Vitalii Portnikov / Free Media
Perhaps July 2026 will go down in the history of the Russian-Ukrainian war as a time when Ukraine managed to find another opportunity to weaken the Russian economy—even despite the brutal ballistic attacks on Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities.
On the night of July 18, Ukraine struck the Wildberries company’s marketplaces in Elektrostal and Kotovsk. It might seem that these are just commercial warehouses, so why is this important in the context of strikes on Russian oil refineries, which have already reduced not only the production of oil products but also the extraction of Russian oil itself?
But in the context of a sanctioned economy, these marketplaces have become the main trade distribution centers for Russia. While oil and oil products are the blood of the Russian economy, Wildberries marketplaces are its lungs.
It’s no coincidence that real wars have taken place over the ownership of Wildberries between Russian officials and oligarchs. Two years ago, the former owner of the company, Vladislav Bakalchuk, emphasized that his ex-wife had seized it from him and appealed for help to the Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov. The founder’s wife merged it with the company Russ, whose owners were linked to billionaire Suleyman Kerimov. But most importantly, according to media reports, Putin personally supported this merger after Tatyana Bakalchuk (now Kim) wrote to him explaining that the merger would allow the creation of a “competitor to Amazon and Alibaba, ensuring transactions in rubles bypassing SWIFT.” These words illustrate what a serious anti-sanction tool this is in the hands of the Kremlin.
This is exactly why these strikes offer a real chance to end the war. I constantly repeat that Russia can only end the war if it lacks resources and money. And people, of course. But for the mercenary army model, which Putin has deliberately chosen for this war, money is also needed.
Recently, Ukraine has been persistently looking for vulnerable spots in the Russian economy. Efforts to reduce oil extraction and oil product production were already a step in the right direction. Not to mention the problems facing the Russian army, this created the prerequisites for a massive fuel crisis and the actual isolation of the occupied Crimea. Strikes on military-industrial complex enterprises have slowed the production of drones and missiles. And now comes a new phase of strikes—on Wildberries warehouses. Yes, products necessary for the production of those same drones might be stored in these warehouses. But these are also blows to the economy as a whole.
Of course, such strikes won’t make Putin immediately stop the war. I don’t even think the Russian president considers ending the war when he hears about economic problems. However, the question is not Putin’s economic competence but the real capabilities of the state he leads.
Ukrainians understand this too. They also realize the path our country has taken in this war, from the first, still tentative, strikes deep into occupied territories, for which they didn’t even want to take responsibility, to strikes on the enemy’s critical infrastructure, which aim to bring its economy to the brink of survival. Yes, it turned out that it is possible to play a survival game together. And maybe this is precisely the tango that Donald Trump spoke of to Volodymyr Zelensky—the tango of not peaceful negotiations, needed by the Kremlin only to “safely,” without new US sanctions, continue the war, but the tango of strikes on Russia.
