A legitimate target or a war crime? Russian commentators can’t agree on Ukraine’s Wildberries strikes.

Russian commentators are split over whether Ukraine's drone strikes on Wildberries warehouses were a legitimate act of war or a war crime. Meduza reports that the overnight July eighteenth attacks on warehouse complexes in Elektrostal, outside Moscow, and in Kotovsk killed eight people and injured dozens, with preliminary estimates putting sellers' losses at more than one hundred fifty billion rubles. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said the facilities were being used to supply sanctioned components for the production of drones and navigation equipment, and a Financial Times reporter, citing a senior Ukrainian official, described the strikes as retaliation for repeated Russian attacks on the Ukrainian delivery company Nova Poshta. A lawyer who spoke with Meduza on condition of anonymity said the warehouses are unlikely to meet the Geneva Conventions' definition of a military objective, because the presence of dual-use goods alone does not clear that bar. Whatever the legal verdict, the International Criminal Court is unlikely to take up these particular strikes, Meduza notes, for a mundane reason: Russia never ratified the Rome Statute, leaving the court without jurisdiction over acts committed on Russian territory.

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