Five years of war have narrowed to two cities: why the battle for Kramatorsk and Sloviansk will likely decide when — and how — Russia’s invasion of Ukraine ends

Recently, Meduza invited readers to send the Razbor desk any questions about the war in Ukraine. This is the second time we’ve done this, and like last year’s round, it drew considerable interest — we received hundreds of responses (thank you!). Answering every message individually is impossible, so we’ve again grouped them into thematic blocks, from questions about when the war might end to an analysis of the current phase of the conflict, in which mutual drone strikes have come to the fore. If your letter isn’t mentioned in this piece, don’t be discouraged: the topic is most likely still addressed in one of the sections. Below is the first installment of our answers. It consists of two parts: the first covers the war’s strategic outlook, and the second examines strikes behind the lines. We’ll publish the second installment in the coming days. It will include answers to questions about the situation on the front, mobilization, and other aspects of the conflict.

Meduza has condemned Russia’s invasion of Ukraine from the very start, and we are committed to reporting objectively on a war we firmly oppose. Join Meduza in its mission to challenge the Kremlin’s censorship with the truth. Donate today. 

When and how will the war end?

Before turning to your questions, here’s a recap of the strategic context behind the war between Russia and Ukraine.

In recent years, Meduza has often written about modern theories of armed conflict — see this piece, for example — the kind studied not only by military experts but also by economists, political scientists, and historians.

Seen through this lens, a protracted war over Ukraine’s sovereignty — the “resource” at stake here — is nothing unusual. Years of fighting have taught both sides that the goals they went into the full-scale war with are unattainable.

• Vladimir Putin understands that he cannot install a puppet government in Kyiv or seize most of the country’s territory, including Odesa, which he specifically named when he formally announced the start of the ”special military operation.”
• Kyiv, for its part, has recognized that for now it remains far from restoring full sovereignty within its 1991 borders.

The negotiations that Donald Trump forced upon both sides in 2025 had the effect of crystallizing new positions.

• Putin continues to press for a further violation of Ukraine’s sovereignty — one that Kyiv itself would acknowledge. He wants Ukraine to accept the loss of the entire Donbas, along with part or all of the Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions.
• Ukraine, in turn, is trying to persuade Putin to abandon that plan.

The means of imposing one’s will can vary, from outright victory on the battlefield to wearing the enemy down and inflicting unacceptable damage on its economy and society.

Now, on to your questions

As the strategic context above makes clear, this war can end only once both sides are convinced that their goals have been achieved or are unattainable at an acceptable price. For the war’s current phase, which has been under way for the past two years, that goal is what one reader called Putin’s drive to “finish grinding down the Donbas” — that is, to capture the sprawling urban area of Kramatorsk and Sloviansk in the northern Donetsk region.

Putin is pressing on with a war that went wrong for him as early as 2022. He does so because he believes he can take this territory in far less than 10 years. Below, we examine what’s behind that confidence.

Kramatorsk and Sloviansk, with a prewar combined population of 250,000, obviously can’t be the point of such a long war on their own. But as a result of the 2025 negotiations, they came to symbolize the preservation of Ukraine’s sovereignty. Numerous sources indicate those talks boiled down to a formula centered on the Donbas:

• Putin regularly invokes the “spirit of Anchorage,” a reference to his 2025 talks with Trump in Alaska, where, according to sources on both sides, the discussion centered on a “compromise”: Ukrainian forces withdrawing from the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, with the Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions divided along the front line. The Kremlin insists that a ceasefire would take effect immediately under those terms. Putin’s representatives at the talks, Kirill Dmitriev and Yuri Ushakov, said as much: transcripts of their conversations with American counterparts, obtained by Bloomberg, show them discussing “handing over the Donbas and exchanging some other territories.” Still, the Kremlin has never officially confirmed it would limit itself to the Donetsk and Luhansk regions and split the Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions, which the Russian Constitution designates as sovereign Russian territory.
• Zelensky and other Ukrainian sources have repeatedly said they’re under pressure specifically to give up the Donbas. Other major issues — such as guarantees against future Russian attacks — have been described as “almost settled,” a characterization Kyiv found unconvincing. Ukraine has flatly refused. The wording matters here: Ukrainian society won’t accept such a decision, since withdrawing troops from the Donbas would split the country and trigger a political crisis. Putin was likely counting on exactly that political outcome.

Even while the negotiations were deadlocked, some argued that the Kremlin was only playing along to distract Trump, and that Russia actually intends to keep fighting until it captures Kyiv and Odesa and installs a friendly government in Ukraine. That interpretation contradicts everything we know about the balance of forces, not just on the front but in the other arenas where this war is being fought.

• Russia has tried, and failed, to destroy Ukraine’s military infrastructure. That’s an extremely difficult task even in more clear-cut cases: in six months of bombing Iran, a country with no reliable allies, the world’s most powerful military machine — the combined forces of the United States and Israel — failed to achieve a decisive result. Ukraine is a harder case still: much of what sustains its war effort sits outside its own borders, its military facilities are often well hidden from reconnaissance, and Russia has far fewer weapons for the job than the United States. The goal looks entirely out of reach.
• Russia has also tried, and failed, to use strikes on civilian infrastructure to break Ukrainian society’s will to resist and cripple the economy sustaining its war effort. We examine the theory and practice of this kind of “suppression” in a separate section below, covering strikes by both Ukraine’s and Russia’s armed forces.
• Judging by Kremlin-controlled media and statements from experts, Russian authorities have likely long hoped for a critical shift within the coalition of states backing Ukraine — one unfavorable to Kyiv. If Western countries were to abandon most of their military and financial aid, that could indeed upset the balance of forces, and the Kremlin may still be counting on it. But building a strategy for victory on such shaky ground, in an arena the Kremlin doesn’t control at all, is irrational, to put it mildly. Ukraine, meanwhile, has had years to learn it shouldn’t expect a dramatically greater level of Western involvement in the war either.
• Finally, on the front itself, the current balance of forces and prevailing tactics all but rule out breakthroughs capable of routing either army. Both sides can only “gnaw through” tactical defenses, hoping to force the other to abandon its own “vision of victory.”

Even if Putin still harbors hopes of destroying present-day Ukraine, he lacks the tools to carry it out — and his own actions make it reasonably clear that he knows it:

• For several years now, faced with a choice between pushing deeper into Ukraine toward strategically vital cities such as Dnipro or continuing to press in the Donbas, Russia’s leadership has chosen the Donbas. That was clearest in early 2025, when Russian forces captured the southern part of the Donetsk region — Kurakhove and Velyka Novosilka — and had an opening to advance toward Dnipro against a weakened Ukrainian force along the Donetsk–Zaporizhzhia highway and farther north. Instead, the Russian General Staff redeployed an entire army, two divisions strong, from the Kurakhove area to Kramatorsk, later sending reserves from around Kherson and Sumy there as well. Putin, in short, isn’t currently planning to crush Ukraine outright; his immediate goal, one that has stretched on for years, is occupying the Donbas. More than half of Russia’s forces in Ukraine are now involved in the advance on Kramatorsk and Sloviansk from multiple directions.
• Kremlin sources quoted by Western media outlets have said that Putin is focused specifically on the Donbas and treats every other front and every other arena of the war as secondary, and Putin himself has said as much.

The odds of the war ending would rise sharply if Russia closed in on that main objective — or if Ukraine’s armed forces convinced the Kremlin that seizing it is impossible or would cost Russia too much. Ukraine’s problem is that Putin appears to have decided to pursue “victory” at any cost, while remaining willing both to raise the stakes and to adapt as circumstances change. So Ukraine has to prove — on the battlefield itself — that further Russian advances are impossible.

It can’t be ruled out that the war will continue even after the battle for the Donbas ends. The Kremlin has repeatedly said that if Ukraine doesn’t surrender these territories voluntarily, the terms of any peace could change. Kyiv, too, could keep fighting even if it loses the battle for the Donbas. But for now, the fight for Kramatorsk and Sloviansk looks decisive; everything else, including the strikes each side aims at the other’s infrastructure, is largely a backdrop. Zelensky effectively matched that bet when he refused to surrender the Donbas, citing the danger of a national split.

It’s clearly too early to call this a turning point, but over the past year, Ukraine’s armed forces have made real gains on two fronts: they have slowed the Russian advance and are hitting targets deep inside Russia. Those successes are especially notable given how long the Kremlin has tried to show that the war hasn’t disrupted ordinary life in Russia. Putin will of course have to reckon with changed circumstances as the offensive at the front fails to go according to plan — something he himself acknowledges and that we return to below. But the Kremlin still appears to believe it can capture the Donbas in the not-too-distant future, allowing it to end the war on its own terms, however far those terms have drifted from its original aims.

There’s no reliable data on this, but indirect signs suggest Putin isn’t entirely satisfied with how the Kramatorsk operation is going. Even so, he’s behaving rationally by his own logic, since he’s prepared for “victory” to take more time and effort than he’d hoped.

Further reading

What really happens after Ukraine strikes a Russian oil refinery? Meduza analyzed unique satellite data to assess the damage.

3 days ago

Last week, Putin unexpectedly called Colonel Abdulaziz Shikhabidov, commander of the 76th Air Assault Division, which has spent six months trying to break through to Dobropillia, north of Pokrovsk and one of the most important intermediate objectives in the Donbas offensive. Coverage of the call focused on the fact that social media users in Dagestan had declared Shikhabidov dead a year earlier, even though it was already known that he was alive and still in command. But the content of this strange conversation is far more interesting.

Putin pressed Shikhabidov on exactly which towns and villages his division had reached. The colonel’s answers were fairly accurate: video, including video published by Ukraine’s armed forces, backed up his account that Russian forces were fighting in villages on the southern outskirts of Dobropillia. Putin, with evident irritation, said that other advancing units were faring worse.

The conversation, which bypassed the General Staff, likely reflects an internal dispute over the situation east of Dobropillia, where the 51st Combined Arms Army reported a breakthrough into the city itself — even though published video shows its forces have been stuck roughly 5 kilometers (3 miles) away for months.

The conversation continued like this:

Putin: Are the tasks being assigned achievable within the time frames and deadlines that have been set?

Shikhabidov: Yes, sir. The deadlines being set are all realistic.

Putin had previously said that “everything is working out for us — not as quickly as we would like, but we’re still advancing every day.” It’s quite likely, then, that Ukrainian intelligence is right when it says Russian forces regularly miss the deadlines set by their own command.

Conversations like this one suggest the Kremlin is tracking the front in granular detail, and the last few weeks may have brought it some encouraging results. The current phase of the offensive on Kramatorsk, which began in May, started out with extremely slow progress, but the pace has picked up lately — though not in every sector of the 300-kilometer (186-mile) front, from the city of Lyman to the border with the Zaporizhzhia region.

• Russian forces launched an unsuccessful assault on Lyman, northeast of Sloviansk, but closed to within 13 kilometers (8 miles) of the city from the east, an advance of 17 kilometers (11 miles) since January. A second Russian force has closed to 7 to 9 kilometers (4 to 6 miles) from the southeastern outskirts of Kramatorsk, an advance of about 14 kilometers (9 miles) over the same period.
• Kostiantynivka, south of Kramatorsk, has been almost entirely captured.
• Russian assault troops have been spotted on the outskirts of Oleksiivo-Druzhkivka, the next town along the highway to Kramatorsk, 13 kilometers (8 miles) from the city — an advance of about 10 kilometers (6 miles) since January.
• Meanwhile, Russian forces are trying to push toward Druzhkivka, behind Ukrainian lines, from both the west and the east, from about 10 kilometers (6 miles) out.
• Near Dobropillia, the advance since the start of the year has totaled about 12 kilometers (7 miles), but only in one sector, the southern one, where the 76th Air Assault Division has been operating since late winter.

Seen through Putin’s eyes, fixated as he is on occupying the Donbas, this picture suggests Russian forces could reach the outskirts of the urban area’s two main cities in early 2027 and then attempt to storm them in the months that follow. But there are also signals that should worry the Kremlin, though it’s unclear how rationally Russia’s leadership is actually weighing them:

• The Russian army constantly runs into trouble holding territory its assault troops have already reached. For the army to push farther, every breakthrough requires weeks of work — clearing the area, preparing supply routes, moving drone operators closer to the front line, setting up new artillery positions farther back, and more, all of it under drone strikes. Then the enemy’s own fire support assets — drone operators, artillery, electronic warfare systems — have to be suppressed all over again. There’s no longer any stretch of the front where Russian forces, or Ukrainian forces for that matter, can string together one tactical operation after another while keeping up a relatively high pace of advance. As recently as a year ago, Russia’s “Vostok” grouping of forces in the Zaporizhzhia region was covering up to 10 kilometers (6 miles) per week for several weeks in a row. But on the main Donbas axis, slow advances and small, “discrete” tactical operations have been the norm since late 2024.
• Russian military losses are steadily rising, a subject we address in more detail in a later section of this piece. That’s also visible in the army’s own structure: in 2024, Russia was forming entirely new divisions and even larger formations — corps and armies — from scratch, drawing on an influx of new recruits and reactivated Soviet-era equipment. Now, commanders can only expand existing brigades into divisions, using already-formed reserve regiments. The rate at which those losses are replaced clearly isn’t outpacing them by much.

All of this suggests the Russian army will struggle to reach the outskirts of Kramatorsk and Sloviansk, even though Putin clearly cares deeply about the pace of the offensive and doesn’t want to keep fighting for the Donbas for years.

Both armies have built mobilization systems that keep feeding reinforcements to the front, whatever the systems’ flaws.

• In Russia, the main problem is that each new recruit costs more over time. But deeper issues loom too: the pool of people willing to risk their lives for relatively modest sums of money could eventually run dry, and the army isn’t entirely satisfied with the caliber of new contract soldiers either. We address all of this in a separate section on mobilization.
• Ukraine’s mobilization has its own problems. To keep pace with the number of reinforcements Russia sends to the front, Ukraine’s armed forces have to draft a far larger share of the population — several times larger. Forced conscription also opens the door to abuse and violence, which take a psychological toll on the population and drive desertion before recruits ever reach the front.

But overall, neither country has come close to running out of men to call up. Even in Ukraine, several million potential recruits remain available.

Most of Russia’s prewar weapons systems haven’t proven effective. That’s only partly a matter of quality, which is often perfectly acceptable. The bigger problem is that the war itself didn’t unfold the way Russian commanders had envisioned — a pattern seen in other protracted wars as well.

Ukraine deserves considerable credit here, too: its army evolved quickly — and forced its opponent to evolve — in ways that give it a chance to match Russian forces or even surpass them. Today’s fighting is built around superiority in communications, reconnaissance, and cheap precision weapons — mainly drones.

That’s a many-trillion-ruble question, and there’s no precise answer. The war’s current cost is still affordable for the Russian state, so long as it keeps gradually extracting resources from the population. Over nearly five years, the government has built a resilient system for doing that, though one already running into difficulties as the conflict grows more expensive. Oleg Itskhoki, an economist, has said Putin operates on a “principle of optimization” that serves the main political project of his life: the war. Under that principle, all the “screws” are tightened as little as possible, but evenly — the state gradually squeezes what the war needs out of ordinary Russians through inflation, tax increases, pulling workers out of the economy and into the army, and more. In that sense, the Kremlin has acted quite rationally since putting the country on a wartime footing in the fall of 2022, and that could continue for a long time yet.

It’s hard to say what the price will be in the future, or whether Russian authorities will be able to pay it. That depends on many unknowns, from the price of oil and the scale of Russian military losses to which new targets Ukraine’s armed forces choose for long-range strikes.

Consider a thought experiment. Suppose Russia captures the entire Donbas through prolonged, bloody fighting, rather than gaining it, say, by Trump pressuring Kyiv into concessions. If the Kremlin then decides to keep fighting with the goal of “destroying” its opponent or seizing new territory, it would hand Ukraine a reason to keep resisting — and its allies a reason not to withdraw their support.

Continuing the war as it is now being fought, with such ambitious goals, could take many more years, or even decades, of fighting. That would create enormous risks for the Kremlin, risks that keep accumulating: the economy’s “screws” could strip their threads, for instance, as the national debt inevitably grows and becomes costlier to service. The level of engagement by the international “coalitions” backing each side — the West on one side, and China and Russia’s other allies of convenience on the other — could also shift in a direction unfavorable to Moscow. It’s hard to predict how the next American administration will behave, and that’s only a little over two years away. International relations theory, specifically the security dilemma, suggests that as Russia grows stronger — that is, as it draws closer to the destruction of Ukraine — the West should increase its support for Kyiv. And we’ve already mentioned the risk that the pool of people willing to die for money could run dry, which would force a shift to less popular mobilization methods.

The war, it turns out, doesn’t give the authorities absolute freedom, even though they have the tools to tighten various screws and crack down at home.

Further reading

Forty days after Zelensky launched his ‘influence operation’ against Russia, what did it achieve?

9 days ago

An alternative to a protracted battle would be sharply increasing the resources the country spends on the war. Russia’s current military spending reaches 8% of GDP, more than double the prewar level. In Ukraine, the figure exceeds 55% of GDP, though a significant portion of that spending is covered by Western countries through direct military and financial aid. In absolute spending, Russia is ahead, but not by much: very roughly, the figures work out to $150 billion a year versus $100 billion, based on 2024 data. Small wonder, then, that Russian forces don’t hold a decisive advantage in this war of attrition.

Could Russia spend several times more? Probably, but that would require a radical overhaul, one that draws far more of the population into the war effort. Putin could have taken that path earlier, but so far he’s preferred to “optimize” the process little by little. That likely reflects his own calculation of the trade-off between the benefits of fighting a “war to a victorious end” and the domestic and external risks that come with it. For now, he appears to prefer taking a “small victory” in the Donbas and negotiating sanctions relief in exchange for a ceasefire, rather than waging an endless war.

It can’t be ruled out that the Kremlin’s assessment will change. For Ukraine, voluntarily surrendering the Donbas would raise the risk that Putin would decide to keep fighting. A Ukrainian victory in the battle for Kramatorsk and Sloviansk — say, through a major counterattack — would lower that risk instead.

Either way, ending the war promises to be complicated. Beyond the territorial dispute, questions about security guarantees for Ukraine and Western sanctions against Russia remain unresolved.

What are the two sides’ strikes behind the lines achieving?

You sent us many similar questions on the most sensitive topic for both Ukrainians and Russians: the strikes each side launches on the other’s businesses and infrastructure behind the lines, which kill civilians.

To answer these together, we’ll first lay out, once again, the context in which they should be understood.

• By 2026, Ukraine had amassed enough drones of two types: one for strikes deep inside Russia, hundreds or even thousands of kilometers from the front, and another for closer targets, 20 to 150 kilometers (12 to 93 miles) away. It quickly launched a campaign that came to be known in Kyiv as the “40-day operation to influence Russia,” “bringing the war back to where it came from,” and “long-range sanctions.” The strikes first targeted the largest oil refineries, as far away as Western Siberia, and then the warehouses of the Russian online marketplace Wildberries.
• Medium-range drones equipped with cameras for homing in on moving targets, such as trucks, have struck vehicles in occupied territories, mainly — though not exclusively — on roads connecting the Rostov region with Crimea.
• The campaign, then, as the names Kyiv has given it suggest, is meant to affect Russia through two channels: first, by worsening the country’s economic situation, in particular by reducing budget revenues; and second, by making it impossible for Russian society to keep pretending the war doesn’t concern it.

The campaign aligns substantively with proposals from Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine’s former defense minister, who believed that the economic and social costs of such strikes would help push Putin to abandon the war. On the front itself, he proposed more than doubling Russian military casualties with drones, so that Russia couldn’t recruit contract soldiers faster than it was losing them — forcing Putin either to end the war or to introduce additional, coercive mobilization measures.

This concept, which wasn’t fully trusted even inside Zelensky’s office or Ukraine’s armed forces, has flaws — and not just theoretical ones. Statistics on the outcomes of air campaigns in the 20th and 21st centuries show such plans don’t succeed on their own. The evidence isn’t conclusive, though: there are few cases suitable for analysis, and it’s difficult to separate out the role of any single factor in success or failure.

The idea of strategic bombing capable of knocking an opponent out of a war entirely originated with the Italian general Giulio Douhet after World War I. Under his doctrine, an attacker must first strip the enemy of aircraft and seize air superiority; the defender would then have nothing left to fight off bombers capable of reaching any target on its territory. Douhet argued the preferred targets shouldn’t be military ones, but rather sites whose destruction could break the will of the state and society to resist. In his view, using aviation this way would eventually make armies and navies unnecessary.

A century of theorizing and practical implementation hasn’t produced very good results: air campaigns unsupported by other branches of the military have failed, and their contribution to overall success has been relatively small. The United States, the leading practitioner of strategic bombing, has failed in the same pattern each time, according to American military experts who have studied the question — and the same conclusions hold for other practitioners, such as Britain and Germany:

• Even overwhelming air superiority didn’t make bombers invulnerable at every altitude and every hour of the day or night, because of air-defense countermeasures — forcing campaign tactics and targets to be adjusted to preserve aircraft.
• Targets and priorities were consistently chosen in ways ill-suited to the overarching objectives.
• Identified targets ran out quickly, requiring a constant search for new ones.
• Each time, a race developed between the pace of strikes and the enemy’s pace of repairing damaged facilities.
• When strikes on industrial and infrastructure targets failed to produce the desired political effect, target selection shifted steadily toward maximizing psychological impact on the population.
• Strategic bombers were increasingly diverted to hit tactical military targets instead.
• Strategic air commanders would insist every time that their mission failed only because politicians wouldn’t let them bomb the “right” targets with the necessary intensity — otherwise, they claimed, victory would have come quickly.

Until the late 1990s, the underlying problem was thought to be insufficient bombing accuracy, and the fix seemed obvious: adopt precision-guided munitions on a wide scale. But once those weapons arrived, things didn’t get better. In Yugoslavia, the air campaign’s outcome was, on balance, positive, though that can’t be fully attributed to strategic bombing alone. In Libya, a second, prolonged wave of strikes on tactical military targets and direct air support for opposition forces proved necessary. In Iran in 2026, the campaign failed spectacularly, partly because it followed the same familiar “recipe” described above.

There’s another problem: this part of the war carries its own escalatory logic. Any participant in an air campaign against an enemy capable of retaliating should expect strikes behind the lines on both sides not just to continue, but to intensify. Civilian casualties in Ukraine are rising again after a long lull — the toll had been declining every year since it peaked in 2022 — while in Russia, unsurprisingly, they’re at their highest level yet.

Further reading

How much damage can Russia’s fuel crisis do to the economy?

24 days ago

Your questions about strikes behind the lines, and our answers

The exception usually cited is NATO’s campaign against Yugoslavia during the conflict in Kosovo. But how successful those bombing and missile strikes actually turned out to be remains unclear, given exaggerations from both sides. Yugoslavia had some success repairing damaged infrastructure between strikes, though how much isn’t precisely known either. And the impact of strikes on strategic targets is hard to separate from other factors in that war’s outcome: it’s widely believed Slobodan Milosevic’s government surrendered because a NATO ground operation had become inevitable and because Belgrade was internationally isolated and had no allies.

The part the atomic bombings played in hastening Japan’s surrender is less clear-cut, too. The widespread view, including among Western researchers, holds that the Red Army’s rapid advance into Manchuria, the empire’s main resource base, drove home to Tokyo that it had reached a strategic dead end. The emperor, in fact, used this as a pretext to persuade the military to surrender, on the condition that he remain on the throne.

Russia has struck, and continues to strike, both railway infrastructure and bridges — with mostly unsuccessful results.

• Most railway infrastructure, aside from rolling stock and electrical equipment, is fairly easy to repair.
• Bridges are also repairable, unless their spans are brought down or their supports damaged — which is far from easy to do.

The troubled history of the rail-and-road drawbridge across the Dniester estuary at Zatoka, in the Odesa region, is well known. It connects Ukrainian territory to the right bank of the Danube and to Romania. Despite its relatively fragile design and numerous strikes with a wide variety of weapons, the structure still hasn’t been fully destroyed. Since 2022, the bridge has been hit with ballistic missiles and glide bombs — and, in single raids, dozens of drones. Ukraine has consistently repaired the damage quickly, only for Russian forces to strike it again. In early August, according to Russian sources, a massed strike finally brought down one span of the bridge.

In 2024, a Russian missile strike damaged the overpass at the Dnipro hydroelectric station, known as DniproHES, but Ukraine quickly restored traffic across it as well.

We answered similar reader questions back in 2025.

This time, though, we received far more questions on strikes against “decision-making centers.” That’s partly because Israel and the United States legitimized this kind of attack by killing Iran’s political and military leaders — while also demonstrating that such strikes can fail to achieve strategic goals.

In the case of Russia and Ukraine, the “unspoken arrangement” theory may well be right, though it’s unlikely anyone actually agreed to anything explicitly. Both sides simply understand that the enemy can respond in kind, as periodically happens with assassination attempts against lower-ranking politicians and military officials, or that a strike on top officials could send the situation spiraling into uncontrolled escalation.

Wildberries warehouses, like those of Nova Poshta and other similar companies in Ukraine, don’t qualify as legitimate military targets under the conventions governing the laws and customs of war — even if they contain not just body armor but components of lethal weapons, such as devices for dropping grenades from drones.

The argument that Ukraine, as the victim of aggression, has the right to respond symmetrically to such Russian strikes doesn’t hold up either: the conventions classify these kinds of attacks on civilian targets as “reprisals,” and they’re prohibited.

But failing to observe the rules of target discrimination isn’t the most condemned or discussed of war crimes. Many of the world’s armies that have fought over the past 80 years have committed this violation in one form or another, even after the conventions now in force had banned it.

Further reading

Wildberries says Ukraine’s drone strikes are force majeure. Does that actually get the marketplace off the hook in Russia?

15 days ago

One more thing: everything points to this war ending in a stalemate, with no clear winner. That will likely mean each side prosecutes those it considers criminals within its own jurisdiction. The International Criminal Court could also prosecute Russians, though many countries are not parties to it. Russia itself will almost certainly keep convicting Ukrainians on “terrorism” charges rather than on war crimes charges, since war crimes are harder to “prove” — especially in cases where no crime was actually committed at all.

Drones are difficult to detect, to track along their entire flight path, and to distinguish from friendly aircraft. They’re also expensive to shoot down, and a large enough swarm can overwhelm any air defense system, whose capacity to track and destroy multiple targets is inherently limited.

Armies around the world are working on this problem, but no one can guarantee complete success so far — and attack drones are improving faster than the defenses meant to stop them.

Putin has struck Ukrainian “stores” before, along with what was then the country’s only working major refinery, in Kremenchuk. Russian forces reportedly “completely destroyed” the plant back in 2022. It resumed refining several times afterward, only to be struck again — most recently in the summer of 2026, according to Russia’s Defense Ministry. Other major Ukrainian oil refineries were shut down before the war, destroyed in the fighting, or occupied — the front line, for instance, ran near the Lysychansk refinery for several years.

As a result, Ukraine today depends almost entirely on imported petroleum products. Russian forces are trying to disrupt that trade too, striking fuel depots and hundreds of gas stations, and, like Ukraine’s armed forces, using drones equipped with cameras and machine-vision guidance to hit fuel trucks behind the lines.

Russia has also struck warehouses belonging to civilian companies in Ukraine, and continues to do so.

Russia simply doesn’t have enough weapons and intelligence assets to destroy “all the infrastructure.” Ukraine does have an intelligence advantage, partly thanks to the West, but that’s not the main factor here. Ukraine has been at war for years: it hides its military plants and imports much of what it needs or receives it as aid. Finding important, vulnerable targets inside Ukraine isn’t easy.

Russian forces, for their part, have yet to develop any systematic campaign to affect Ukrainian society beyond strikes on energy facilities in winter — though they clearly want to. In summer, Ukraine’s power grid doesn’t experience shortages.

Russia, meanwhile, is trying to carry on with ordinary life: businesses keep operating quite openly, from military plants to airports and refineries. That lets Ukraine pick the most painful targets — and the ones least protected against strikes by drones with small warheads.

Russian forces, meanwhile, rely on large numbers of missiles with powerful warheads but low reliability, especially in terminal-phase targeting — so every error can turn into a catastrophe for civilians. Ukrainian censors are also far more effective at concealing the aftermath of strikes on military targets than their Russian counterparts, even though both countries have similar rules banning the publication of videos showing strike “impacts.”

Ukraine has struck those workshops and a workers’ dormitory several times, but the attacks have disrupted operations for at most a few days. Factory workshops are difficult targets for drones carrying small warheads; hitting them effectively requires missiles capable of carrying hundreds of kilograms of explosives.

If it’s had any effect, it’s been minimal so far. The government decided that state agencies, including the military, get priority access to motor fuel: gas stations come last, while even farms rank only second. Some units of the “Dnepr” group of forces, fighting in the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions, may be facing supply disruptions because they received supplies via the “Novorossiya” highway, which has come under large-scale strikes by Ukrainian drones, as well as via neighboring roads. Russian “military correspondents” — even those who regularly report on the army’s problems — aren’t currently flagging any shortage.

• First, he likely considers it taboo.
• Second, the Kremlin’s main partners on the international stage — the leaders of China and India — also consider it taboo, and have told Putin as much, though that’s known only from Western media reports.
• Finally, gaining a real strategic advantage through tactical nuclear weapons isn’t easy, while escalating tensions with the West and triggering global ostracism would be all but guaranteed.

The question describes a well-known effect of strategic bombing. The authors of the article “When Does Aerial Bombing Work? Quantitative Empirical Tests, 1917–1999” say they obtained statistically significant results across various air campaigns showing that a population under attack either doesn’t blame its own government at all or shifts the blame onto the enemy — regardless of the form of government or other characteristics.

For now, it’s more accurate to describe the Ukrainian campaign not as a turning point in the war, but as an attempt to use a newly available resource to pressure the enemy — and, of course, as a response to the enemy’s own strikes.

Experience — that of Gulf countries whose airports have come under attack from Iran, as well as Russia’s own — shows it’s difficult to paralyze air travel this way for long. Doing so requires a constant threat of strikes, which means launching large numbers of drones on a regular basis, and most of them won’t even reach their targets.

No one but Ukraine’s leadership has a definitive answer to that. On paper, though, Wildberries warehouses meet every criterion for a Ukrainian strike target.

• They’re poorly defended facilities that can be destroyed with just a few drones carrying small warheads.
• They hold large quantities of valuable goods that also burn easily.
• Destroying Wildberries as a business would hurt government budgets, including the federal budget, by reducing value-added tax payments.
• Finally, what sets Wildberries, founded by Tatyana Kim, apart from Ozon is its sheer scale — larger by every measure, from market share to total warehouse floor space.

Exactly how Ukraine’s military commanders drew up their target list is unclear, though military AI may have played a role. Alex Karp, the chief executive of Palantir, an American company that leads the field globally, has said the company’s AI model actively helps select targets for Ukraine’s armed forces. Ukrainian intelligence said that this includes building a database of targets deep inside Russia. Palantir did similar work under contract to the Pentagon before the war with Iran.