On July 18, Ukrainian drones struck two enormous Wildberries logistics centers: one in Elektrostal near Moscow and another in the Tambov region.

Eight workers were killed. Dozens were injured. The warehouses burned—and with them burned merchandise belonging not only to one giant corporation, but to tens of thousands of Russian entrepreneurs.

Then the attacks continued.

Wildberries facilities were struck in the Krasnodar and Stavropol regions and near St. Petersburg. In less than a week, what initially looked like an isolated attack began to resemble a deliberate campaign against Russia’s largest online marketplace.

Ukraine says the warehouses were involved in supplying components for Russian drones, navigation equipment, military clothing, and other goods used by the armed forces. Russia describes them as civilian targets.

But the real importance of this story goes far beyond what was stored inside any one building.

Wildberries is not simply an online shop. It is part of the infrastructure through which modern Russia functions. Hundreds of thousands of sellers depend on it. Banks finance the company and its merchants. Workers, manufacturers, landlords, couriers, and pickup-point owners all rely on the same network.

Destroying one warehouse therefore means more than destroying a building. It can wipe out the working capital of thousands of businesses at once, weaken banks, disrupt deliveries, reduce tax revenue, and force the state to spend money repairing yet another crisis.

And this reveals one of the central weaknesses of Putin’s Russia.

To make the country easier to control, the Kremlin concentrated money, information, logistics, and commerce inside a limited number of giant structures.

Monopolies are politically convenient.

They are also chokepoints.

Today, we will examine why Ukraine has begun striking a new category of targets, why Wildberries matters far more than an ordinary retailer, how the damage can spread from a burning warehouse into banks and the state budget—and whether this strategy can make Putin’s war increasingly difficult to finance and manage.

Here’s our roadmap:

The War Behind the Front — Why Ukraine is expanding its target list.

Putin’s Monopoly State — How economic concentration made Russia easier to control—and easier to disrupt.

The Wildberries Chokepoint — Why one marketplace became essential to hundreds of thousands of businesses.

Too Big to Abandon — Why the government may eventually be forced to rescue the company.

Making the War Unaffordable — How Ukraine is trying to create more crises than Putin’s system can absorb.

The War Behind the Front

Wars begin with armies fighting armies. But the longer they continue, the farther the battlefield expands.

An army depends on an enormous structure behind it. Fuel must reach vehicles, factories must replace weapons, banks must finance production, and the civilian economy must continue generating the revenue that supports the state.

Russia expected the invasion of Ukraine to end quickly. Instead, Ukraine survived, and the Kremlin settled into a prolonged war. It mobilized more men, expanded military production, constructed defensive lines, and accepted losses that would once have seemed politically impossible.

By 2026, the conflict had become an industrial contest. Russia had more people, money, and production capacity. Ukraine had fewer resources but developed a remarkable ability to use relatively inexpensive drones against costly and difficult-to-replace targets.

That changed Ukrainian strategy.

Rather than trying to destroy every Russian weapon at the front, Ukraine increasingly began attacking the systems that allow Russia to produce, transport, and finance those weapons.

Oil refineries were an obvious target. Russia needs fuel for the army, but refinery disruptions also affect agriculture, transportation, and civilian industry. Damage to a few installations can therefore produce losses far greater than the price of the drones used to strike them.

Russia adapted by strengthening defenses around important facilities, dispersing equipment, and redirecting fuel from less vulnerable regions. Refineries remained valuable targets, but Ukraine continued looking for other pressure points.

This is the logic of a long war. Once one side learns to protect a particular target, the other searches for something less protected.

Wildberries warehouses offered a new opportunity. They were enormous, economically important, highly concentrated, and difficult to defend. More importantly, the goods inside belonged to tens of thousands of separate businesses.

A damaged refinery primarily hurts one large company and the industries that depend on its output. A destroyed marketplace warehouse can ruin thousands of entrepreneurs immediately.

The consequences are not limited to the physical loss. Sellers begin questioning whether it is safe to keep inventory inside the platform. Banks reconsider loans. Other warehouses become overloaded. Investors reassess logistics property.

The fire may be extinguished within hours. The disruption can continue much longer.

Putin’s Monopoly State

To understand why these warehouses matter so much, we must look at how Putin’s Russia was built.

A ruling group that captures the state cannot depend on public trust. It depends on control. Over time, the Kremlin subordinated the courts, the media, the security services, and the commanding heights of the economy.

Ordinary people were left with little choice but to adapt. They might dislike the government or oppose the war privately, but they still had to earn a living. They found work inside state institutions, borrowed from state-controlled banks, accepted government contracts, or built businesses on platforms connected to politically protected capital.

This is one of the central mechanisms of authoritarianism. The state does not require genuine loyalty from everyone. It needs people to remain dependent on the system and unable to build a viable life outside it.

By working, borrowing, selling, and paying taxes, people support the same state that limits their political choices. Their behavior is individually rational, but collectively it keeps the system alive.

This matters because Putin can continue the war as long as he has enough money to pay the armed institutions that protect his rule: the military, the police, the National Guard, and the security services.

Energy exports still provide important revenue, but Russia has lost much of its former European market. Sanctions, military spending, and high interest rates have increased pressure on state finances. Domestic economic activity therefore matters more.

Russia’s war depends on the ordinary circulation of money through the civilian economy. Companies earn revenue, salaries are paid and spent, goods are sold, and the state takes a share at every stage through taxes, duties, fees, and social contributions.

The civilian economy is not separate from the war. It helps finance it.

The Kremlin’s preference for large companies makes this system easier to supervise. A giant corporation can be controlled through its owner, chief executive, lenders, or regulators. Millions of truly independent businesses would be much harder to manage.

That is why Russia has developed dominant banks, state corporations, centralized retail networks, and digital platforms through which a growing share of economic life passes.

But concentration creates a weakness. When an entire sector depends on a small number of companies, those companies become national chokepoints.

The Wildberries Chokepoint

Wildberries became Russia’s largest online marketplace by giving small sellers access to customers across the country. It handled storage, payments, advertising, delivery, and returns, while its pickup-point network reached places where traditional retail remained limited.

After Western companies left Russia, marketplaces became even more important. They helped distribute parallel imports and restored access to goods that had disappeared from official stores.

This convenience came at the price of dependence.

Wildberries controlled where merchandise was stored, how products appeared in searches, what sellers paid, and when they received their money. Sellers remained legally independent, but the platform controlled their route to the customer.

For many of them, the inventory inside a Wildberries warehouse was not spare stock. It was their working capital, often purchased with borrowed money.

When a warehouse burned, they did not merely lose future profits. They lost the means to continue operating while their loans, wages, and supplier bills remained.

Wildberries announced that more than 88,000 smaller sellers affected by the Elektrostal fire would receive compensation first. But initial amounts credited to internal accounts reportedly represented only a small share of the destroyed goods.

Even if further payments arrive later, timing matters. A seller may eventually receive compensation and still collapse before the money reaches a real bank account.

Wildberries faces the same problem on a much larger scale. Its enormous turnover does not mean that it has enough free cash to reimburse repeated losses of this size. No commercial marketplace is designed around the possibility that several major logistics centers will be destroyed during a prolonged war.

Insurance may not close the gap. Standard policies often exclude war, terrorism, or drone attacks unless additional coverage has been purchased.

Rebuilding the warehouses would solve only the physical problem. The deeper issue is confidence.

Sellers who expect more attacks will reduce the amount of stock held inside the network, divide it among several facilities, move to competing platforms, or leave the business entirely.

The warehouse can be rebuilt. Trust is much harder to restore.

Too Big to Abandon

A serious Wildberries crisis would affect so many businesses, workers, banks, and property owners that the Russian government could not easily ignore it.

If the company could no longer compensate sellers, maintain enough warehouse capacity, or service its obligations, tens of thousands of entrepreneurs could default. Workers would lose jobs, banks would absorb more bad loans, and tax revenue would fall.

The Kremlin would then face pressure to intervene through subsidized credit, guarantees, tax relief, or direct financial support.

That would move the losses from the company onto the state.

Russia may be able to afford such a rescue, but the government is already paying for the war while supporting industries weakened by sanctions, labor shortages, and expensive credit. Every new rescue reduces the resources available elsewhere.

More importantly, money cannot solve the security problem.

Russia can rebuild a warehouse and compensate part of the lost inventory. It cannot guarantee that the replacement facility will survive another attack.

The country is too large, and the number of valuable targets is too great. Air-defense systems placed around a logistics center cannot simultaneously protect a refinery, military plant, railway hub, power station, or airfield somewhere else.

Ukraine is forcing Russia to make choices.

Wildberries management faces a similar trap. According to sellers, the company has complicated the removal of goods from some facilities, presumably to prevent merchants from fleeing the platform.

From the company’s perspective, that is understandable. A mass withdrawal would disrupt deliveries, reduce revenue, and drive away customers.

Yet keeping more inventory inside vulnerable warehouses also increases the losses from the next strike.

Wildberries depends on sellers trusting its logistics network. The continuing attacks give them every reason not to.

Making the War Unaffordable

Ukraine cannot defeat Russia through a simple contest of resources. Russia has a larger population, a broader industrial base, and more money to spend on a prolonged conflict.

Even successful Ukrainian operations at the front may not be enough to force the Kremlin to stop.

Ukraine’s alternative is to make the damage from the war increasingly difficult for Putin’s system to absorb.

The obvious problem is that Putin does not personally experience most of that damage. He does not lose his business when a warehouse burns or struggle to repay a loan. The system protects the leadership and transfers the consequences to companies, workers, and consumers.

Ukraine cannot directly change Russia’s political system. It cannot organize an effective opposition inside the country or give ordinary Russians the power to remove Putin.

What it can do is attack the economic structures that keep his state functioning.

This explains why Ukraine’s target list is expanding.

The Kremlin concentrated essential functions inside large companies because that made them easier to control. But when logistics, fuel distribution, communications, finance, or data processing depend on a limited number of hubs, striking those hubs can disrupt a much larger system.

The objective is not necessarily to destroy Wildberries or any other single corporation. It is to create a chain of crises that begin to reinforce one another.

A refinery strike creates fuel problems. A logistics attack interrupts deliveries and destroys working capital. A damaged communications or data center can disrupt commercial operations far beyond the building itself.

Putin’s state may be able to handle one crisis by spending money and issuing orders. The weakness appears when several develop at the same time.

Russia does not have unlimited money, equipment, specialists, or organizational capacity. Sanctions restrict access to advanced machinery. Skilled workers are increasingly difficult to replace. Government finances are strained, and the bureaucracy is far better at enforcing obedience than coordinating complicated recovery across multiple industries.

Ukraine is therefore trying to stretch the system until the Kremlin can no longer defend every important facility, repair every damaged industry, and compensate every group that suffers losses.

This is the strategic value of the monopolies Putin created.

They concentrate the functions Russia needs to remain stable, but they also allow Ukraine to strike the nodes on which millions of people and businesses depend.

That does not mean these attacks will quickly end the war. The Kremlin may continue transferring much of the pain to ordinary Russians. Authoritarian systems can survive severe economic damage when people are frightened, isolated, and unable to organize.

But even pain pushed downward creates costs for the state. Ruined businesses stop paying taxes. Distressed borrowers weaken banks. Unemployed workers require support. Damaged companies demand rescue, while every new target requires additional protection.

Ukraine’s goal is not to make Putin sympathize with those who suffer. It is to make the system that sustains his war more expensive, less reliable, and increasingly difficult to manage.

 

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