rating agency Egan-Jones has released an analysis warning that privately owned commercial assets are now exposed to state-level conflict in ways that go well beyond the battlefield. The Egan-Jones drone risk commentary uses Ukraine’s strikes on Russia-based online retailer Wildberries to explain how cheap, long-range attacks can hit a private business and then push the financial damage onto merchants, insurers and lenders that were never targeted. The firm published the analysis on September 3, 2026.
According to the firm, deterrence between nuclear powers is still holding, but the price of causing serious damage has dropped sharply. Egan-Jones points to Ukraine’s Operation Spiderweb in June 2025, in which drones costing roughly $2,000 apiece damaged about a third of Russia’s strategic cruise missile carriers. Distance has also stopped being a barrier. The analysis cites a July 2026 strike on the Omsk refinery, carried out almost 2,500 kilometers from territory held by Ukraine, as evidence that range no longer limits what an attacker can reach.
Egan-Jones Drone Risk Analysis Traces the Wildberries Strikes
Commercial sites have proven just as reachable as military ones. Between July 18 and August 4, 2026, drones hit at least sixteen Wildberries facilities spread across fourteen regions. Wildberries handles about 45 percent of online commerce in Russia, so the damage touched a large share of the country’s e-commerce network. The published floor area of the affected sites adds up to 2.0 million square meters in just eighteen days, which Egan-Jones compares to roughly 4 percent of the North American space Amazon reported in its most recent annual filing.
The Egan-Jones drone risk analysis argues that where the loss ended up matters most for credit investors. Eleven days before the first strike, Wildberries changed its terms to disclaim liability for goods destroyed in force majeure events. That left sellers without compensation and shifted the cost onto thousands of small merchants who sold through the platform. Insurance covered part of the loss and declined the rest. The firm’s full analysis makes the case that a physical loss at a widely dispersed borrower turns into a capital question at a lender whose own property was never attacked.
Every defense has a ceiling, according to the commentary. Passive hardening cannot be applied at scale, and defenders end up paying between 20 and 600 times the attacker’s unit cost. Site-level drone protection runs into the same math, since the gap between the price of an attack and the price of stopping one keeps widening. For a rating agency, that imbalance is less a military problem than a balance sheet problem, because it determines how much of any loss a defender can realistically prevent.
What Investors Should Document About State-Level Exposure
Egan-Jones asks whether investors holding asset-heavy private positions have actually examined their state-level exposure. The firm lays out five things to document: site concentration, replacement lead times, war and hostile-act exclusions, contractual loss allocation, and counterparty pass-through. Each item describes a different route by which a loss can travel from the site that was struck to a party further down the financial chain. Documenting them ahead of time, rather than after a strike, is the practical step the firm is asking investors to take.
The leading indicator, the firm suggests, is whether a product line or contract allows a business to be characterized as supporting a state’s military effort. Wildberries became a target after its own catalog listed drone components. The Egan-Jones drone risk framework treats that kind of listing as the signal to watch, since it can shift a company from ordinary commercial operator to something an adversary views as part of a war effort.
Egan-Jones concludes that deterrence among states has not failed, but that losses can now be inherited by parties that were never directly hit. The firm, an NRSRO founded in 1995, provides credit ratings and proxy services, and its analysis frames the Wildberries case as a working example of how conflict costs can surface far from the point of impact. For holders of private commercial assets, the question the firm leaves open is whether that exposure has been measured at all.
