Wildberries and the Unit of Analysis in Targeting Law
Since the middle of July 2026, Ukrainian long-range drones have struck more than twenty warehouses belonging to Wildberries, Russia’s largest online retailer. By August 5, Deutsche Welle estimated the company’s losses at between 1.2 and 1.5 million square meters of storage, some 17 to 22 percent of its total warehousing capacity. The campaign then reached further and struck larger. On August 7, a Liutyi drone hit the 158,000-square-meter hub at Yekaterinburg, roughly 1,700 kilometers from the border. Overnight on August 16, amid one of the largest drone attacks yet on the Moscow region, fires broke out at Koledino, which Ukraine’s Defense Ministry described as the company’s largest such facility at 250,000 square meters, and at the Severnoye Domodedovo logistics park. The sites now span Tambov, the Moscow region, St Petersburg and Leningrad, Crimea, Krasnodar and Stavropol, Volgograd and Vladimir, Voronezh, Samara, Ryazan, Tver, and Sverdlovsk (here, here, here).
The first wave, on the night of July 17 to 18, hit Elektrostal in the Moscow region and Kotovsk in Tambov, killing eight warehouse employees and injuring more than 70. Five more died in the Moscow region on August 4, one in Voronezh a week later, and one more in the Moscow region on August 16. Commercial losses are of a different order: analysts cited by Russian Forbes estimate seller losses at 215 to 280 billion rubles. The company’s position is that it owes those sellers nothing, its chief executive having characterized the strikes as force majeure after the vendor agreement was revised weeks earlier to remove liability for damage caused by drone attacks.
This post argues that the business entity Wildberries is not a unit of assessment for targeting law purposes. If select Wildberries facilities made an effective contribution to military action, and their destruction offered a definite military advantage, they would qualify as military objectives. But that finding would support targeting only those facilities. The intuition this correction displaces is familiar from integrated systems, where functionally interdependent components may sometimes be assessed together. What integrates an air defense network is a military function. What unites the Wildberries warehouses is a shareholder, which performs no work under Article 52(2) of Additional Protocol I (AP I).
Ukraine’s Analysis
In an early comment, President Zelensky stated that the warehouses struck on 18 July were logistics facilities used to supply “sanctioned components for drone production and navigation equipment,” later specifying the centers were involved in supplying the Russian military with drone components, navigation equipment, and other gear. That is a claim about the present function of particular buildings, and it is the kind of claim the law of targeting is built to receive. Alongside it, however, came a framing that has since done most of the work: the strikes formed part of a campaign of “long-range sanctions.”
By late July, the President was reported as defending the strikes on the ground that Wildberries enables the sale and distribution of tactical military items. It is a claim about what the company does rather than about what any warehouse was doing when struck. Brovdi described the operations as intended to disrupt the “illusion of a comfortable peacetime.” Ukrainian analysts close to the effort have been franker still, describing a dual purpose of hampering the Russian economy and, through it, the State budget that funds aggression. Reporting on the campaign now routinely explains it as an attempt to bring the war to ordinary Russians to pressure the Kremlin toward talks.
On August 10 and 11, Ukraine’s Main Intelligence Directorate reported that cyber specialists disrupted Wildberries’ customer service channel and payment infrastructure. Under Rule 92 of the Tallinn Manual 2.0, a cyber operation constitutes an attack under Article 49(1) of AP I where it is reasonably expected to cause injury or death to persons or damage or destruction to objects. A majority of the Manual’s experts would treat a loss of functionality as damage for this purpose, some requiring that the affected infrastructure need repair or replacement. A disruption of payments and customer service, resolved within days and leaving the systems intact, meets the threshold on no reading, and the operation therefore engages no targeting rule. Its significance is evidentiary. Payment systems and contact centers bear no relation to drone components on any account, and an operation aimed at them, announced as one campaign with the strikes, discloses the unit at which that campaign is aimed: the enterprise.
Existing Analysis
Professor Michael Schmitt’s primer sets out the governing doctrine for the strikes. He states the object-level rule without qualification: the entity to be assessed is the individual target, not sectors, systems, industries, or networks, such that a finding as to one facility carries no determinative bearing on the next. He confines the advantage prong to genuine military gain and rejects economic, financial, and psychological advantage, along with the generalized aim of pressuring an adversary to abandon the fight. He warns against stretching the definition of military objectives, and he is right on each point.
Writing on the second day of what was then a two-incident story, Professor Schmitt took President Zelensky’s use claim at face value and reasoned from it: if the warehouses were channeling drone components, they were dual-use objects and lawful targets, with the remaining questions falling to proportionality and precautions. The question this post takes up arises only once the campaign is viewed whole. A campaign of 21 strikes justified by reference to a business entity’s character, its fiscal weight, and the pressure its collapse exerts invites the conclusion that the business enterprise itself has crossed into the category of lawful military objectives. Where Professor Schmitt described a slippery slope in the abstract, the Wildberries campaign is what standing on it looks like.
The Unit of Analysis
The principle of distinction, which the International Court of Justice identified as a cardinal principle of the law of armed conflict binding on all States (Legality of the Threat or Use of Nuclear Weapons, advisory opinion, para. 78), is operationalized in Articles 48 and 52(1) of AP I. Article 52(2) supplies the operative definition, confining military objectives to objects which “by their nature, location, purpose or use make an effective contribution to military action and whose total or partial destruction, capture or neutralization, in the circumstances ruling at the time, offers a definite military advantage.” The definition is universally accepted as customary.
The definition speaks of objects and of circumstances ruling at the time. Nothing in it permits status to attach to an owner, a brand, a sector, or a distribution network. Article 51(5)(a) supplies a structural confirmation, prohibiting treatment of clearly separated and distinct military objectives as a single objective. Targeting rests on inference, and a body of verified instances may properly inform a commander’s assessment of a further facility among the information reasonably available at the time. The threshold for such an inference to carry a strike is high, and it rises with the size of the network. Wildberries reportedly operates roughly 200 major logistics and warehouse facilities across the Russian Federation, so assembling a pattern dense enough to ground reliable inference across the holding would demand an evidentiary basis of considerable weight, facility by facility, and current at the time of each attack. What can be observed is a tension. The tempo of the campaign, its geographic spread, and the vocabulary in which it has been explained together suggest a target selected as an enterprise rather than a sequence of facilities each independently verified.
Sanctions Grammar
The European Union sanctioned the company’s banking arm in July 2026 over its financial contribution to the Russian State budget, and Poland, sanctioning the company in 2022, described it as the largest taxpayer in the Russian Federation. Against this background, Zelensky’s phrase, “long-range sanctions,” warrants attention. Sanctions attach to a company, a bank, a sector, or a class of goods. To describe an air campaign as sanctions enforcement is to import the unit of analysis proper to a regime that operates on actors into one that operates on things.
Ukrainian analysts close to the effort track the fiscal logic, presenting destruction of the logistics network as a blow to the budget that funds the aggression. Revenue, however, is what Article 52(2) excludes. As to effective contribution, the connection between government revenue and military action is too attenuated to qualify, because on that logic nearly every productive activity in a belligerent economy sustains the war effort. The point is contested in practice. An International Committee of the Red Cross commentary reads the phrase “military action” to exclude contributions that merely sustain the economy behind the fighting. The U.S Law of War Manual (updated July 2023) treats economic objects in war-supporting or war-sustaining industries as military objectives, offering electric power stations and oil refining and distribution facilities as examples (§ 5.6.6.2). The position has drawn sustained scholarly attention, and the debate turns on how far down the causal chain from revenue to rifle the law will follow.
As to definite military advantage, an advantage that is economic, financial, or psychological does not satisfy the provision, nor does the generalized aim of coercing an adversary toward negotiation (for a somewhat blurred position (see Ethiopia-Eritrea Claims Commission, Partial Award, Western Front, Aerial Bombardment and Related Claims, para. 121). Ukraine has not argued for the U.S. war-sustaining interpretation of “effective contribution.” It has enacted that interpretation, at scale, while describing it in the vocabulary of a non-kinetic regime.
A Marketplace Is Not a Supply Node
A crucial point is that Wildberries is a marketplace. Third-party vendors list goods on the platform and sell them to whoever buys them, and among those goods are drone components and body armor. That is the factual substrate of the assertion that the company supplies the Russian military.
Use, as the criterion of present function in targeting, requires that the object be supporting military action now (ICRC, AP I Commentary, para. 2023). A warehouse through which materiel destined for the armed forces is passing satisfies it. A warehouse holding commercially available electronics that any consumer may order does not. Purpose, the criterion of intended future use (para. 2022), cannot fill the gap. It requires evidence sufficient for a reasonable commander, on information reasonably available at the time, to conclude that the object will in fact be put to military use, and it excludes speculation, worst-case assumptions and mere capacity for military application. Stock that might later be bought by a soldier is the paradigm of what the purpose criterion was drafted to exclude, since a contrary rule would render targetable every retailer of dual-capable goods in a belligerent State.
Ukraine has never alleged State procurement through these facilities. It has alleged that a marketplace lists items with military utility. Between those two propositions lies the entire content of the use criterion.
Conclusion
Individual assessment of military objectives remains the rule, and the only route to a different result runs through the purpose prong. Were dual use so pervasive and so central to the enterprise’s operations that a reasonable commander could conclude that a further facility will in fact be put to military use, the inference would be available on the terms Article 52(2) already supplies. That standard is demanding and evidentiary. It is met by showing what the network does, never by observing how often it has been struck. Absent such a showing, repetition begins to substitute for verification, and targeting becomes habitual.
A belligerent that succeeds in recasting economic targeting as sanctions enforcement hands the same move to every subsequent belligerent. The move is attractive precisely because sanctions designations are public, plentiful and already drafted in the language of contribution to a war effort. There is no shortage of designated firms in any modern conflict, and each one comes with a ready-made dossier explaining why it matters to the enemy economy.
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Davit Khachatryan is an international law expert and researcher with a focus on operational law, international criminal law, alternative dispute resolution, and the intersection of various legal disciplines.
The views expressed are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, or Department of Defense.
Articles of War is a forum for professionals to share opinions and cultivate ideas. Articles of War does not screen articles to fit a particular editorial agenda, nor endorse or advocate material that is published. Authorship does not indicate affiliation with Articles of War, the Lieber Institute, or the United States Military Academy West Point.
Photo credit: Artyom Vasilyev via Wikimedia Commons
