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Automatically translated version. May contain inaccuracies compared to the original.
Why does Ukraine keep striking Russian Wildberries warehouses? I’ll try to explain a possible rationale.
The logic of a war of attrition is simple: victory goes to the side that endures the longest, not the one that captured the most territory. A vivid example is Germany in World War I. The Germans seized huge territories in eastern Europe, advancing more than 1 thousand km beyond their prewar borders. The lands of present-day Ukraine, Poland, Belarus, the Baltic states, and many other countries fell under occupation. But the war quickly entered a phase of exhaustion for which the German economy and society were unprepared. As a result, Germany lost the war and effectively relinquished the conquered territories without a fight. An important component of German ressentiment after World War I was the realization that it was not the army but the home front that lost the war.
The Russian–Ukrainian war is also a war of attrition. And whereas Russia struck Ukraine’s rear from the first day of the full-scale invasion, Ukraine only began doing this systematically this year. Ukraine officially states that the goal of strikes on refineries, the tankers of the "shadow fleet," and export terminals is to reduce revenue to the Russian budget that finances the aggression. Still, oil revenues make up about 25% of the Russian Federation’s budget. It appears the strikes on Wildberries are intended to undermine the remaining 75%.
It’s clear that large Russian businesses have their own logistics not tied to Wildberries warehouses. However, the math of a war of attrition suggests that strikes against tens of thousands of small and medium taxpayers can, in total budgetary damage to the Russian Federation, be as significant as disabling dozens of large enterprises. In addition, such attacks will inevitably trigger a wave of bankruptcies among Russian small and medium businesses. Many of these firms took loans they will now be unable to repay. It’s too early to give exact figures, but if we’re talking about tens of thousands of defaulted loans (which is a quite realistic scenario), this will provoke a large-scale banking crisis—one that has already been ongoing in Russia for some time.
There’s no point debating whether strikes on Wildberries are a war crime. Since Russia has not ratified the Rome Statute, such arguments are purely theoretical. The key point is different: a war of attrition now also means the exhaustion of the Russian economy and society, and that is a direct consequence of these strikes. At the same time, Ukraine obviously will not stop until Russia stops first.
If earlier many imagined the war ending with the formula "peace for territory," now Ukraine is proposing "peace for peace." Sooner or later this war will end that way. And the sooner the majority of Russia’s residents realize that, the greater the chances it will happen sooner rather than later—much to the displeasure of certain pensioners in the Kremlin.
Source: Mykola Knyazhytsky / Facebook
Document: PDF proof of the original version of the news item "Замість "миру в обмін на території" Україна пропонує "мир в обмін на мир"". It records the publication content at the moment of the first scan, the preservation date and the source: Gordon.
