The real target of the Ukrainian strikes is not the Wildberries warehouses

Verifying the “facts” Putin has put forward has long since become a political genre in its own right. Even if we set aside the zoological tales about the complicated relationship between orcas and bears, his statements about the situation on the front lines and in the Ukrainian rear are about equally reliable.

For example, at that same press conference, he stated that “Russian troops are 12 km away from the city of Sumy,” although earlier (on June 28), he had said they were 10.5 km away. In other words, the offensive is so successful that it has gone into negative territory. Or take his remarks about mobilization, which he called “complete nonsense.” And yet, this “nonsense” was personally announced by Putin in September 2022 and officially continues to this day.

In other words, Putin’s statements add nothing new. Russia has been striking at Ukraine’s energy sector and will continue to do so. We know this not from a press conference, but from the first blackouts in 2022.

The only thing worth noting is the shift in threats from the military on the front lines toward Ukraine’s rear. And there’s an explanation for this: the Russian army’s current rate of advance is the slowest it has been since 2023. The tactic of infiltration—currently the most “advanced” tactic available to the “world’s second-largest army”—means that the front line is advancing literally on foot. This obviously makes large-scale breakthroughs impossible, whereas the Ukrainian Armed Forces have already learned to deal with localized advances. In other words, the war on the front lines has reached a strategic stalemate, and the only way Putin can escalate the conflict is by intensifying the war against civilians in the Ukrainian rear.

A key difference in the current state of the war is that Ukraine now has the ability to respond with its own “long-range sanctions.”

Currently, Ukrainian drones are limited in the amount of explosives they can carry, so they can only attack a limited number of targets on Russian territory. But even this has proven sufficient to destabilize the situation in Russia.

On the eve of the sham elections to the Russian State Duma, the drop in Putin’s approval ratings is felt more acutely, since no one should doubt the government’s popularity.

But what kind of popularity can we even talk about if public sentiment is as shown in the polls? And the fact that Zelenskyy cites these graphs to justify the correctness of the chosen tactics of striking warehouses and oil refineries further convinces Putin that the real target is not Wildberries warehouses, but the “people’s love” for the leader, which is plummeting. And what kind of dictator are you if the people aren’t going into hysterics out of love for you, as in Stalin’s USSR or today’s North Korea?

Obviously, there is nothing good about the current escalation. Russia is rapidly advancing the technological capabilities of its airstrikes, deploying jet-powered drones and ramping up ballistic missile attacks. Ukraine is trying to do the same, and we all continue to hope for a massive Ukrainian ballistic missile program, the production timeline for which has been repeatedly delayed.

Strikes deep inside Russia alone are not capable of ending the war. But they are doing what this was all meant to begin with: returning the war to where it came from. And along with the war, they are reminding Russian society—and Putin personally—of its true cost. For Putin, this means the gradual transformation of the war from a political tool into a threat to the stability of his regime.

And if we’re lucky, the phrase “they’ll hang me” will go from being a newspaper headline to a real political prediction that has come true.

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