Kyiv blows up biggest Wildberries hub in drone attack | Hacker News Reader

Kyiv blows up biggest Wildberries hub in drone attack

independent.co.uk

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Wildberries is Russia's equivalent of Amazon.

Ukraine has apparently hit 7 of the 10 largest Wildberries hubs. This latest hit was on the hub for Moscow.

[1] https://united24media.com/war-in-ukraine/ukraine-knocks-7-of...

What's the rationale behind this? Is Wildberries hiding military hardware and munitions in its warehouses?

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

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

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.

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

They could have rolled over, if the majority wanted that then there isn’t much the Ukrainian government could do about it.

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?

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

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.

> 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

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.

Leaders of Russia who lose a war do not, historically, survive long. Putin spends most of his time in bunkers now, terrified of both attacks from Ukraine and possible coup attempts from his own people.[1]

[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/putin-bunker...

Putin is only powerful as long as institutions continue to follow him.

He doesnt throw people out of windows himself, he has his state do that.

Move enough people away from supporting him and he's gone.

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

Prigozin had a chance

When it happened it seemed that the emperor was naked and nobody would protect Putin.

All the military ordered to stop him just did not do anything or joined them.

Tried to bomb him but plane was shot down and that was that.

Only problem is Prigozin called it off, he likely forgot to hide his family

Someone more ruthless in his place could have done more

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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