Kyiv blows up biggest Wildberries hub in drone attack

tonyedgecombe 1 day ago | | |

It’s providing logistical support. You could go to their website and order items for the “special police operation “.

It’s also a juicy target from an economical perspective. They are going to need a ton of financial support to keep operating.

estearum 1 day ago | | |

Wildberries is (or was, at least, prior to the initial attacks) openly selling equipment intended for and marketed for military uses

conradludgate 1 day ago | | |

I imagine they want the people of Russia to feel the economic pain of the war, and vote/protest accordingly.

Arnt 19 hours ago | | |

It does much more than that. Wildberries had 45% of the logistics and large warehouses. This means that every company that produces something will have parcels coming in from Wildberries every day. The businesses that owned the ~$6B of burnt inventory may go bankrupt, too, adding to the chaos.

Animats 1 day ago | | |

That sort of is the strategy. Ukraine says they pick targets in Moscow and St. Petersburg that hurt Russia's elites. The trouble is that Russia's elites have little influence over Putin. He crushed that a decade ago.

The battlefront in Ukraine has been stuck for a year. People are dying, but nobody is winning. The front lines don't move much. Nobody really knows what to do. It's very WWI.

Arnt 19 hours ago | | |

Did you know that during WW1, the front lines moves from far west of Ukraine to the far east, and then back again? This war isn't like that.

And it really isn't. Back then the front moved and it mattered. This isn't like that. Ukraine recently hit about 200 ships, not because the front moved and the ships came into range, but because they'd blown up all the defenses along a 200km-long path from the "front" to the ships, so they had free passage. That "front" means much less than in WW1.

mittensc 1 day ago | | |

> The trouble is that Russia's elites have little influence over Putin.

Well, seems like they better start working on that

I'm curious what happens when elites next to putin start losing their wealth by losing their actual assets

doublerabbit 1 day ago | | |

They get shot, thrown out of a window or their jet explodes.

Three simple solutions to eliminate "I want my money". Putin is no joke, he is ex-KGB.

general1465 1 day ago | | |

Prigozin tried to go against Putin with actual army. And he was naive enough to think that he can shot at the king, miss and live.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wagner_Group_rebellion

tonyedgecombe 1 day ago | | |

That rarely works. Russia has been pounding Ukraine yet the Ukrainians are as defiant as ever.

echoangle 1 day ago | | |

They are also defending and don’t really have a choice, Russia does.

halJordan 1 day ago | | |

It rarely works (Mitchell and Douhet were famously proven wrong a few short years after WW1). But it is the named reason Kiev gives.

conradludgate 1 day ago | | |

I think it's a matter of perspective. It's Russia's war. The Russian people didn't want this, but they have to live with their leader's decisions. For the Ukrainians, the alternative is surrendering to Putin.

general1465 1 day ago | | |

It kind of works. Imagine that Iran would be able to blow Amazon warehouses in the USA using drones after 4 years of fighting. Sure there would be few fanatics on Fox News wanting to nuke Iran, but most of people would be asking what is the point of bombing Iran in the first place? What's the goal?

Because that's what Russians are facing right now. No gas on gas stations. No online ordering of stuff. Enemy drones are flying daily over their heads after 4 years of fighting, Russians are fearing of another mobilization and for what? What is the goal of this war?

pseudohadamard 19 hours ago | | |

Besides what they're selling, it's also damaging the longstanding social contract between Putin and the Russian people: Turn a blind eye to the way I run things and I'll make sure your life continues as normal. This is breaking that contract.

Other dictators did this too. Hitler kept a bunch of very nonessential things running far longer than he should have in order to try and preserve some level of normalcy for the German people. The Nazis actually had monthly reports, "Meldungen aus dem Reich" ("Reports from the Reich") on what the public were thinking about various things, which were distributed to top Nazi leaders. They stopped publishing them some time in 1944 because by then you didn't need secret reports any more to know what the public were thinking.