Comment by andyjohnson0
3 days ago
Related: Ukraine have been targeting [1] warehouses owned by Wildberries, the Russian domestic equivalent of Amazon, causing $2.2bn of damage to-date.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jul/24/ukraine-wareho...
These feel quite different. IRGC attacked Amazon compute. Ukraine attacked several warehouses. Comparing Wildberries to Amazon is also only half the truth. Wildberries is directly part of russian war machine as soldiers need to buy essential dual-use equipment there and they even sell weapons.
AWS hosts all DoD cloud infrastructure. Isn't that analogous?
I suspect in both cases the primary motivation is "there's a huge box full of expensive stuff and if we get a drone inside the whole box burns to the ground".
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> What are Russia's reasons not to fire ballistic missiles at those factories, wherever they may be?
Russia is already targeting apartment blocks. I doubt they hesitate to attack known factories.
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Presumably they don't know where they are.
It's not like something being civilian infrastructure is a problem -https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_strikes_against_Ukrain...
What's somebody going to do? Complain to the UN?
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An aggressor state doesn't get to cry foul play. I don't care what Ukraine has to resort to so they can defend their sovereignty. If Russia doesn't like how the game is being played, they can take their ball and go home.
I admit I've had the privilege of not following the war between Russia/Ukraine very closely, but your question seems to assume that Russia has been clearly delineating between civilian and military targets. "UN Meetings Coverage and Press Releases : Russian Attacks in Ukraine Show ‘Clear’ Pattern of Targeting Civilians, UN Officials Stress, as Security Council Speakers Call for Urgent De-escalation" [1] from Jul 9, 2026 suggests that is not the case and claims "16,402 civilians, including 802 children, have been killed in Ukraine"
[1] https://press.un.org/en/2026/sc16408.doc.htm
> What are Russia's reasons not to fire ballistic missiles at those factories, wherever they may be?
Russians fire at everything in Ukraine, military and civilian. They'd obviously fire on those factories except they can't find them.
Who cares what the justifications Ukraine uses, they are fighting for their existence against Russian invaders and are not openly targeting civilians.
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I didn't know I'd find Vatnik's on HN.
I wonder why they don’t target Russian data centers? Much harder to repair or replace.
Datacenters are full of metal. Warehouses are full of cardboard boxes and styrofoam.
A rack of 14 $5k servers is worth $70k. A half-pallet stacked two meters high with $50 rubber dicks, each in a 30x10x10 cm box, is worth around $24k, and has the same form factor. There are more expensive servers but there are also more expensive products.
But large data centers would be maybe 10k square meters in one building, while the largest building of the Elektrostal Wildberries warehouse was over 150k sqm.
A datacenter, if successfully and completely burned down, would of course cause disruption (although in a well designed redundant system it shouldn't), but doing so is harder and burning down a major logistics hub causes disruption too.
The warehouse also leaves a hard to deny, widely visible reminder to the population that the war has consequences, in the form of a Moscow-sized smoke cloud: https://worldview.earthdata.nasa.gov/?v=33.290517136221574,5... (plus endless videos of small sellers lamenting their fate).
Yeah you’ve convinced me. Wildberries warehouses would burn more readily and cause more widespread economic and military disruption than a Yandex data center.
Unsurprisingly, the people fighting the war know what they’re doing.
Hitting the enemy where it hurts. It's much more effective to hurt Russian morale by making big explosions and petrol rain from striking a refinery or stopping/delaying shipments to the front line than by shutting down a center where a handful of people work and that won't directly impact the war. Ukraine must making fighting painful enough that the Russians withdraw, because the math of attrition favors the much more populous and richer Russians long term.
the point of hitting them is to cause commercial damage to american companies. In reality, this changes little in terms of US capacity. Doing the equivalent of this to Russia would be attacking their oil ports and infrastructure.
wildberries has been taken over by an oligarch and the only powers in Russia that Putin may hear are the oligarchs. There will be no 'overthrow of Putin' in Russia because there is no institutional support and it is well understood by literate people - a revolution is not just a disorganized uprising on the streets (what happens the next day? - return to normal) it requires years of planning and support.
This is incorrect. The founder and CEO of Wildberries of Tatyana Kim. She does not come from a wealthy family. She started that business as a young mother in 2004 and is self-made.
Many Eastern bloc communist states fell with large public protests and did not "require years of planning and support". [1]
[1] "How Every Communist Country in Europe Ended": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=avTUUizh-sg
Do they even still exist? It's not easy to find even a small russian VPS to be a reverse proxy for your encrypted messenger project any more.