When the warehouse becomes a battlefield

CNBC reports that Ukraine has ratcheted up its attacks on Wildberries — Russia's closest equivalent to Amazon, a retail and logistics giant woven into the everyday commercial life of millions of Russian households. The choice of target is worth pausing on. Militaries have always struck at supply lines; what is newer, and more deliberate, is the targeting of the civilian economic infrastructure that maintains what one might call the domestic narrative of normalcy — the sense among ordinary people that the state is functioning, that goods flow, that tomorrow resembles today.

I spent much of my working life arguing that confidence — what I called animal spirits — is not a luxury ornament on top of the real economy but one of its load-bearing columns. Investment does not flow toward a future that feels unsafe or illegible. Consumption does not hold steady when the familiar institutions of everyday commerce begin to crack. If Ukraine's strategists understand this, they are playing a deeper game than raw destruction: they are attempting to puncture the psychological equilibrium on which Russian domestic tolerance of the war depends. Whether that is wise or humane is a separate question; that it is economically legible is beyond doubt.

The CNBC report frames this as a new phase in the war, which I take to mean a phase in which the boundary between military and civilian economic targets is being contested more openly. I would counsel modern readers not to be surprised by this. I wrote, in the aftermath of Versailles, that political settlements have long economic tails — that what is signed at a conference table will be paid for, in installments of suffering, by people who were not in the room. The same logic runs in reverse: the people now absorbing the disruption to Russian retail — the households who ordered from Wildberries, the warehouse workers, the delivery drivers — did not design this war, and they will bear costs proportionate to neither their choices nor their power.

There is also a macroeconomic question that the headline gestures toward without quite naming. Russia has been attempting, since 2022, to sustain domestic demand through a combination of high military spending and suppressed consumer anxiety — a kind of wartime fiscal stimulus directed toward armament rather than welfare, financed by energy revenues and capital controls. Disrupting the retail and logistics layer does not merely inconvenience consumers; it strains the supply-side of that domestic demand equation, potentially feeding into inflation and shortages that monetary policy alone cannot resolve. The Russian central bank has already been forced into aggressive rate increases (this I infer from reports available before my time, and confirm as consistent with the logic of the situation); adding supply-chain chaos to demand pressure is a recipe for the kind of stagflation that embarrasses governments and erodes public patience.

I will not pretend to know whether Ukraine's campaign against Wildberries will prove decisive, or whether the human cost is proportionate to the strategic gain — those are judgments requiring facts and moral standing I cannot claim from where I sit. What I can say with confidence is this: any settlement that eventually ends this war will need to reckon seriously with the economic reconstruction of a civilian population that has had the ordinary machinery of commerce made into a military target. The history of badly designed peace settlements — and I watched one unfold at Versailles — is that they create the next war by ignoring this reckoning. The negotiators of whatever peace eventually comes would do well to remember that markets are not merely instruments of profit; they are the infrastructure of social order, and you cannot bomb that infrastructure and then expect order to reassemble itself without deliberate public investment and international support.