Georgy Pirogov. Photo: FSB Public Relations Centre/TASS/ZUMA Press/Scanpix/LETA via Novaya Gazeta Europe
Two years ago, Georgy Pirogov, a Russian man who had moved abroad after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, disappeared in Uzbekistan. He later resurfaced in a Moscow pre-trial detention centre. In July 2026, he was convicted of treason, and last week, the Federal Security Service (FSB) announced that the verdict had entered into force. The agency accused Pirogov of spying for Polish military intelligence and providing financial support to Ukraine’s military. According to the human rights group Department One, Pirogov says he was injected with an unknown substance before his removal from Uzbekistan. Novaya Gazeta Europe examines what we know about the case.
In early July, the Moscow City Court sentenced Georgy Pirogov to 23 years in prison followed by two more years of movement restrictions and a fine of 800,000 rubles (€8,100). Pirogov had left Russia via the United Arab Emirates after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine and settled in Georgia, where he worked as an industrial climber before travelling to Uzbekistan for work. His relatives lost contact with him on 6 July 2024, and his abandoned car was later found in the Uzbek city of Nukus. Just two days later, on 8 July 2024, a Moscow district court sent him to pre-trial detention.
According to an FSB press release, Pirogov “independently established contact” in April 2022 with a representative of Polish military intelligence and was tasked with gathering classified information about advanced weapons systems used by Russian forces against Ukraine. Russian investigators allege he obtained data on missile systems, as well as personal details of individuals with access to state secrets, through defence industry contacts. Prosecutors also claim he transferred cryptocurrency to fund Ukraine’s military, purchased military equipment, and arranged its delivery from Poland to Ukraine.
Information about Pirogov’s life is hard to come by. Two videos of him are publicly available: one from 2024, filmed in Uzbekistan, in which he describes the harsh conditions of his work, and another, undated, that shows him after his arrest ”confirming” to FSB interrogators that he had gathered information.
Novaya Gazeta Europe reviewed the social media profiles of several of Pirogov’s relatives and found no political posts, aside from a petition his sister shared five years ago on Change.org concerning a small-scale land dispute near Moscow. Records from Georgia’s National Statistics Office indicate that, until 2024, a man named Georgy Pirogov served as director and co-owner of the Namaste Hostel in Tbilisi. The hostel’s Facebook and Instagram pages feature photos and videos of a man closely resembling the Pirogov convicted in Moscow, and the accounts stopped updating around the time of his disappearance, though the hostel itself continues to operate. Its representatives did not respond to a request for comment.
Novaya Gazeta Europe found three documents connected to Pirogov’s case in a public legal database: two attempts by his lawyer to appeal his pre-trial detention order before the Moscow City Court, and a separate appeal against the seizure of his property. None of the motions succeeded.
Court documents show that Pirogov has elderly parents, holds a university degree, is unmarried, and had no prior criminal record. His lawyer said that Pirogov had “actively assisted in uncovering and investigating the crime” and had confessed, and that, contrary to the prosecution’s portrayal of him as a Polish spy stealing data for Ukraine’s armed forces, “no socially dangerous consequences” had resulted from his actions.
“The entire case behind the accusation [that he was working for Polish intelligence] was built on an FSB sting operation. Agents posed as one of his acquaintances and communicated with Pirogov under that person’s identity; the authorities later classified those exchanges as treason,” Yevgeny Smirnov, a lawyer with Department One, told Novaya Gazeta Europe. He said it remains unknown to what extent the FSB coordinated Pirogov’s abduction in Uzbekistan with the country’s own security services.
“They took him the simplest way possible — FSB officers flew in, detained him, injected him with some substance, and brought him to Moscow,” Smirnov said, adding that this account came from Pirogov himself, who gave it to explain how he ended up back in Russia after his arrest. The account raises questions: the substance would presumably have been meant to make Pirogov compliant with his abductors’ instructions, yet he would also have needed to appear sufficiently lucid to avoid arousing the suspicion of Uzbek border guards as he boarded the plane.
Smirnov noted that the charge brought against Pirogov has become commonplace in Russia. “[Charges of] treason in the form of espionage are extremely widespread right now — photographing military sites, sending data about military personnel, these things are now classified as treason,” he said.
The legal framework inside Russia has undergone a fundamental shift since the expansion of wartime legislation.
Charges of high treason and espionage, once rare, are now systematically deployed as standard instruments of domestic policy. The handling of these cases by the Russian judiciary is characterised by near-total secrecy, with the vast majority of trials held behind closed doors and resulting in lengthy penal colony sentences.
This data compiled by @one_dept documents the accelerating rate of these convictions. While the individual metrics are detailed in the slides, the broader picture reflects a judicial system restructured to neutralise dissent.
Lida Moniava, a prominent advocate for critically ill children’s care, has been charged with spreading false information about the military, her attorney told Russian media on Wednesday.
Moniava was arrested following a police search of her home in Moscow earlier in the day and questioned by officials from the Investigative Committee, Russia’s top investigative body.
Moscow’s Simonovsky District Court is expected to rule on pre-trial detention measures, her attorney told the news outlet RBC.
The charge of spreading false information about the military carries a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison.
Moniava is the founder of the Moscow-based charity Lighthouse, which operates hospices for seriously ill children and young adults in the Russian capital and surrounding region.
After Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Moniava created a foundation that provided shelter, medical supplies and food to people fleeing from the war. The organization also later helped Armenians fleeing from conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh, as well as Russians displaced from the Kursk and Belgorod regions.
That foundation suspended operations last September due to the dwindling number of refugees arriving in Moscow and the Moscow region.
Moniava was previously detained in January and in February. She was fined 45,000 rubles ($520) after being found guilty of “discrediting” the Russian military in posts on Telegram.
Despite facing pressure from the authorities, Moniava has refused to leave Russia.
“If I leave, critically ill children will end up in nursing homes and intensive care units for longer periods. Knowing that, I doubt I could live happily in some other country,” she wrote earlier this year.
Lidia Moniava is being forced out of Russia. First, her hospice was slapped with an administrative fine. Then she was threatened with criminal prosecution. Next, a criminal case was launched against her, her home was searched, and she was interrogated. Now, the court has sentenced her to non-custodial remand. It’s the standard playbook: we’re about to lock you up, so hurry and leave; take advantage of this last chance. In unison with the punitive organs, the lucky political émigrés are chiming in, “Run, Lida, run!” Escape is the very essence of their political activism. Fleeing is their means of survival.
Forcing an undesirable person to leave is the best option for the authorities. That much is obvious. But it is also obvious that this “undesirable person” has a different set of values, different views on life and on her place in it. She cannot abandon a cause she considers important; she cannot betray the people who have placed their trust in her, the people she cares for. Personal responsibility is what Russian society so desperately lacks today.
She won’t have an easy time of it. It’s hard for a free person to live in an unfree country. But it’s a noble choice, one that only people who are free on the inside can understand.
I always thought she was exactly what a Christian should be like.
Lida Moniava, the director of Lighthouse children’s hospice, has been accused of circulating “fake news” about the army. she has been detained and faces up to ten years in prison.
It is clear who is running a country where righteous people are behind bars.
On the evening of September 3, Simonovsky Court placed Lida Moniava, founder of Dom s Mayakom (“Lighthouse Charity Foundation”), under a set of restrictions in a criminal case accusing her of spreading “fake” information about the Russian military. Moniava is one of the leading figures in contemporary Russian philanthropy: she founded the Dom s Mayakom charity and its hospices for children with severe and incurable illnesses. Dozens of people came to Simonovsky Court in Moscow to support her. The news outlet Bereg recounts what happened — and shows how Moniava’s supporters celebrated her release. Meduza is translating the report in full.
A hearing on pretrial restrictions for Lida Moniava, founder of the Lighthouse Charity Foundation, is scheduled for 5 p.m. on September 3. A full hour before the hearing, Muscovites who have come to support Moniava are already gathering outside the Simonovsky Court building.
Police searched Moniava’s home early on the morning of August 2 as part of a criminal case over spreading “fake” information about the Russian military, then arrested her. The case stems from a post Moniava published on her Telegram channel to mark the first anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. “For a year now, my country has been sending missiles, tanks, and soldiers into Ukraine. For a year now, innocent people have been dying because of it,” she wrote.
A short young woman named Nadezhda stands in the parking lot reserved for official vehicles directly in front of the courthouse. She is visibly nervous. She introduces herself as Moniava’s goddaughter.
“I’m waiting for justice. If someone like Lida is sent to prison, something truly terrible will happen to the world,” Nadezhda says.
A mixed crowd gradually gathers by the parking lot: young people who might be described as part of the alternative scene, middle-aged people, and elderly members of the support group. Some call themselves Moniava’s friends and acquaintances; others, like red-haired Makar, dressed all in black, learned about her from recent news coverage.
“When I read about Lida, I realized she’s just an incredibly good person — kind, with the noblest intentions,” Makar tells the independent Russian outlet Bereg. “Of course, it’s a real shame things turned out this way.”
Makar says he is trying not to get his hopes up that the charges against Moniava will be dropped or that she will be released from custody, “so I don’t end up disappointed.”
Mikhail, an acquaintance of Moniava’s, is also there to support her. He speaks about her much as dozens of others have in Facebook posts supporting her over the past day.
“I admire what she does, what she stands for, and the fact that she’s open about it. That’s genuinely brave,” Mikhail says. “You can do charity work and still be a conformist because you think charity makes up for everything. But Lida did good work without becoming a conformist just to keep doing it.”
When Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Moniava stayed in the country and continued helping children with incurable illnesses. She also set up a fund to help refugees from Ukraine and Nagorno-Karabakh, as well as residents of the Kursk region’s border areas affected by the Ukrainian military’s incursion in August 2024.
While helping people affected by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Moniava also wrote antiwar posts on Facebook. In February 2026, Russian authorities fined her 45,000 rubles for “discrediting” the Russian military over those posts. She wrote about children killed in a Russian missile strike on Kryvyi Rih and the deaths of the Martynenko family — a father, a mother, and their 11-year-old son — in a strike on Sumy.
After the February hearing at which a judge imposed the fine, Moniava thanked her followers for their support and said in a post that she had “received a lot of advice to leave Russia”:
When Center E is banging on your apartment door, it’s scary, of course. But look at this photo — Anya and I are having such a great time on our shift [at the hospice]. She’s a girl who spent 19 years behind the walls of a residential institution. If I leave, children in palliative care will spend more time in residential institutions and intensive care units. I doubt I could live happily in some other country knowing that. So emigration isn’t in the plans.
In the same post, Moniava added: “I also can’t stay silent as if there’s no war. Trying to live honestly comes first for me.”
Natalya, who came to Simonovsky Court, does not know Moniava personally but has long followed her work. “I’m just in shock over what’s happening,” she says. “It’s probably to be expected, but it’s still very hard for me to accept. I’m an outsider looking on, and I simply respect her work, so I came here to support her. Lida is a wonderful person who helps others live and survive. That’s very important in our world. In turbulent times, we need to support each other somehow and do something.”
Others who came to support the Dom s Mayakom founder included Nobel laureate Dmitry Muratov, former editor-in-chief of the independent Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta; Nyuta Federmesser, founder of the Vera Fund, which helps people with incurable illnesses; actress Tatyana Drubich, co-chair of the same fund; and Daniil Maksimov, a Vera Fund employee and founder of an inclusive magazine about sex for people with disabilities.
Maksimov, a blogger, writes on social media about living with spinal muscular atrophy (SMA) and the problems wheelchair users face. Several people in motorized wheelchairs gathered outside Simonovsky Court on the day of Moniava’s hearing.
The Lighthouse Charity Foundation needs support. In recent days, it has lost many donations and some of its donors. You can donate from Russia in rubles on the foundation’s website.
Shortly before 5 p.m., a prison transport van parked outside the courthouse pulls away. By now, around 200 people have gathered. Someone in the crowd says, “This one’s probably leaving now, and the next one will have Lida in it.” When another prison van drives onto the court grounds soon afterward, people start chanting, “Lida! Lida!”
The van’s barred windows make it impossible to see who is inside. The van pulls into the garage.
People line up to enter the courthouse, and the line moves very slowly. One woman in a blue jacket stands out among the crowd, holding a copy of Viktor Vilisov’s book Nas Vsekh Toshnit (We’re All Sick to Our Stomachs) with a bright orange cover. Off to one side stands Yekaterina Duntsova, head of the Rassvet (“Dawn”) party; somewhere in the same crowd are Tatyana and Valery Yashin, the parents of convicted politician Ilya Yashin, who was sent to Germany in a prisoner exchange.
“So many people showed up. This is a really high-profile case,” someone in the crowd says.
Forty minutes later, the line still has not cleared. Two young men carrying tripods come out of the courthouse toward the line. Someone in the crowd asks hopefully:
“So, any news?”
“No, nothing at all.”
It is a little after 5 p.m. when Nyuta Federmesser, who had entered the courthouse near the front of the line, comes back outside. “Lida hasn’t arrived yet,” she says. “We came down because it’s impossible to breathe in there. There’s no point in standing here anymore because they’ll start kicking everyone out soon. The court closes at 6 p.m.”
Some of those who came are in no hurry to leave, even though it is very stuffy inside. Dmitry Muratov takes a spot right by the courtroom entrance. One woman who came to support Moniava offers people postcards to write warm messages on, which will later be delivered to Moniava. A police officer comes upstairs and asks everyone to leave the building: the court has closed for the day.
Everyone heads down to the courtyard, which is packed with people. In the middle, a group shares a pie. Police soon drive everyone out of the courtyard as well, and the gates close. Now everyone waits for Moniava by the fence.
Traffic police officers watch the crowd from cars with their emergency lights on. One of them approaches the crowd. What he says is familiar from rallies and pickets:
“Citizens, do not obstruct the passage of other citizens!”
“We’ve heard that one before,” a woman over 60 says. “I’m so sick of you!”
Word eventually spreads that Moniava has been brought to the courthouse after all and that the hearing has begun. The press is not allowed to attend.
“I know Lida personally,” says Fatima, who came to Simonovsky Court to support her. “Lida is a wonderful person. She’s done a lot in our country to help children with severe and incurable illnesses, and she built a palliative care system. Of course, it’s pretty horrifying that she’s inside the Simonovsky Court building at all.”
Neither Fatima nor Mikhail, who respects Moniava for refusing to conform, expects “anything good” to come of the judge’s decision.
Half an hour later, the crowd starts to stir. The courthouse doors open, and two security officers appear in the doorway. Several people start chanting “Lida!” but she is nowhere in sight. A few men come out, followed by a woman. “The workday is over,” someone in the crowd says.
As they wait, someone starts singing, but the words are impossible to make out.
Finally, Moniava’s defense attorney, Mikhail Biryukov, says from inside the courtroom that the court is releasing Moniava from custody and placing her under a “ban on certain activities.” While the investigation continues, she is barred from going outside between 8 p.m. and 8 a.m., communicating with witnesses, or using the internet.
Sometime between 8 and 9 p.m., Moniava and Biryukov emerge from the courthouse. The people waiting behind the fence chant Moniava’s name and applaud. Once outside the gates, she tells the crowd: “I thought I was going to get 10 years in prison. Some kind of miracle.”
She says investigators spent “many hours” trying to persuade her to admit guilt: “For some reason, it’s very important that the defendant say they feel guilty. I don’t feel guilty. I want the war to end as soon as possible.”
“Is there anything you want to do right now?” journalists ask Moniava.
The first attack on the Saky military airfield, in the annexed Crimean peninsula, took place on August 9. Le Monde/AP
Lyudmyla Khersonska
When Crimea was still a place of light,
when gulls were free of orders, when sandals beat light on the border of water, and gulls were the only patrols in the sky; when women in bright dresses walked barefoot or in cheap sandals, in sandals, in sandals instead of boots, before missiles. Before missiles, I, too, loved it all.
Translated from the Russian by Ilya Kaminsky and Katie Farris
Когда-то во времена Крыма,
когда Крым еще не был горем, когда Крым еще был морем, и над морем летали чайки, а в море резвились дельфины, когда по берегу ходили в сандалиях, а не в тяжелых берцах, когда-то во времена солнца, когда не было дыма снарядов, когда в море не вбивали сваи и не строили железную сушу, тогда я все это любила.
Lyudmyla Khersonska is the author of About Today Is a Different War (Arrowsmith Press, 2023), and The Country Where Everyone’s Name Is Fear: Selected Poems (Lost Horse Press, 2022), coauthored with her husband, Boris Khersonsky, and translated by Ilya Kaminsky and Katie Farris.
About this Poem
“I [wrote] this poem after Russia annexed the Crimea. After this beautiful Ukrainian place [was] violently transformed into a Russian military base. I visited Crimea many times before the annexation. I loved its poetic tranquillity and inspiring landscapes. Now it is all gone. I might never be able to see it again. But I have it in my memory. I often think of my friends who used to live there before the annexation. They had to flee. Their house stays empty with the memory locked behind the door.” —Lyudmyla Khersonska
“Katie Farris and I [collaborated] to translate this poem by Ludmyla Khersonsky [sic] who is a poet from Odesa, Ukraine, who is also a war refugee, currently living in Italy. Her writings have appeared widely in the U.S., including in The New Yorker and World Literature Today. She has written about war for many years and, to my mind, her writing stands in the tradition of other Eastern European poets, including Anna Swir, who write about crisis with hypnotic clarity and restraint.” —Ilya Kaminsky
Source: Poets.org. I deliberately reordered the placement of the names of the poet and the translators, above, to make it conform to common conventions, although of course the original placement of the names of the translators points to their own sense of authorship. ||||| TRR
Back in the days of Crimea,
when Crimea was not yet sorrow, when Crimea was still the sea, and over the sea flew seagulls, and dolphins frolicked in the sea, when the shore was trod in sandals, not heavy combat boots, back in the days of sunshine when there was no missile smoke, no piles driven into the sea, no building of an ironclad land, in those days I loved all of it.
Translated, from the Russian, by the Russian Reader
Zakhar Prilepin addressing an assembly at Petersburg’s Mining University. Photo: Bumaga
Zakhar Prilepin speaks at Mining University welcome assembly
Zakhar Prilepin was introduced as a “writer and participant in the Special Military Operation,” but was mistakenly referred to as “Prigozhin,” so he corrected the master of ceremonies, our correspondent reports.
Prilepin told the students that emigrating after receiving an education at the Mining University would be an act of treason.
“If you take your knowledge beyond the borders of this country, beyond the bounds of our national science, you will betray all those who stand beside you. I hope there is no one here like this, but some of you might secretly be thinking, ‘I was born so intelligent, I am so wonderful and gorgeous, and basically I’m entitled to everything, that I’ll just pack my bags and go off somewhere where they’ll pay me more for my brains.’ Please understand that this is a treachery against those people who have conquered and cultivated this vast expanse,” Prilepin declared.
Prilepin was the third to speak, after Rector Vladimir Litvinenko and one of his vice-rectors. On stage, the writer stood next to Litvinenko.
A wave of false bomb threats triggered mass evacuations at schools, kindergartens, hospitals and museums across at least nine Russian regions, local officials and media reported Tuesday.
In the Leningrad region, Governor Alexander Drozdenko said “a dozen” schools, kindergartens and hospitals responded to bomb scares. The hoaxes came amid Day of Knowledge celebrations that mark the start of the new school year every Sept. 1.
“We can’t ignore these threats, even though we understand the enemy’s goal to… ruin the holiday for children and adults,” Drozdenko wrote on Telegram, likely a reference to Ukraine.
St. Petersburg and Leningrad region police told the Fontanka.ru news outlet that “more than 100 institutions” received false threats.
In Moscow, at least four museums, including the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, evacuated visitors or temporarily closed for what they called “technical reasons.”
A government building in the Far Eastern Zabaikalsky region and a number of hospitals in the central republic of Tatarstan were also reportedly evacuated.
Fake bomb threats were also reported across the Ural Mountains, the Yamal-Nenets autonomous district, the Orenburg region and the Krasnoyarsk region.
Mass bomb threats, which the Kremlin referred to as “telephone terrorism,” have periodically plagued Russian cities in the years before and since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Prilepin greeted the 2014 ‘Russian Spring’ with delight as the realisation of long-held hopes for a resurgence of Russian power. He hailed the Crimean annexation as a vital turning point in Russia’s post-Soviet history, marking an end to the dominance of what he called the ‘hysterical’ domestic media coverage of the Russian military campaigns in Chechnya and Georgia, and expressing the hope that ‘the Crimean story will give a kind of super-brutal revolutionary impulse inside the country, so that it undergoes a metamorphosis’. Prilepin has been actively involved in the Donbas conflict, initially as a war correspondent and as an activist organising charity rock concerts in aid of the pro-Russian side and delivering humanitarian supplies to the local population. From 2015 to mid-2018 Prilepin was employed as adviser tothe head of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR), Aleksandr Zakharchenko; in a move that has prompted speculation and conspiracy theorising when, Prilepin, citing health problems, left Zakharchenko’s service a few weeks before the latter was assassinated in August 2018. Apparently on commission from Kremlin ‘grey cardinal’ Vladislav Surkov, Prilepin published a popular biography of Zakharchenko in 2016.
In early 2017 Prilepin’s involvement in the war moved to another level after he announced that he was forming his own battalion to fight in the Donbas for the DNR. This led to his being hailed in the newspaper Moskovskii komsomolets as not just both writer and soldier, but also ‘perhaps, a prophet’; the popular tabloid Komsomol’skaia pravda described him as a ‘hero of our time’ for the 2000s, and the‘Byron of Donetsk’. Other commentators predicted that Prilepin would write ‘the first great novel’ about the war in the Donbas, which ‘our children and grandchildren will use to study the history of the second decade of the 21st Century’. Prilepin followed up his announcement with an online videoclip in which he held up a peace sign and delivered a mock-serious speech about the writer’s duty to oppose war, before tearing up the peace sign and ordering his men to open fire on Ukrainian positions.
Source: Julie Fedor, “Spinning Russia’s 21st Century Wars: Zakhar Prilepin and His ‘Literary Spetsnaz.’” The RUSI Journal, vol. 163, no. 6 (December 2018): 20–21. https://doi.org/10.1080/03071847.2018.1562015.
A billboard advertising voluntary (“contract”) military service in St. Petersburg, Russia. Source: Wall Street Journal
Raids aimed at forcing men to fight in the war against Ukraine have become widespread throughout Russia’s regions. In the Penza Region, where law enforcement, in concert with officials from military registration and enlistment offices, have been carrying out such raids in a particularly aggressive manner, local residents have banded together to “take back their men,” as they put it.
“They took him away, but we caught up with them halfway and got him back”
On 23 July, unknown men in plain clothes drove up to the home of Sergei Teplyakov, an employee of a local security firm in Bashmakovo, a district council town in the Penza Region with a population of around nine thousand).
“One of them introduced himself as the new neighborhood beat cop and demanded to see [Sergei’s] passport. Sergei then started phoning the real neighborhood beat cop. [The intruders] flew into a rage, grabbed him, and dragged him into their car. It was a straight-up abduction: no grounds for his arrest, no names, no paperwork whatsoever were provided,” says Oksana, a resident of the town. (We have changed the names of those whom we interviewed for their own safety.) “Sergei’s son, who had been telephoned by the neighbors, arrived, started filming it on his phone, and shouting at them. They let [Sergei] go. But the next day, [Alexei] Denisenko was caught in a raid.”
According to the locals, two unknown men grabbed Denisenko in a park where he was cutting grass to work off court-ordered community service hours for drunk driving.
“They threatened [Denisenko]. They said he would suffer the consequences if he didn’t go with them to the district council offices. A female council staffer was in the car with the ‘trappers,’ and so [Alexei] believed them. Plus, the license plates on the car were local, and it was a council vehicle,” says local resident Artyom. “He was told they were taking him to the council to ‘verify his details.’ But witnesses noticed they drove him off towards Penza and they called his family. His sister was able to chase them down halfway there, less than a hundred kilometers from Penza. She forced them to stop their car and she wrested Alexei from their clutches. These ‘recruiters’ are local officials working for the Defense Ministry by supplying them with unsuspecting folk. It’s utter lawlessness: these recruiters barge straight into people’s homes. If a man is walking down the street a bit tipsy, he’s definitely at risk. But basically, they’ll grab anyone.”
According to Mediazona, which has been compiling a name-by-name list of fallen Russian servicemen since 2022, more than two thousand residents of the Penza Region are known to have been killed in combat. The list of those killed from Bashmakovo includes twenty-five people.
Bashmakovo residents say that they had never met any of the “recruiters” before.
“We looked up the drivers of these vehicles—it turned out that one of them works as a bailiff!” says Artyom. “The plates of the second vehicle (O217XR) are registered to the Bashmakovo District Council. The families of Denisenko and Teplyakov reported the attempted abduction and coercion into signing military contracts to the police. Recently, two more men were also abducted. They managed to get a lawyer sent to them, but it wasn’t possible to get them out of the recruitment center on Skladskaya Street in Penza: they’d already been pressured into signing up there. According to the lawyer, one of them was threatened with ‘criminal charges’ over debts, even though the amount he owed didn’t warrant criminal prosecution. In other words, they were basically hoodwinked.”
Following these incidents, the locals decided to form a neighborhood watch group to defend the men.
“I joined the patrols almost straight away. It all happened spontaneously,” says Galina, a resident of Bashmakovo. “The guys set up [an online chat] group and started posting there about what was happening in the town and how they were rounding up the men. Gradually, people simply got together on VKontakte. That’s where we coordinate our efforts: we’ve split into shifts and we patrol the town around the clock. Around 250 people have joined the vigilante group. It’s much more effective to take back people on the spot, before they’re sent to the police station or the military recruitment office, because there’s simply no legal basis for detaining them.”
She says that almost everyone in the vigilante group has personal motives.
“There’s fear for our loved ones, of course. God forbid that my husband goes off to work and then disappears: you already know what might have happened to him. In June, they took my cousin away. He has two children. I recently found out that he had some sort of unpaid loan. I don’t know where he is now and what’s become of him.”
Galina says the members of the neighborhood watch patrol Bashmakovo every day and even at night: those who have cars drive around the town to check for suspicious vehicles or strangers. The volunteers chip in for petrol. They also use a community fund to cover unexpected expenses. Recently, during a patrol, there was a minor road accident in which two cars were damaged. They were repaired free of charge by acquaintances at a garage, and the only cost was for the spare parts.
Galina herself has been called out in response to a report of an attempted abduction.
“I was with my mom at the hospital when a message came through the group chat saying that two police officers were trying to force their way into Pavel Berdechenkov’s house. My mom and I drove over there, and the rest of the crew joined us. In the end, the police had nothing to say: they got into their car and drove off. There was another incident when we were patrolling a neighboring village and spotted a GAZelle van we didn’t recognize. All such reports go straight to our private group.”
She estimates that the vigilante group’s members have managed to prevent at least five or six people from being abducted in this way. But their methods doesn’t always work.
“Today we weren’t able to rescue a man because the alert came in too late. Within forty-five minutes, they’d already taken him far away. That’s why what matters most is that we’re notified straight away. Then we can get to the scene.”
A member of the volunteer group claims that at least two vehicles belonging to district authorities have been used in the raids. According to her, a Lada Granta, which residents have dubbed “401,” belongs to the Bashmakovo District education department, while a Lada Largus 217 belongs to the district council. Locals blame the council’s chair, Tamara Pavlutkina, for what is happening and feel that reporting incidents to the local police is pointless.
“There’s no point in complaining to the police. We believe the district council chair gives the orders and the rest just carry them out. She gets everything done by proxy,” says Galina.
Tamara Pavlutkina
As an example, she cites the story of fifty-eight-year-old Sergei Milkin from the village of Podgornoye, sixteen kilometers from Bashmakovo. According to her, the local beat cop, Sinyov, invited Milkin to the village council “for a chat,” after which he disappeared. Milkin, says Galina, had serious heart problems: he’d had a bypass operation. The day after his chat with the police officer, he rang his family from the Rostov recruitment center and told them he was being sent to the war. Ten days later, he died, basically on the front line.
“We wrote to every relevant authority: the military prosecutor’s office and Bastrykin at the Investigative Committee, and we appealed to the television. Our complaint was registered, and then there was silence.
Another member of the vigilante group, Alexei, joined it after his relative was nearly sent off to war.
“He was summoned by letter to the military registration and enlistment office to ‘verify his details.’ We happened to be visiting him at the time and witnessed the whole thing. The round-ups had begun in Penza by then, but not here yet. What’s more, he didn’t go alone but with a friend, so we felt a bit more reassured. He’d left his phone at home,” says Alexei. “Two hours went by, but he wasn’t back yet. Three hours passed, and still nothing. His friend returned alone and said, ‘Your relative’s gone to Penza for a medical board.’ We were in a panic. I rang the infamous Penza military registration and enlistment office at 19 Skladskaya Street. They replied, ‘We’ve got no one by that name here.’”
Alexei says that at that moment the village chair came to the house and asked for the missing man’s military service card.
“I started filming her straight away. ‘What grounds do you have for asking to see his papers?!’ I ask her. She replies, ‘The council sent me.’ I ask her to give me names and job titles, but she refuses. We take a taxi to Penza. At 19 Skladskaya Street, we race up and down all the floors. We come across a drunk man whom someone had brought in, while the bloke accompanying him boasts that he’s already brought in and ‘handed over’ two people that day. Then we meet a tearful mother: her son had been snatched straight from their home, and she’d rushed there hot on their heels. Her [other] two sons were already at [the front]. She said she won’t hand over the third one.”
Alexei spotted his relative right on the steps of the military registration and enlistment office.
“He had been brought there in a private car by an ‘acquaintance’ of the village council chair. When we shouted at this man, he claimed that he had nothing to do with it: he had just ‘kindly’ given [my relative] a lift to Penza. Then he scrammed. We immediately took our relative by the arms, but by that point he had already been ‘psyched out’: they’d explained to him that after the medical examination he would have to sign some papers, supposedly to verify his details. What sort of people are they? They’re a disgrace. They’re prepared to take people’s lives for these payments.”
Meanwhile, Oksana, who has also joined the group, told [Radio Svoboda] that the local authorities had begun putting pressure on them.
“The security forces have already threatened us. Do you know what they threatened to do us? To send us off to the war! What’s more, they’ve been openly persecuting those who have criticized the raids or written about them on social media. Police officers went straight to the home of Vera Makavtsova and, in front of her four children, threatened her with criminal charges. They are threatening to charge her under Article 319 (“insulting a public official”). All because, in a post of hers, she called the district council accomplices to the abductions, and its chair, Tamara Pavlutkina, a co-organizer of press-ganging people into combat.”
In an audio recording made during Makavtsova’s arrest, police officers can be heard bursting into the house and demanding that the woman “come with them.” This is because she allegedly “poses a threat to Russia’s national security,” posts all manner of “extremist” content on social media, and takes part in meetups of residents.
“You don’t have a warrant,” Makavtsova says.
“Do you have a fucking warrant to gather in the city center on Saturdays?!” the police officer replies.
“In the end, they busted down the door and detained her. Of course, it’s not domestic violence, her husband beating her [that brought the police to Makavtsova’s home]. It was a post attacking an official and the Defense Ministry. That was grounds for the police to ‘intervene.’ They never responded to the complaints from Denisenko and the Teplyakovs. I’m sure Pavlutkina herself filed the complaint [against them],” Oksana says indignantly.
“The chair of the council has two sons,” adds Galina. ‘When I asked her why she wasn’t sending her own sons [to the front], she said, ‘I didn’t give birth to them for that.'”
Meanwhile, on 25 June, a ceremony was held at the Bashmakovo District Council to present state awards to the local families of men killed during the invasion of Ukraine. Relatives and loved ones of the soldiers, who had returned home as “Cargo 200,” received honors and medals. The ceremony was attended by the local military enlistment officer, Alexei Valygin, and Pavlutkina, a member of the ruling United Russia party, who assured those present that “should any questions arise, citizens can always contact the district council.”
[Radio Svoboda] reached out to Pavlutkina, asking her to comment on reports that the district council had been involved in detaining residents and forcing them to volunteer for the army. As this article went to press, she had not responded.
In early August, Penza-based blogger Stanislav Morozov set up a support chat group for men who have been detained and pressured into enlisting in the army. He called on residents to unite to resist such detentions.
“We are doing this out of desperation, because we simply have no other choice. We are people who are standing up for our fundamental rights and freedoms—the right not to be treated as a commodity and not to have our free will taken away under the threat of a truncheon. When lawful means of self-defense cease to work, the only shield left is a neighbor’s shoulder. Our strength now lies in this compulsory yet consciously chosen consolidation,” Morozov explained in the chat’s overview.
Within the first twenty-four hours, 300 people had joined the chat, and within a week the number of participants had exceeded 1,200. Morozov calls on eyewitnesses to report arrests promptly and promises to help find lawyers for those detained. He warns that security forces and provocateurs may have joined the chat and asks everyone to be careful with what they say.
Amid the raids, other ways of warning people about them have emerged. In early August, an online service launched featuring a map on which users could mark the locations of arrests. A few days later, its developers reported that the service and its associated Telegram channel had been hacked, and the website had started redirecting users to a porn site, according to the Telegram channel Mobilization. The project’s creators speculated that the law enforcement agencies might have taken an interest in them, but it is not yet possible to independently ascertain who was behind the hack.
“They’ve taken a blind man away!“
All across Russia, men are being deceitfully lured into the war against Ukraine.
On 8 August, an incident involving abduction and the forced signing of a military service contract took place in Omsk.
According to Valentina, on Saturday morning three unknown men grabbed her 31-year-old brother, Danil, straight from the courtyard of their home in Omsk’s Kirovsk District.
“He has a wife and children. This morning, he took a can of beer and went to sit on a bench by the entrance to his block. That’s where they picked him up. It was a private vehicle, but luckily, the neighbors managed to write down the license plate number. While we were looking for him, he came back on his own. He told us they’d taken him to a ‘volunteer’ recruitment center at 8 Maryanovskaya Street. He had barely managed to break free and escape, and he hadn’t signed anything. Well, we calmed down a bit,” says Valentina.
But that same evening, she says, they came for him again.
“Danil was out in the courtyard with his wife and children. Some men arrived in a Niva [off-road vehicle]. They twisted his arms behind his back and took him away to parts unknown. The children were screaming, and his wife tried to fight them off, but to no avail. We were terrified: what should we do? We started dashing off statements to the military prosecutor’s office, the military Investigative Committee, and the police. We found out he was back on Maryanovskaya Street. We’re demanding his release, but they won’t even let us speak to him on the phone. It’s a proper kidnapping.”
Her brother was released after some time, but, according to Valentina, he had been beaten up beforehand and forced to sign a “voluntary” military enlistment contract.
“They’ve finally let him go, but they intimidated him so much and beat him up so badly, that he signed the contract. We’re in shock at the moment, trying to raise money for lawyers. What else can we do? He’s at home for now, but they’ve got that contract they forced him to sign. They could turn up and break down the door, after all. What’s going on is just horrific.”
In August in Russia’s Maritime Territory, according to Ivan, a former soldier, the military stopped his brother Mikhail, who has a category 1 visual impairment.
“On 3 August, Misha went to the shop. He was stopped by two soldiers who initially asked him to sign a contract with the Defense Ministry,” says Ivan. “My brother refused. He told them straight away that he was a person with a category 1 visual impairment. They kept pressuring him: ‘Then you’ll be building barracks in Sibirtsevo’ (a village in the Maritime Territory’s Chernigovsky District, where military unit 16871 is stationed). He explained to them at length that he could hardly see anything at all. He’d been making his way to the shop by memory and by touch, after all. Then they grabbed him and took him away by force.”
The following day, Ivan (who had himself been discharged due to an injury sustained in combat in Ukraine) brought all his brother’s medical records to the recruitment center in Ussuriysk.
“They were holding him at the recruitment center on Lermontov Street. I showed them his medical records and his Category 1 disability certificate. I was certain they’d sort it out and let him go. But early the next morning, Misha rang and said they were putting him on a bus to the airport,” says Ivan. “That was it! He was off to Ukraine to fight. How on earth will he manage there?! He can only cope here on his own because he knows the streets like the back of his hand. But over there, he won’t even be able to get around. What do they want with him?!”
Mikhail’s family filed a complaint with the military prosecutor’s office claiming that he had been coerced into signing a contract.
“They said they had thirty days to respond. But how can we wait when a blind man has been whisked off to a war zone? He’s in danger there every single minute!” exclaims Ivan indignantly.
Human rights defenders note that after someone signs a contract volunteering for the army, it is extremely difficult to get the agreement annulled, even if he alleges that he was coerced into signing it.
“Coercion is illegal in theory, but if the contract has already been signed, annulling it at one’s own request is nearly impossible. In this case, one also has to file a written request with the military commissar to withdraw from the contract,” says Yaroslav Mukhin (whose name has been changed for his own safety), a lawyer specializing in cases involving conscientious objectors. “But experience shows that even medical certifications of disability are no longer of any help. The case may well go to court, but by the time the proceedings are over, a conscript in such poor health will already have been killed [in combat].”
Raids on men in Russia have been taking place amid growing challenges with recruiting volunteers. The Financial Timesreports that the Kremlin and the Defense Ministry tasked the regions with recruiting 409,000 men in 2026, and it is up to local officials to fulfill the recruitment quotas. Meanwhile, the costs of recruiting itself have increased. Important Storiescalculated that in the first quarter of 2026 alone the regions paid recruiters 3.2 billion rubles [approx. 33 million euros], which is more than twice the monthly average a year earlier.
In early August, the Wall Street Journalreported on complaints of men being detained and forced to volunteer for the army in Penza, Ulyanovsk, Rostov, Amur, and Yaroslavl regions, as well as Udmurtia, Tatarstan, Voronezh, and Arkhangelsk. According to the newspaper, American officials believe that the Kremlin is considering a larger-scale option: a new round of mobilizations. If such a decision is made, the newspaper’s sources expect it to be implemented after national parliamentary elections on 18–20 September. Russian authorities deny plans for another mobilization.
Ukraine has been carrying out intensive attacks on Russia’s export infrastructure along the Black Sea coast and on oil refineries across the country. Optimistic observers predict significant challenges for the Russian economy and, as a result, a depletion of the resources it needs to wage war. In light of this, common sense dictates that responsible politicians should return to the negotiating table.
The outlook is bleak because the Russian regime is devoid of responsible politicians who would be swayed by common sense. The political elite inhabit another reality—a reality in which they are doing a crackerjack job with the economy, inflation remains at tolerable levels, there are no hiccoughs with petrol (the Kremlin’s limousines don’t fill up at ordinary petrol stations plagued by kilometers-long queues, after all), the populace unanimously supports the war, and the deaths of hundreds of thousands of men at the front are mere collateral damage, not a serious demographic blow to the country. The regime are doing a great job with everything, and there is nothing to worry about. And the regime has the police, the FSB, the Investigative Committee, the prosecutor’s office, the Russian National Guard, obedient judges, and the penitentiary system to deal with the malcontents.
That is why the political crackdown will ratchet up in synch with the worsening of the military or economic situation and the rise of popular discontent. Russian history is chockablock with examples of when growing discontent, fueled by grassroots hardships, was nipped in the bud by the most brutal terror. Examples include the Russian Civil War and the Holodomor. The Russian authorities have never spared their fellow citizens, whether to further the war effort or to protect their own privilege.
Certain dreamers among the opposition bank all their hopes on a Ukrainian victory: in their reckoning, it would open a window of possibility to rebuilding politics in Russia. This is actually possible: it has happened in Russian history that military defeats have kickstarted democratic reforms. But it happened under weak regimes, despotic regimes which were frittering away their potential. Does anyone imagine that the current dictatorship is on its last legs and willing to make concessions to society?
Pinning hopes on the force of Ukrainian arms is not only naive but also dubious morally speaking. It is naive because by and large Ukraine could not care less about Russian domestic politics. No one will roar into Moscow on Abrams tanks and bestow either liberty or an occupation government on Russians. This is unrealistic, especially considering that Russia’s irresponsible politicians have their hands on nuclear weapons (a big thanks to Soviet physicists). Hypothetically, military defeat could embolden the society to protest, but in this case, as I noted earlier, the Kremlin has a wide range of tools for cracking down on dissent, and it has a wealth of experience in using them.
The hope that Ukraine will emerge victorious from the war is quite popular among Russian political exiles. This is partly because there is nothing else they can do to liberate Russia. Well, almost nothing. Donating to the Ukrainian Armed Forces is easy, and it washes away all their sins as exiles. It’s like going to church, lighting a candle, making a small offering, and assuming you’ve earned your place in heaven. As gestalt therapy it will do the trick, but it is quite dubious politically. It is disgraceful to reap the rewards of others’ hard work. Counting on a Ukrainian victory as a means of liberating Russia from dictatorship is not a particularly honorable strategy for the opposition. Victory must be forged with one’s own hands, not those of others.
In the last century, the White émigré National Alliance of Russian Solidarists (NTS) had a fine slogan: “No one will do Russia’s business for us.” Bitter experience gave birth to this slogan: the White movement’s betrayal by the Entente, the West’s economic aid in industrializing USSR, the surrender of anti-Stalinist military units at the end of the World War Two, and the Yalta Conference, which left the Eastern Europe at Stalin’s mercy. No one cared in the slightest about our misfortunes. At best, they voiced extreme concern.
That’s how it happened in the past, and it’s still the case today. Had Russia not invaded Ukraine, the West would have gone on buttering up the Russian dictatorship regardless of who sat at the very top of the Kremlin’s power vertical. If the war were to end, Western politicians would gradually go back to their old ways of pursuing mutually beneficial trade and joint ventures, exchanging sweet nothings, and turning a blind eye to what is going on inside Russia. It’s not our business, and they should take care of it themselves, the West shall always decide. This is not a particular attitude toward Russia but realpolitik. Wasn’t that the case at the outset of this year, when the West simply stood by as tens of thousands of demonstrators were gunned down in Iran? Does the communist reign of terror in China really have any impact on the West’s economic interests? There are many such example
We must concede that liberating Russia is Russia’s business. There is no use in our relying either on the empathy of foreigners or on their arms. While Ukraine’s current military successes cannot fail to gladden all opponents of the war, of course, there is no point in our placing unwarranted, exaggerated hopes on them when it comes to Russia’s long-term future. It is highly unlikely that these military successes will bring about a sea change in the Kremlin’s political priorities and thus open the floodgates to democracy.
The cinematography department of the All-Russian State Institute of Cinematography (VGIK) posted an ad on its VKontakte page about “a special group” being recruited for director [and cinematographer] Mikhail Agranovich’s class. Prospective students are offered free tuition starting in the 2027 academic year, provided they sign a one-year contract with the [Russian] Defense Ministry for service in UAV (drone) units.
The students are also promised free dormitory accommodation, combat veteran status (along with associated benefits), and “expanded technical and financial resources for student film projects.” Contract service will be equated to conscription service, the ad states.
“If you dream of studying at the world’s first film school, the renowned VGIK, now’s your chance. Places in the group are limited,” the ad reads.
Previously, the Higher School of Economics announced free tuition for students serving in unmanned systems units and the BARS (“Leopard”) reservist detachments in Moscow.
Russian universities and colleges have launched a widespread pressure and propaganda campaign aimed at steering students toward the war in Ukraine. Valery Falkov, minister of science and higher education, demanded that two percent of students be sent to the army. Students are promised “guaranteed discharge” upon the expiration of their contracts.
However, Artyom Klyga, head of the legal department at the Movement of Conscientious Objectors (DSO), found that this was a ruse. In reality, students recruited for military service are deployed wherever the command decides and discharged only when the command deems appropriate.
A screenshot of an in-house article on HSE’s website touting its rankings.
Higher School of Economics confirms it is offering students a standard military contract instead of regular one-year conscription, says human rights activist
Vladimir Krotov, head of the department at the Higher School of Economics (HSE) responsible for student military registration, stated in response to an inquiry that those who voluntarily enlisted in the army would be subject to the Defense Ministry’s standard terms. This was reported by Artyom Klyga, a lawyer with the Movement of Conscientious Objectors (DSO).
Earlier, the publication T-Invariant released a letter sent to university staff. The document stated that students facing expulsion were being offered an alternative: a one-year contract with the Defense Ministry. The terms cited included guaranteed discharge after one year and service in unmanned systems units. However, Krotov’s response indicates that those who agreed to enlist would be deployed wherever the command decided and discharged whenever the command deemed appropriate. Only the provision regarding financial compensation is accurate, Klyga notes.
The HSE regularly appears on lists of Russia’s most prestigious universities. The letter to staff noted that they are now required to submit weekly reports on the number of military service notifications sent to students.
Laura Loomer (left) is an American far-right conspiracist and influencer from Arizona who has suddenly (supposedly) seen the light on Ukraine after actually visiting the country that has endured an unprovoked Russian invasion for the last four and a half years. Lily Lynch (right) is a leftyish American foreign affairs writer from California who, apparently, does not need to see a place with her own eyes to give her readers the all-knowing lowdown on what’s happening there. Whose account of the Ukraine-Russia war rings truer to you?
Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s speech at NATO’s Defence Industry Forum in Ankara earlier this month was a hymn to drone warfare. Drones, the Ukrainian president proclaimed, had heralded ‘revolutionary changes in the very nature of war’ – as significant as the machine gun in the First World War, or as the modern tank in the Second. ‘Disruptive’ drone tech had allowed Ukraine to increase dramatically the number of Russian casualties, intercept Russia’s Shahed UAVs and hit targets as far away as Siberia. Recent attacks had succeeded in blackening the skies over Moscow and striking oil refineries 2,700 km away in Omsk. The country had transformed itself into a ‘drone superpower’, in the words of the Atlantic Council. Before 2022, there were just seven domestic drone manufacturers – today, there are over 500. And now, as restrictions on drone exports are being lifted, Ukraine will soon be selling them to the world.
The man most responsible for putting drones at the centre of Ukraine’s war effort has been the telegenic 35-year-old, now former Defence Minister, Mykhailo Fedorov. This much-hyped tech wunderkind has acquired a following among both patriotic liberals at home and Atlanticists in the West. He has helped promote Ukraine as a kind of ‘start-up nation’ – a high-tech defence industrial powerhouse forged in war. When barely in his thirties, he was appointed Minister of Digital Transformation, where he was responsible for the ‘state in a smartphone’ initiative – which moved government services onto a USAID-funded app called Diiya. Though beloved by the liberal NGO set, Palantir-backed Fedorov has also learned to speak MAGA’s language; in January, he announced his ministry’s objective to kill 50,000 Russians per month, explaining it would ‘make the cost of war for Russia one it cannot sustain, thereby forcing peace through strength’.
In the weeks leading up to the NATO summit, Western media reports alleged that Ukraine had turned the tide in its favour. Russia was in trouble. The narrative was reminiscent of the ‘spring counteroffensive’ of 2023, much hyped in Western media – a supposedly transformational Ukrainian battlefield push that never quite materialized and cost tens of thousands of lives. In Ankara, the latest reversal of fortune was attributed to Ukraine’s drone tech capabilities, its thriving defence industry and its innovative young leadership, who apparently ran the country less like a post-Soviet state and more like a Silicon Valley start-up.
Just one week later, however, this optimistic story began to fall apart. Zelenskyy abruptly dismissed Fedorov, a move that left many feeling furious and betrayed. Fedorov’s loyalists responded by excoriating Zelenskyy on social media and assembling in Kiev, Lviv and Odessa, holding signs bearing messages like ‘Hands off Fedorov’ and ‘Stop Sabotaging Victory’. Ukraine’s supporters in the West did not hide their opposition to the decision either. ‘Firing Fedorov, one of the smartest, most competent and innovative ministers in all of Europe, is one of the dumbest things Zelenskyy has done’, Estonia’s former president Toomas Hendrik Ilves wrote on X. A consensus formed among the Atlanticist commentariat: Zelenskyy had sided with his sclerotic ‘Soviet’ generals – particularly Russian-born commander-in-chief Oleksandr Syrskyi – against an energetic young reformer. After several days of virulent backlash, Zelenskyy responded by dismissing Syrskyi too.
The decision to remove Fedorov forced a simmering Ukrainian political crisis into the public eye. In Ankara, NATO officials were intent on depicting Russia – and only Russia – as the country in dire political and economic straits. At one briefing, I listened to a senior NATO official speak of possible tensions within the Russian political elite. These days, he said, they look outside their windows and see oil refineries in flames from Ukrainian drone attacks. This, he asserted, must be having a psychological effect, and resentment towards Putin was likely mounting. A fracture could be coming any day now. The Russian economy, meanwhile, was ‘in the worst state it’s been in for decades’. He recited a litany of grim statistics: the federal deficit was now 2.3 times what it was during the same period last year, the economy was now 70 per cent security-related expenditures, which came at the expense of the regular economy and would be ‘very hard to reverse’. And despite rising oil prices due to the war on Iran, Russia would still have to cut non-military spending by 10 per cent this year.
Russia was also reportedly performing poorly on the battlefield and any progress it was making came at an enormous cost. According to the NATO official’s estimates, there had been between 1.3 and 1.5 million Russian casualties in the war, and between 30,000 and 35,000 Russians were now being killed each month. The military was now ‘increasingly relying on convicts, indebted citizens and foreigners’ to fill its ranks. Russia’s territorial gains had also been ‘far less steady’ in recent months: its forces were now purportedly advancing at just 3.79 sq km per day, down from a reported 16 sq km last year. Another morbid statistic touted at the summit was the alleged average life expectancy of a Russian soldier: thanks to Ukraine’s drones, I was told, the average Russian recruit only lived between 20 and 30 minutes at the front.
Listening to all this, I thought about what I’d heard [sic] about life in Russia. I was certainly aware of the mounting wartime pain. I knew there were now petrol shortages in parts of the country, though these are partly seasonal, and that this has meant long waits outside stations. Whereas the war had previously been experienced by most Russians as a distant conflict – only seen on social media or television – the drone attacks on Russian oil refineries had brought the war home. But the idea that this would inevitably provoke a major anti-government backlash didn’t quite follow. Videos have even surfaced on Russian social media showing people drinking and dancing as they waited in long queues for petrol. As one commentator put it, ‘coronavirus divided us, but petrol shortages brought us together’. The domestic problems were all very real and getting worse, but Russians appeared to be weathering them, at least for now. Prophesies of the Russian economy’s imminent collapse had been issued for years, but had all come to nothing.
Polls from inside Russia also hint at a more stable situation than that depicted at the NATO summit. Russia experts always caution readers to be sceptical of polls from inside the country, but even so, the results suggest that at least some of the graver prognostications might be exaggerated. According to a survey by the independent Levada Center, Putin’s popularity is indeed in decline, but as of May, as many as 79 per cent of Russians polled still said they approved of his performance. Only 15 per cent said they disapproved. In the same survey, 74 per cent of Russians said they supported their country’s actions in Ukraine. (Still, some 60 per cent of Russians reported that they favoured peace negotiations to end the war, and only 30 per cent said they wanted to continue fighting it.) Even adjusting for a degree of wartime self-censorship, these numbers do not exactly hint at a coming cataclysm.
But the question that most nagged at me throughout the summit was: what about Ukraine? The assessment of Russia’s position in the war included a host of criteria: a survey of the situation on the homefront, elite political fractures, the economy, the demography of its soldiers. Yet Ukraine’s position was portrayed according to a single hopeful indicator, its success in drone warfare.
According to a recent Gallup poll (one that was largely buried in the Western press), Ukrainians are even less enthusiastic about fighting this war than Russians are. Less than one in four adults (24 per cent) say Ukraine should keep fighting until it wins the war, while 66 per cent say Ukraine should seek to negotiate an end to the war as soon as possible. And while NATO officials were eager to tout staggering casualty figures for Russia in Ankara, there was naturally far less said about Ukraine’s dead – unless they could be presented in terms of a favourable ‘kill ratio’ with Russia. According to the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies (which receives funding from the US government, Lockheed Martin and NATO among others) the Ukrainian military has suffered between 125,000 and 150,000 fatalities. However, some believe the actual number is higher.
As NATO officials look for cracks in the Kremlin matrix, there are plenty to worry about in Ukraine. In addition to the rupture between Fedorov and the military brass, a ‘spectacular’ corruption scandal has implicated members of Zelenskyy’s inner circle, part of which involves corruption in drone procurement. Meanwhile, the ‘stable stagnation’ of the Ukrainian economy also rests on relatively fragile foundations – continued support from Western partners. Often missing from Western wartime reporting is the brutal economic reality of everyday life in Ukraine: the number of Ukrainians living below subsistence levels has increased dramatically in wartime; while Russians have been inconvenienced in this conflict, most haven’t faced the same material devastation.
The Ukrainian armed forces may be an even worse state than their Russian adversaries. A transition to a corps-based command structure last year may have aligned Ukraine with NATO standards, but no amount of restructuring can change the fundamentals. The average age of a Ukrainian soldier is now 45. Mobilization remains a persistent problem. One of the reasons cited for Fedorov’s dismissal was his failure to fix this (ever the tech solutionist, Fedorov had reportedly pushed for a ‘digitalization’ of mobilization). The brutal practice of ‘busification’ – whereby military age men are snatched off the street – continues to inspire loathing. Reports regularly surface of forcibly conscripted men being beaten or killed. Unsurprisingly, Ukraine is suffering a desertion crisis. Though the exact figures were classified last year, in January, Fedorov said that 200,000 Ukrainian soldiers had gone AWOL.
The Russian armed forces may be filled with convicts and debtors, but they still haven’t had to resort to conscription[sic], while the Ukrainian side is partially composed of men who are middle-aged and don’t want to fight. Ukraine also increasingly relies on foreign fighters; while Russia has recruited hapless Africans to serve as cannon fodder, Ukraine now employs thousands of recruits from Colombia, Brazil and various European countries, designated as ‘volunteers’ to get around anti-mercenary laws. And there remains the fundamental problem of massive asymmetry: Russia still has Ukraine outmanned. Ukraine has attempted to make up for this difference with drones, but this has only succeeded in slowing the pace of Russian advances.
The image of a Ukraine filled with patriotic liberals eager to fight a high-tech war until total Russian collapse is a fiction. In reality, the majority of both Russians and Ukrainians want negotiations to end the war now. Only a minority want to continue fighting until their side’s most maximalist aims are met. Absent the propaganda of a youth-driven drone tech revolution in war, Ukraine looks in a remarkably similar situation to Russia: two countries hurtling toward demographic oblivion, in a conflict directed by a profiteering political elite and fought in part by the unwilling, the coerced, the foreign and the old. At the NATO summit, however, the alliance continued to promote its PR-manufactured image of Ukraine, through selective statistics and polite obfuscation.
Laura Loomer became infamous for spreading conspiracy theories online. Now, as she travels across Ukraine to see the damage inflicted by Russia in its years-long war, she wants to admit that she fell for some falsehoods of her own.
A close ally of President Donald Trump, Loomer has completely reversed her longtime criticism of Ukraine and is urging fellow conservatives to be wary of Moscow’s propaganda, which she blames for duping large swaths of the American right.
“You don’t need to listen to a podcaster and let them influence your opinion about a country. You can look at those facts yourself,” she told the Associated Press in Kyiv shortly after returning from a trip close to the front line in Ukraine’s east. The interview was supposed to take place in Loomer’s hotel, but it had to be moved to the building’s underground bomb shelter as the city faced another ballistic missile attack.
Loomer has remained influential with Trump despite not having an official role, and she said they spoke over the phone after she sat down with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. She also said that she expects to meet with Trump after returning from her trip.
Loomer’s turnaround on Ukraine has been welcomed by the country’s leaders, whose relationships with Trump have been strained at times. But it has also stirred confusion, surprise and suspicion in the United States. She continues to insist that Ukraine is not paying for her travels.
As Trump and Zelenskyy prepare to meet on Tuesday in Washington, Loomer said it’s clear that her trip has already made a difference, refocusing attention on the war as Congress debates new sanctions intended to punish Russia.
“It’s looking good for Ukraine, right?” she said. “Going into this meeting next week at the Oval Office is looking pretty good.”
Loomer says she was ‘bamboozled’ to oppose Ukraine
Loomer had spent years minimizing the war and amplifying Russian propaganda until she made a dramatic reversal this week.
“I’ve come to realize I was bamboozled by Russian propaganda and I came to believe a lot of untrue things about Ukraine. I used to think that this was a country full of Nazis,” Loomer told Zelenskyy as she interviewed him for her show on Rumble, an online video platform.
Loomer blamed her indoctrination on getting banned by American social media platforms, leading her to try Telegram, where Russian media is widely shared.
“The Russians,” she added, “are very good at capitalizing on people’s rage. And I was very angry,” she said, recounting her feelings about the 2020 election, which she falsely maintains was stolen from Trump despite all evidence to the contrary.
She said her change in perspective had been gradual as she started to see podcasters like Tucker Carlson “turn on President Trump” while having their rhetoric amplified by Russian sources.
Loomer, who casts herself as an independent journalist, told the AP she believed her reversal was already changing minds within Trump’s “Make America Great Again” movement.
“Oh, 100%,” she said. “I’ve received messages all day from different people and media and politics and people just who follow me online who said, ’Wow, I didn’t realize how much we’ve been lied to.’ ‘Wow you really opened my eyes.’”
Loomer was welcomed with open arms
Ukrainian officials seemed to recognize the opportunity of winning over an ardent Trump ally with a large online following. In addition to her interview with Zelenskyy, Loomer had audiences with top Ukrainian officials and the country’s chief rabbi.
“It takes courage to come to Ukraine and not be deterred by Russian propaganda or air raid sirens,” Zelenskyy’s office wrote on social media.
“Laura is very powerful and she’s a very authoritative in the U.S., so I hope that everything she has seen by her own eyes will help her to spread the truth when she is back at the U.S.,” Tetyana Berezhna, the deputy prime minister and Ukrainian minister of culture told the AP. “I do really hope and I believe that her visit will have a huge impact on relations with the U.S. administration.”
While some have tried to downplay Loomer’s influence with the president, he has often followed her advice. She occasionally traveled with him during the 2024 campaign, and last year he purged his National Security Council staff after she raised concerns about their loyalty in an Oval Office meeting.
Trump appears to be tracking Loomer’s trip, sharing video of her conversation with Zelenskyy on social media.
“Very good!!!” he wrote on Thursday evening.
The conspiracist denounces conspiracy theories
Loomer has a long history of spreading conspiracy theories. She once shared a video that called 9/11 an “inside job” and amplified a lie about Haitian immigrants eating dogs and cats in Ohio, which Trump went on to repeat during a presidential debate with Kamala Harris.
Although Loomer may have changed her mind about Russia’s invasion, her bigoted views have not budged.
But in the interview, she bemoaned how influential podcasters can spread misinformation.
“They have been able to warp people’s minds to the point where people aren’t even capable of analyzing a subject with common sense anymore because they want to depend on these personalities to give them the opinion that they think they should have,” she said, calling the situation “a major national security threat.”
She said she thinks that “information war” has “the potential to be more destructive than any kinetic war that our country may ever face” and called on the Trump administration to take the threat of Russian propaganda, foreign interference and influence operations more seriously.
“I think that some of our leaders are being influenced by propaganda,” she said.
The White House has routinely downplayed the role of Moscow’s influence, especially because Trump has long chaffed at investigations showing that Russia worked to boost his 2016 candidacy.
Loomer has said repeatedly that Ukraine did not finance her trip and insisted she had traveled in her own capacity.
“I can guarantee you I wasn’t paid by anybody. I certainly wasn’t paid by the government of Ukraine to come here,” she said.
“If it’s fake, why did I risk my life? I’m in a bomb shelter right now. I barely slept this week,” she said.
Tokayev reads Putin the riot act in Omsk, 25 July 2026. Source: Vesti (Telegram)
Kazakhstani President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev proposed “freezing” the war in Ukraine during talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Saturday, 25 July 2026, in Omsk. TASS published an excerpt featuring Tokayev’s statement and Putin’s reaction.
Tokayev made the remarks during a meeting with Putin at the Forum on Interregional Cooperation between the two countries, which took place 24–25 July. The President of Kazakhstan stated that at present, “no one knows how to resolve the situation, because each side has its own position.” At the same time, he suggested that “perhaps this conflict should already be frozen and we should return to the Istanbul Formula 2.0, since significant results were achieved there.”
According to Tokayev, in connection with the war in Ukraine, he has been “receiving many signals” from Europe and the U.S., about which he had previously informed Putin. And yet, the President of Kazakhstan added that his country refuses to act as a mediator in achieving peace between Russia and Ukraine.
Tokayev: The nature of this conflict is not entirely clear to many people
Tokayev emphasized that the war in Ukraine is an “interstate conflict” and “not some sort of civil war.”
“We have always treated the Ukrainian people, their culture, and their language with respect, and we believe that the nature of this conflict is not entirely clear to many, including us,” the Kazakhstani president noted. He added that “all of this must be stopped,” since the war in Ukraine “plays into the hands” of the opponents of both Moscow and Kyiv.
At the same time, Tokayev noted that Putin had shown “the utmost diplomatic flexibility” during his meeting with U.S. President Donald Trump in Anchorage in August 2025.
Briefly commenting on the Kazakhstani president’s remarks about the war, Putin for his part promised him that he would “definitely provide detailed information” within the day about what was happening on the “Ukrainian front.”
Vladimir Putin ventured out in public for the first time in months and walked smack dab into an ambush during a televised meeting that went off the rails.
Fresh off a tightly controlled publicity stunt in Irkutsk on Friday—where the Russian leader, flanked by bodyguards, made a show of inspecting aircraft—Putin sat down with Kazakhstan’s president in the Russian city of Omsk on Saturday.
The 73-year-old Russian president could barely conceal his nervous grimace as Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev used the meeting, which was supposed to be about Russia-Kazakh cooperation, to throw Putin under the bus.
“I will not hide that I am receiving many signals—which I have already informed you about by phone—from Europe and the United States regarding the current state of the conflict between Ukraine and Russia,” Tokayev told Putin as a slew of Kremlin-controlled TV outlets filmed the confrontation.
He went on to call BS on the Kremlin’s narrative of the war, saying, “The nature of this conflict is not entirely clear” and seems utterly pointless. Putin, meanwhile, appeared to tense up and stared down at his lap as Tokayev spoke, seemingly caught off guard.
“This all needs to stop,” Tokayev said, urging Putin to “freeze” the war and return to negotiations. He twisted the knife by adding that despite “proposals and appeals,” Kazakhstan “categorically refuses” to act as a mediator in helping to end the war, since “Russia is a great country” and can “manage on its own.”
At the end of Tokayev’s three-minute speech, Putin nervously thanked the Kazakh president and promised to give him a “detailed briefing” on the Ukraine war, before the broadcast abruptly ended.
The tense exchange came a day after Putin flew to Irkutsk, Siberia, for an unannounced visit to the Irkutsk Aviation Plant, his first trip to one of Russia’s regions for domestic issues in more than eight months. He has drastically reduced travel to Russia’s regions and avoided public appearances in recent months, purportedly out of fear of being assassinated. Instead, amid relentless Ukrainian drone strikes and growing public outrage over economic woes, Putin has largely retreated into fortified underground bunkers, where he is said to have at times remained for weeks.
Footage shared by the Kremlin showed him flanked by bodyguards as he inspected the Yak-130M combat jet trainer and an MC-21 passenger jet, which has been plagued by repeated production delays.
The plant had apparently been cleared out for his visit, and Irkutsk locals fumed on social media about the entire city coming to a standstill to make way for what was widely seen as a PR stunt.
“Burn in hell,” one resident commented in response to Putin’s visit on a local website, according to the independent outlet People of Baikal.
“Will we need to bow when the tsar passes through?” another quipped.
“How scared he is of his own people,” a third person noted, only to be reminded, “Well, every other person is ready to kill him.”
Enemy drones attacked Wildberries warehouses in Leningrad Region in the early hours of 24 July, reported Alexander Drozdenko, head of Russia’s 47th region.
Governor Alexander Beglov reported that, in Petersburg, “civilian infrastructure on Moscow Highway was targeted.”
The Russian Defense Ministry claimed it had downed 571 Ukrainian Armed Forces drones over Russia’s regions overnight.
Delovoi Peterburg reports below what we know about the latest series of attacks on warehouses in the Petersburg metro area.
Repelling the drone attack in Leningrad Region: Fire in Novosaratovka
Three people were injured and hospitalized in stable condition, Drozdenko said.
“A drone strike caused a fire at Wildberries warehouses in the village of Novosaratovka* in the Vsevolozhsk District,” the governor explained.
In addition, a warehouse belonging to the Severnaya poultry farm in the village of Sinyavino, Kirovsk District, Leningrad Region, sustained damage. No one was injured. Debris from the drone fell onto the grounds of the old hospital, according to Andrei Voropayev, head of the Sverdlov Settlement.
“They’re not letting anyone in there, including us. We don’t know what was there. Just warehouses and more warehouses. Definitely no chemicals. When it was shot down over the Neva, one drone fell on the old hospital in the village. There are only bare walls there, no people, and the firefighters have left,” Voropaev told 47news.
A drone alert was issued in Region 47 at 01:43 Moscow Time on 24 July 2. Drozdenko reported that fifty drones had been shot down over the region. The regional governor lifted the drone threat alert at 06:17 Moscow Time.
“The drone threat in the Leningrad Region has been lifted. Fifty-nine enemy UAVs have been shot down. I thank the anti-aircraft forces for their effective performance,” said Drozdenko.
The Investigative Committee reported that a criminal case had been opened regarding a terrorist act (per Article 205 of the Russian Federal Criminal Code) in connection with “an attack by Ukrainian armed groups on civilian targets in the Leningrad Region.” No further details of the attack were provided in the statement.
Attack on Petersburg: Shushary and Utkina Zavod
The company’s warehouses in Petersburg were also targeted. According to the RWB (Wildberries | Russ) press office, operations at two logistics complexes have been temporarily suspended.
“Operations at the company’s logistics complexes in Shushary and Utkina Zavod (both in Petersburg) have been temporarily suspended. Updates on the resumption of operations will follow,” the press office stated.
The company clarified that there had been no casualties at Wildberries facilities in Petersburg and the Leningrad Region.
Some of the warehouse space and merchandise was salvaged, and a swift evacuation was carried out at the warehouses, such that there were no casualties, Tatyana Kim later reported.
“Dear partners, up-to-date information on the situation is being published on the seller’s website. All our efforts are now focused on redistributing goods across warehouses to ensure more efficient inventory turnover and the economic stability of our partners,” the Wildberries founder wrote on her social media channel.
Eyewitnesses reported that Pyaterochka’s warehouses in Utkina Zavod may also have been hit, but X5 (the discount grocery store chain’s operator) denied this.
“The reports are false. The facility was not damaged and will continue to operate as usual,” X5 told DP.
Governor Beglov reported that efforts are underway to address the aftermath of the attack on a civilian infrastructure facility on Moscow Highway.
“The emergency response headquarters, which I personally head, has been coordinating the work of the municipal services and interagency cooperation,” the governor wrote on Max.
Drivers and eyewitnesses have reported that traffic on Moscow Highway has come to a standstill. The City Transportation Committee announced that, due to the impassability of Moscow Highway, bus lines 179, 192, 196, 197, and 388 have been temporarily rerouted.
“Bus routes Nos. 179, 192, 196, 197, and 388 are running via Danube Boulevard and Sofia Street, then continuing along their regular routes (in both directions). We recommend that residents of Slavyanka take suburban commuter trains. Trains are running every ten minutes,” the transportation committee announced.
Eyewitnesses report major traffic jams in the south and southeast of the city, on the Ring Road and on Sofia Street.
“A massive traffic jam has formed on Sofia Street heading toward the city: it starts past the intersection with Ust-Izhorsk Highway. There is also a major traffic jam on the inner ring road between Murmansk Highway and Moscow Highway; it is caused by the closure of the city-bound exit to Moscow Highway due to roadwork,” reported the city’s Megapolis channel on Telegram.
A live map of the traffic jams in question, in Petersburg’s far south. Image courtesty of Delovoi Peterburg
Residents of a building on Aleksa Dundić Street in the Frunze District were evacuated on the afternoon of 24 July, according to 78.ru. Residents of stairwells 8 through 19 were asked to leave their flats and go outside.
Pulkovo Airport imposed flight restrictions starting at 1:46 a.m. and resumed flight operations at 6:00 a.m. Moscow Time after the drone threat was lifted.
As of that time, over fifty flights had been delayed by two hours or more, and fourteen were waiting at alternate airports. By 8:20 a.m., Pulkovo had handled approximately thirty flights, both arriving and departing. Two flights arrived in Petersburg from alternate airports, according to the VVSS (Northern Capital’s Air Gateway) press service.
“All services are working to fulfill the daily flight plan per the revised schedule,” airport officials said.
UPDATE: As of 9:15 a.m., approximately sixty flights had been dispatched to their destination airports, and seven aircraft had arrived in Petersburg from alternate airports.
During the drone threat, restrictions on mobile communication were in effect in the metropolitan area, with the peak number of complaints occurring overnight.
A chart showing numbers of complaints about loss of mobile phone coverage in the Petersburg area during the 24 July 2026 drone attack. Image courtesy of Delovoi Peterburg
The damage from the attacks on Wildberries warehouses in the Leningrad Region and Petersburg could reach 76 billion rubles [approx. 861 million euros], according to preliminary estimates done for DP by Sergei Semko, lead analyst at Data Insight, conducted preliminary calculations for DP.
Attacks on Warehouses: A Timeline
In recent days, Wildberries warehouses have been targeted by enemy drones. Just yesterday, two logistics complexes sustained damage in Voronezh.
The first attacks on Wildberries warehouses in Russia took place on 18 July. The strikes targeted the company’s facilities in the Tambov and Moscow regions. At least eight people were killed, and more than sixty civilians were injured. Several of the injured were in critical condition.
On the night of 21–22 July, drones attacked large Wildberries warehouses in Krasnodar and Nevinnomyssk, Stavropol Territory. A local state of emergency was declared in Nevinnomyssk. The head of the Krasnodar Territory reported one fatality resulting from an attack on the oil depot in Armavir and provided an update on the condition of those injured at the warehouses in Krasnodar. The Investigative Committee classified the attacks as acts of terrorism. A criminal case has been opened under Article 205 of the Russian Federal Criminal Code.
DP has reported that the drone strikes on Wildberries warehouses have created problems not only for that particular and the sellers collaborating with it. In fact, a new reality has dawned for the entire Russian e-commerce and logistics market. Everyone will have to restructure their internal procedures and come up with new solutions.
* Here are some snapshots I took of Novosaratovka during a Sunday Cafe expedition there in December 2015:
Russian businesses have been feeling the effects of the war in Ukraine through tax increases, rising costs caused by fuel shortages, and supply chains disrupted by sanctions. Now, there is another risk to contend with: Ukrainian drone strikes on their facilities.
As Ukraine wages a campaign to bring the conflict home to ordinary Russians, it has opened a new front aimed at the online marketplace Wildberries, a pillar of the country’s retail economy and a potent symbol of modern life in Russia.
In recent days, Ukraine has hit five warehouses belonging to Wildberries, a Russian analogue to Amazon, as well as storage sites for other large retailers. Eight people were killed in attacks on Saturday and one person on Wednesday, the Russian authorities said. The strikes on Saturday alone were reported to have wiped out between 6 and 9 percent of the storage capacity of Wildberries.
Ukraine’s long-range strikes on Russian economic targets, including a months-long campaign of attacks on oil processing facilities, are intended to pressure President Vladimir V. Putin to end the war, in part by hampering his ability to finance it. The oil strikes have caused fuel shortages that have led to lines at gas stations, and they could affect the coming harvest season.
Mr. Putin has signaled no intention of backing away from his objectives in the conflict, and the economy, while weakened by the war, is not on the verge of collapse. Still, analysts said that if the attacks on Russia’s business infrastructure continued, the ripple effects could pose severe economic challenges on top of a range of other war-related strains, reducing tax collections and adding to inflation.
Ukraine has targeted Wildberries warehouses in five regions across Russia, including a reported strike early Thursday in the Voronezh region, south of Moscow. A fire at a warehouse in Elektrostal, a city in the Moscow region, took three days to extinguish.
The day after the initial strikes, Russia unleashed the largest missile attack on Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital, since the war started in 2022, firing at least 35 ballistic and hypersonic cruise missiles.
Ukraine has said that its strikes are in retaliation for Russian attacks on its postal delivery hubs and other civilian infrastructure, a yearslong campaign by Moscow that has been far more devastating than Kyiv’s strikes against Russia. A Russian attack last week on a postal terminal in the northeastern city of Kharkiv left three people dead and 20 injured.
President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine has also said that Wildberries facilities are a legitimate target because the company sells goods to the Russian military. The Kremlin spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov, has denied the accusation.
Wildberries has a policy of not selling military-grade weapons, but it does sell goods used by soldiers, like commercial drones that can be jury-rigged with explosives, as well as fiber-optic cables, tactical clothing and other so-called dual-use items.
The Wildberries attacks have been calamitous for small Russian entrepreneurs who sell goods through the site, the country’s largest online marketplace.
One of them, Timur, woke up on Saturday morning to news that he had lost clothing and shoes worth about $25,000 as a result of the attacks on the Wildberries warehouses in Elektrostal and in Kotovsk, in the Tambov region, southeast of Moscow.
Timur, who was nervous about speaking with foreign journalists when reached by telephone and asked that his last name be withheld to avoid reprisals, said that his main concern was the uncertainty that he and other Russian entrepreneurs now faced.
He said on Tuesday that it was unclear what would happen next “because most likely they are not the only warehouses that will be attacked.”
Hours later, two more Wildberries warehouses that contained his apparel, in the southern Stavropol and Krasnodar regions, were hit by drones. His losses doubled.
Timur said he had been building his business for five years, “and it can just collapse in a week,” he said, a precarity that Ukrainians have been living with for nearly four and a half years.
He warned of the effects on the Russian economy, saying that continued strikes could cause the Wildberries business model to collapse, raising prices and bringing about shortages.
Alexander Kolyandr, director for Europe at the Eurasia Group, a consulting firm, echoed that view.
“The company itself and all the sellers will likely pay less in taxes than last year, and given the size, it might be pretty substantial, especially at a time when the Russian budget is experiencing a widening deficit,” Mr. Kolyandr said.
Additionally, the cost of protecting, rebuilding and insuring the warehouses will be passed on to consumers, he said, contributing to already high levels of inflation.
The attacks on Saturday in the Moscow and Tambov regions destroyed goods worth almost as much as Wildberries’ entire profit last year, according to expert estimates reported by Kommersant, a Russian newspaper, and by Forbes Russia.
The company’s chief executive, Tatyana Kim, promised financial compensation of about $25,000 to families of the workers who were killed and half of that amount to the injured.
At the beginning of the month, Wildberries and another large online marketplace, Ozon, changed their terms and conditions to stipulate that the companies had no legal obligation to compensate for losses caused by drone attacks.
On Wednesday, however, Ms. Kim announced payouts to small-scale sellers who were “most vulnerable.” She did not disclose the amounts.
Many sellers on Wildberries financed their products with loans, including Timur, who told of interest rates as high as 35 percent. Some vendors risk having their bank accounts frozen as soon as next week if they are unable to make tax payments due in the coming days, according to the business newspaper Vedomosti.
A civilian facility like a warehouse can become a lawful military target if it is being used, or is being prepared to be used, for military purposes, said Michael Schmitt, who teaches international law at the University of Reading in England and is a former legal adviser to the U.S. military.
Combatants, he said, must take into account exactly what kind of materials are inside, have a high degree of certainty about the site’s future military use and make efforts to mitigate harm to civilians.
Maria Snegovaya, a researcher at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said that Russia’s economic slowdown, related in part to Ukraine’s long-range strikes, had coincided with declining levels of support for the war.
But some in Russia said that the increased drumbeat of attacks could rally Russians around their leader.
“The adversary started doing the job of our propaganda, which is to explain to the nation that a real war is underway, and no one can just lie low,” a Russian military blogger, Roman Saponkov, wrote on Telegram. “At first they switched off fuel at the petrol station, now they took on Wildberries warehouses. Next, it will be beer factories and nail salons.”
