U.S. President Donald Trump said he is open to a three-way meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese leader Xi Jinping, Reuters reported.
“If President Xi wants to have it, I’d have it,” Trump said.
He said the meeting could focus on nuclear disarmament. “We would have it to talk about nuclear weapons and denuclearization,” Trump told reporters.
On October 19, sources told The Wall Street Journal that Putin had proposed a three-way summit with Trump and Xi to discuss Ukraine. Putin reportedly wants to negotiate an end to the war on terms favorable to Moscow, without Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky taking part. Beijing has indicated that it would not object if Trump agrees to the meeting, the Journal’s sources said.
In recent weeks, Trump has renewed pressure on Ukraine, demanding that it stop striking Russian oil refineries, hold a presidential election, and reach an agreement with Russia. Trump has also authorized imports of Russian diesel fuel into the United States and decided against imposing “sanctions from hell” on Russia.
It is unclear exactly why Trump decided to escalate tensions with Ukraine. He is thought to have agreed to the diesel deal with Putin to appease Americans unhappy with rising diesel prices caused by the U.S. war with Iran and to improve his approval ratings ahead of congressional elections. Trump himself maintains that he simply does not want to “push” Russia “away” from peace talks with Ukraine.
At Meduza, we are committed to transparency about our use of artificial intelligence in the newsroom. The story you’re reading was written by one of our living, breathing journalists and translated from Russian using an AI model configured to follow our strict editorial standards. This translation process is the result of extensive testing and refinements to ensure our English-language coverage is timely and accurate. A Meduza editor reviews every draft before publication.
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Russian forces used a drone to strike the central park in Nova Vodolaha, a town in Ukraine’s Kharkiv region, said Ivan Vyhivskyi, head of Ukraine’s Interior Ministry.
Six people were killed: a man, three women, and two girls. One girl was 11, and the other was just over a year old, said Oleh Syniehubov, head of the Kharkiv regional military administration.
Another 15 people were wounded, including seven children, he said.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said the younger girl was named Angelina. Her mother, Inna, also died. Zelensky said a Shahed drone struck the park.
At Meduza, we are committed to transparency about our use of artificial intelligence in the newsroom. The story you’re reading was written by one of our living, breathing journalists and translated from Russian using an AI model configured to follow our strict editorial standards. This translation process is the result of extensive testing and refinements to ensure our English-language coverage is timely and accurate. A Meduza editor reviews every draft before publication.
If you find any errors in this translation, please contact us at reports@meduza.io.
Meduza is 12! When we were just starting out in 2014, the world was a very different place — no COVID, no President Trump, no mass exodus of Russians. Russia’s war against Ukraine had already begun, though, and of course there was Putin (who had been in power long before that). What will the world and Russia be like in 12 years? And what would you like them to be like? We put these questions to 12 people we trust.
Galina Timchenko, Meduza co-founder and publisher
The honest answer to this question sounds pretty harsh, but what can you do: “I don’t know.” No, it’s worse than that: “Nobody knows.”
There are too many variables, too many forks in the road. We’re still managing a precarious balancing act, but the risk of tumbling into catastrophe is greater than ever. Some things are obvious, like the AI “big bang”; others are less so, like the “rightward turn” in many countries.
Making predictions is a thankless business. My only hope is that in 12 years, no one will remember them.
As for what I’d like the world to be like in 12 years, John Lennon put it best in his famous song “Imagine.”
Boris Grebenshchikov, musician
Fortunately, I cannot see the future at all, and I wouldn’t want to, because it depends on how we act now. We can only act authentically by listening to our hearts. Knowing the future would keep us from acting sincerely, as our hearts tell us to.
Lyubov Sobol, politician
I see Russia as a wonderful country. Without wars. Without restrictions. With leaders elected by its own citizens, working to make people’s lives better: so they can live happily, grow, work and earn a living, raise children, and think about the future, rather than struggle to survive in a toxic present. With advanced technology, high-quality healthcare and education, and a commitment to protecting the environment and ensuring everyone’s well-being.
A country that builds partnerships with its neighbors and with countries willing to work with us. Without coercion, blackmail, or threats, and to everyone’s benefit. Russia is neither an appendage of the West nor a colony of China. We can learn from other countries’ mistakes and successes while finding our own way. Right now, we’re falling behind in everything, from the AI race to human rights, but why can’t we succeed at both? Russia can be a wonderful country. That’s worth fighting for.
Maria Kolomychenko, journalist at The Bell who researches technology and internet restrictions
It’s hard for me to predict the future more than a decade ahead, but I’ll try. I’ll focus on a subject I’ve covered for years: how governments regulate the internet. I’ll be only too happy if this prediction doesn’t come true =)
Given current trends, I expect the line between how democracies and autocracies regulate the internet to blur by 2038. Experiments with “digital sovereignty,” partial restrictions on minors’ internet access, and surveillance through lawful interception (in other words, the same thing as Russia’s SORM surveillance system) — all of this is already happening in European and other democratic countries. The technologies used to exert control and the arguments for using them increasingly resemble those employed by authoritarian states such as Russia.
As a result, children growing up now and those born in the next few years will probably never know an anonymous, truly free internet — in Russia, and possibly in Europe and the U.S. as well. They’ll learn from books that people once used the internet without having to show ID every time they logged in, and without fearing that every action and every like could be traced back to them.
Artificial intelligence will bring many benefits, but also new problems — and we’re already seeing the first signs. Government agencies responsible for censorship and repression are already trying to incorporate AI into their work. Over the next decade, Russia will probably use it increasingly for mass surveillance of internet users, primarily to automate the analysis of the vast amounts of data collected by SORM and other government systems.
The question is whether Europe will use these technologies the same way Russia does, or whether it will manage to draw a line between security and total surveillance. I don’t have an answer.
Georgy Trishkin, rocket launch analyst and author of the Telegram channel Tekhassky Vestnik (The Texas Herald)
Predicting the future is a thankless task, but let’s assume that in 12 years, high-speed satellite internet will be commonplace and having no internet on a plane will be a thing of the past. Streams of tens of thousands of satellites will be visible in the night sky, and reusable rocket launches will happen daily, if not hourly. Several private and national space stations will replace the International Space Station, but the militarization of space will recall the frenzy of the 1980s.
By then, astronauts from the United States, China and Europe will have landed on the Moon, perhaps joined by Russians or Japanese astronauts taking part in other countries’ missions. And Mars? It will still be inhabited by robots, but scientists on Earth will already be studying samples of its soil. The world will see both the metallic core of a protoplanet and the methane glaciers of Titan, and witness Apophis’s close approach. Both Voyager probes will, sadly, fall silent after a half-century mission. Sightings of passing interstellar objects will become more common, and they’ll continue to fuel conspiracy theories. We’re unlikely to find traces of other life or discover the nature of our own, but as before, we’ll be one step closer. What matters, though, is that the next 12 years, like the last 12, pass without any loss of human life in orbit.
Anton Dolin, film critic
Probably David Lynch’s famous quote: “I’m wearing dark glasses today because I’m seeing the future, and it’s looking very bright.”
Asya Zolnikova, architecture journalist and art historian
According to the U.N., two-thirds of the world’s population will live in cities by the middle of the 21st century. Cities will be even bigger and more crowded, and competition for housing, education, and healthcare will intensify. Everyone has to decide for themselves what to do about that, but it’s certainly something to prepare for.
Now for the second part of the question — what I’d like Russia to be like.
I’ve lived in Moscow all my life and saw the city change for the better in the 2010s. But at the same time, restrictions and repression kept growing. I vividly remember the day in 2012 when members of Pussy Riot were sentenced — I was already working as a news reporter then. The two-year sentence completely threw the newsroom. It was a shock. After work, I went to the Oktyabrskaya subway station, near where I was living at the time, and saw that part of Muzeon Park had reopened after renovations, with landscaping and pavilions unlike anything we’d seen before. I don’t remember whether the ship Bryusov was there yet, but it certainly was a couple of years later, when things in Russia had gotten even worse. I walked along, thinking about that two-year sentence, unable to understand how all of this could exist side by side: the sentence was handed down at Moscow’s Khamovniki District Court, just a couple of kilometers from the park.
I’ve lost some of my idealism since then, but I’d really like beautiful parks and architecture to stop being a consolation or a smokescreen.
Maria Moskaleva, a student who left Russia after being persecuted over an antiwar drawing
Many readers may be hoping to find pure, childlike optimism here — touching visions of a happy future for Russia and a world that still has a chance at a decent, rational future.
But I had to take off my rose-colored glasses long ago. I had to face reality — its cruelty and uncomfortable truths, and the candor that people so rarely show.
It seems to me that Russia has no hope left. There are too few people who care about life itself — and I want to remind you how much that word means. And even that small percentage of people can’t truly change, or even shake, what has taken hold in the country. What hope there is lies with young people capable of clear thinking.
A fascist regime has seized control of Russia. Thousands, hundreds of thousands of shattered lives. Poverty. Wars. Illegally seized territories. But behind all of this, there is one cause that seems to me the most important. How people think.
Not everyone becomes truly human simply by being born. What makes us human is the path we take through life. A path toward the kind of thoughtful reasoning society badly needs. But while this problem has deep historical roots in Russia, things don’t look much better in the rest of the world. Just look around, read the international press, and see what’s happening.
It’s hard for me to imagine how many years, decades, or even centuries will have to pass before Russia can be called a free and democratic country, before tens of thousands of people finally wake up and rise up against the bloodstained regime. That takes a leader.
People no longer understand words whose meanings should be impossible to forget.
Love. Happiness. Goodness.
Without understanding what these words mean, people continue to support bloodshed, their own humiliation, and the destruction of their loved ones’ lives.
The world is changing in complicated ways, but certainly not for the better. Money dictates everything. Too many people in power don’t care about human lives, and that trend can only grow stronger.
I won’t make predictions or guess at the future. But there will never be heaven on earth. There will never be a time of perfect harmony, complete tranquility, happiness and well-being. No. That world doesn’t exist and never will.
And yet the most frightening thing is something else: we’re driving ourselves deeper and deeper into the abyss. Every day. With our actions, words, and thoughts.
We have only ourselves to blame for what happens around us and for the suffering we endure.
And so there’s no point anymore in shouting, “Come to your senses!”
It’s too late.
Though I’d like to believe it isn’t.
Angelina Davydova, environmental journalist
I want to see a more peaceful, calmer world with greater solidarity, where people and governments in different countries work to solve global problems, including climate change, biodiversity loss, plastic pollution, inequality, and treatment for rare diseases.
A world where humanity works across borders on comprehensive solutions to environmental and social problems, while trying to build a new system of economic and social governance that doesn’t deplete resources, pollute the environment, or deepen inequality. A world where people have the resources, energy, opportunities and time to pursue these goals without facing threats to their lives, freedom, or health.
But we probably won’t see such dramatic changes for the better in 12 years. For now, many parts of the world seem to be heading toward destruction instead: International relations and agreements, international organizations, and joint efforts to solve problems are breaking down. Ongoing wars and conflicts, new races for resources, the rise of authoritarianism and other undemocratic forms of government amid political crises in traditional democracies, growing social inequality and divisions within societies, and the lack of real action on global environmental problems are all pushing many parts of the world further toward the destruction of existing political, social, civic, and international structures.
I very much hope that this period of upheaval and destruction, as the world we know disappears, will eventually hit rock bottom, after which countries and regions will try to begin a new era of renewal, joint action, and cooperation. I’d like to see that new world. For now, we can only guess what it might look like.
Dmitry Kuznets, Meduza’s military analyst
The future, as physicists and philosophers tell us, is fundamentally unpredictable. Yet many people try anyway, passing off outcomes they consider likely as certainties. I’m not comfortable making forecasts, but if you insist, I’ll give it a try too.
In a short-term forecast — and 12 years isn’t far off — the likeliest outcomes are those in which the world doesn’t change very much. After all, it’s barely changed in the past 12 years: The Russian army was fighting in Ukraine in 2014, too; Meduza was working out of Latvia, and most of its readers were in Russia.
There are differences, of course. The war between Russia and Ukraine will be over by 2038. But, alas, Russia has already mortgaged its future — in every sense — to fight it, and no “victory,” whatever that word is supposed to mean, will get it out of that debt trap.
We can, of course, hope (or fear) that artificial general intelligence will sweep everything away like a mighty hurricane and let every country and society start with a clean slate. (What’s a 12-year forecast without AI?) But here, too, it’s better to make a cautious prediction: Don’t expect AI to solve all the mysteries of the universe, dramatically increase labor productivity, or wipe out all of humanity and put us all out of work.
AI advances will be adopted fastest in warfare: We’ll almost certainly soon see vast numbers of fully autonomous drones deciding for themselves whether to kill. That will certainly happen before people trust AI to fly commercial airliners or perform other safety-critical tasks.
What the AI industry will take from us is money. In the U.S., capital investment in this sector already exceeds investment in all other industries combined. News organizations are especially vulnerable: Their reporting is already being taken without compensation and delivered to paying users by AI agents. We’ll be sure to discuss all of this on Meduza in 12 years.
Whatever the world is like in 12 years, I hope we’ll still be able to explore it in all its beautiful and terrible diversity. I’d like to believe that efforts to correct globalization’s mistakes won’t lead to closed borders, and that technological progress won’t exclude people from pursuing knowledge.
Apart from that, progress has so far made the world better and more interesting (even if many people disagree), and there’s no reason to think that trend will change by 2038.
Alexey Uvarov, historian
How inevitable a good or bad future seems depends in large part on how we feel at the time. In the fall of 1940, for instance, hundreds of thousands of Londoners endured constant bombing by the Nazi Luftwaffe and later lived to see the Beatles and the Moon landing. How much of that future could they possibly have imagined back in 1940?
The thing is, we’ve grown used to living in a world that’s moving in the “right” direction, a world destined for progress. But for millennia, humanity lived in a different kind of world, including one that saw two world wars, genocides, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the nuclear disasters at Chornobyl and Fukushima. None of these terrible tragedies condemned future generations to eternal suffering, though the suffering of those who lived through these horrors is immeasurable.
Perhaps that’s where our hope lies: Neither the “course of history” nor the “logic of human development” makes progress or self-destruction inevitable. It all depends on us — on people — and recognizing our power to shape events can help restore our faith in the future.
In hindsight, we tend to see many tragic events as inevitable, but in fact nothing is predetermined. So we shouldn’t expect either flying cars or the ashes of a nuclear apocalypse in 2038. It will be a new, changing world, in some ways less balanced and less predictable than ours.
But the question is what we ourselves can do for our future, rather than which direction the world is heading. I believe and hope that the world in 2038 will be a place where everyone takes more responsibility for their own life and future.
Galina Yuzefovich, literary critic
From where we stand today, it’s hard to imagine a bright future, but I’ll try.
By 2038, even if the world hasn’t entirely abandoned the idea of war as a way to resolve differences (that’s too much to hope for), it will at least have entered another long period of relative peace.
Clearly, artificial intelligence isn’t going anywhere (though as a natural-born Luddite and technological pessimist, I wouldn’t mind if it did). But I’m almost certain that agreements setting standards for AI use will be reached before long, so I’m not worried about a machine uprising or a total catastrophe in the job market (including creative work) by 2038.
As for my own field, I think we’ll very soon see intellectualism and serious reading come back into fashion. In fact, that’s already happening, but I see it as a “long-term trend” that won’t run out of steam in 12 years — it will gather strength instead. Society will inevitably celebrate print books, long novels, and the slower pleasures of sustained attention, while Instagram Reels and other “fast” content will become a little embarrassing, like fast food.
I’ll take the liberty of referring readers to John Lennon’s song “Imagine,” which expresses my ideals best, and focus on books. I very much want to believe that by 2038, reading will really be back in fashion — that it will return not just as an activity society approves of (in that sense, it will definitely come back — it’s already coming back), but as something more. That books will once again be at the center of public attention, that people won’t just put them on shelves and take pretty photos of them, but actually read them, discuss them, and share them with one another.
With all the enormous upheavals we’re witnessing, and those we can only foresee for now, this may seem like a trivial detail and wishful thinking on the part of someone who simply loves to read. But I really am convinced that reading is what allows both individuals and humanity as a species to maintain a certain depth and complexity.
Books also foster empathy and provide a foundation for constructive, civil debate — something a genuinely democratic society cannot exist without. In the future I hope to see, reading will matter again — both as an individual pursuit and a shared social activity.
At Meduza, we are committed to transparency about our use of artificial intelligence in the newsroom. The story you’re reading was written by one of our living, breathing journalists and translated from Russian using an AI model configured to follow our strict editorial standards. This translation process is the result of extensive testing and refinements to ensure our English-language coverage is timely and accurate. A Meduza editor reviews every draft before publication.
If you find any errors in this translation, please contact us at reports@meduza.io.
Grozny’s Akhmatovsky District Court fined St. Petersburg resident Lena Patyayeva 150,000 rubles for holding a solo picket on the third anniversary of the disappearance of her friend Seda Suleimanova, a Chechen woman, according to a post on Chechnya’s Supreme Court website.
The post does not identify the person fined, but Mediazona reported that it was Patyayeva.
The court found her guilty of a repeat violation of protest laws under Article 20.2, Part 8 of Russia’s Code of Administrative Offenses. In November 2025, Patyayeva was sentenced to nine days in jail under the same provision for a solo picket.
Lena Patyayeva held a solo picket in Grozny on August 23, 2026. She stood at a monument to fallen journalists, holding a sign that read “I demand an investigation into the murder of Seda Suleimanova” and, in Chechen, “Where is Seda?” Patyayeva was detained shortly afterward.
Seda Suleimanova fled her relatives in 2022 because they were planning to force her into marriage. She lived in St. Petersburg. In August 2023, police officers came to her apartment and told her she was suspected of stealing jewelry worth 150,000 rubles, following a complaint from her mother. They detained her, took her back to Chechnya against her will, and handed her over to her relatives. A few days later, Chechnya’s human rights ombudsman, Mansur Soltayev, published a photograph and a video of Suleimanova. She has not been seen since.
In February 2024, the SK SOS project reported that Suleimanova might have been killed by her relatives. Shortly after a public campaign demanding that she be found, Russia’s Investigative Committee opened a murder investigation. In May 2025, authorities declared Suleimanova a missing person and launched a search for her.
At Meduza, we are committed to transparency about our use of artificial intelligence in the newsroom. The story you’re reading was written by one of our living, breathing journalists and translated from Russian using an AI model configured to follow our strict editorial standards. This translation process is the result of extensive testing and refinements to ensure our English-language coverage is timely and accurate. A Meduza editor reviews every draft before publication.
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“Imperium,” a documentary by Sergei Loznitsa, won the best film award at the British Film Institute’s 70th London Film Festival.
“Imperium” consists of archival footage shot by Italian documentary filmmakers in the Soviet Union in the 1970s. Loznitsa discovered the footage at the Audiovisual Archive of the Workers’ and Democratic Movement in Rome. The film opens with a parade on Red Square, then moves to other regions of the country to show everyday life and celebrations.
The jury said “Imperium” offers a fresh perspective on life in the Soviet Union before its collapse. “The film offers a broad view of life in a country with an extraordinarily diverse social and cultural landscape, many aspects of which have rarely appeared on-screen,” it said in a statement.
At Meduza, we are committed to transparency about our use of artificial intelligence in the newsroom. The story you’re reading was written by one of our living, breathing journalists and translated from Russian using an AI model configured to follow our strict editorial standards. This translation process is the result of extensive testing and refinements to ensure our English-language coverage is timely and accurate. A Meduza editor reviews every draft before publication.
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The U.S. and Ukrainian presidents have continued their long-distance war of words. Donald Trump wrote on social media that Volodymyr Zelensky “doesn’t want to end this war.”
“[W]ith all of the money that Europe is famously giving him, and that Crooked Joe Biden gave him in the past, he doesn’t want to end this war, and probably never did,” Trump said on his social media platform, Truth Social.
The U.S. president said Zelensky could have “made a better deal two years ago than he can now.” “His country is in shambles, a large portion of his land is lost,” Trump said. He also said Ukraine had lost access to seas and oceans and that its male population had shrunk — “wounded, and/or dead.”
U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Zelensky “presents a false binary” by linking an end to the war with a Ukrainian victory. “The war must end, and that will be with some kind of a negotiated settlement, and President Trump is working on that every day. He’s done it since he came into office,” Bessent said in an interview with NBC News.
He also urged Zelensky to “be very careful” about accusing the United States of restricting Starlink in Ukraine. Bessent said those claims were untrue.
Zelensky said Ukraine, rather than Russia, was being pressured to make concessions. “I believe steps have been taken to convince Ukraine to capitulate,” Zelensky said in an interview with Bloomberg.
I’m not saying that’s what our partners are trying to achieve. I don’t want to think our American partners believe the war can end sooner at Ukraine’s expense. But that’s how it looks.
Zelensky again said the United States had deliberately slowed Starlink service in Ukraine, putting Ukrainian military operations at risk, and was also delaying deliveries of missiles for Patriot air defense systems.
“My latest model was: We don’t target Russian diesel, you give us missiles for Patriot systems to protect our facilities. But they just want us to stop attacking diesel. And if we strike that, they will disconnect us from something,” Zelensky said.
The Ukrainian president tied the U.S. actions to the November midterm elections, in which Trump is trying to shore up his Republican Party. “Politics is very aggressive during election time,” he said. “I think it is agony now, but after elections, life will continue, and I believe it will be calmer.”
The war in photographs: The aftermath of a strike on Kyiv
As Trump and Zelensky trade barbs over who should make concessions to end the war, Russian forces continue to strike Kyiv every day. Ukraine receives no advance warning of the strikes.
Kyiv. October 19, 2026A damaged shopping center in Kyiv. October 19, 2026A confectionery shop after a Russian strike. Kyiv. October 19, 2026A clothing store after a Russian strike. Kyiv, October 19, 2026A damaged subway station in Kyiv. October 19, 2026
At Meduza, we are committed to transparency about our use of artificial intelligence in the newsroom. The story you’re reading was written by one of our living, breathing journalists and translated from Russian using an AI model configured to follow our strict editorial standards. This translation process is the result of extensive testing and refinements to ensure our English-language coverage is timely and accurate. A Meduza editor reviews every draft before publication.
If you find any errors in this translation, please contact us at reports@meduza.io.
Wagner fighters escort CAR President Faustin-Archange Touadéra, July 17, 2023
After Yevgeny Prigozhin’s death, Russian authorities took control of the Wagner Group and created the Defense Ministry’s Africa Corps, which was supposed to take command of Wagner’s mercenaries in Africa. But Prigozhin’s son Pavel managed to retain control of Wagner fighters in the Central African Republic (CAR) and expand his father’s business, The Wall Street Journal reported.
CAR President Faustin-Archange Touadéra helped him by asking the Kremlin not to replace Wagner fighters with Russian Defense Ministry troops, the newspaper reported. Touadéra integrated Prigozhin’s mercenaries into the country’s police, army, and intelligence units.
About 500 Wagner fighters are based in the capital, Bangui. They guard the president, fight rebels, and make money from gold mining and trafficking in drugs and weapons, the Journal reported.
The younger Prigozhin controls the CAR’s largest gold deposit, which generates $250 million a year. Local authorities help ship the gold abroad by labeling it as government property. Over the past three months, shipments have gone through Belarus, according to the newspaper.
Prigozhin also controls a substantial share of the local tramadol market and sells weapons to rebel groups in Sudan and Libya. Wagner also produces vodka and beer in the CAR.
In total, the Prigozhin family earns more than $400 million a year, according to an estimate by the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime.
Experts who spoke to the Journal believe an agreement with the Kremlin may have helped the younger Prigozhin strengthen his position in the CAR. The Wagner Group also owns radio stations in the country that broadcast anti-Western propaganda, glorify Touadéra, and praise Russia, the newspaper reported.
Pavel Prigozhin lives in St. Petersburg but regularly visits Bangui, according to the Journal. During these visits, he stays at the Ledger Plaza hotel, which has effectively become Wagner’s headquarters in the CAR. Fighters armed with assault rifles guard the hotel grounds, and even senior government officials go through security checks to meet him.
Pavel was 25 when his father died in August 2023. He inherited his father’s entire estate, valued at 12 billion rubles.
The elder Prigozhin was also survived by his wife, two daughters, and mother. Under the will, Pavel was required to provide them with a “decent standard of living.” The news outlet Port, citing an unnamed source, claimed that Pavel’s unwillingness to share the inheritance had caused a family dispute.
At Meduza, we are committed to transparency about our use of artificial intelligence in the newsroom. The story you’re reading was written by one of our living, breathing journalists and translated from Russian using an AI model configured to follow our strict editorial standards. This translation process is the result of extensive testing and refinements to ensure our English-language coverage is timely and accurate. A Meduza editor reviews every draft before publication.
If you find any errors in this translation, please contact us at reports@meduza.io.
The Russian military satellite Cosmos 2612 has come very close to ICEYE-X36, a radar satellite operated by the Finnish-American company ICEYE, according to LeoLabs, which monitors activity in space.
In an October 16 statement, LeoLabs said the Russian satellite’s movement “appears to be a deliberate approach toward” ICEYE-X36. As of Friday afternoon, Cosmos 2612 was about 4.8 kilometers from ICEYE-X36, down from more than 320 kilometers a day earlier. Dutch satellite tracker Marco Langbroek estimated the distance between the satellites at 1 to 2 kilometers.
“That is very worrisome. This RPO (Rendezvous and Proximity Operation) is completely non-consensual.
“If ICEYE-X36 is indeed used by Ukraine, this means that a satellite from one country (Russia) is closely approaching a satellite of another country (Ukraine) with which it is at war,” Langbroek wrote.
By Monday, October 19, the distance between the spacecraft had shrunk to 26 meters, according to rocket launch analyst Georgy Trishkin, who runs the Telegram channel Tekhassky Vestnik. He said any approach that brings spacecraft within a kilometer of each other in orbit “is considered critical.” “And here they’re also flying in tandem without coordinating with each other. In this case, the maneuvers aren’t accidental — they’re very much deliberate,” Trishkin said:
The know-it-alls are all rattling off the same lines about “intelligence gathering” and “jammers” — typical output from an AI chatbot. But the actual purpose of these maneuvers is less obvious. What we’re seeing is one of the first demonstrations of a new kind of confrontation in orbit — noncontact deorbiting through fuel depletion.
Trishkin added: “Directly interfering with other spacecraft is dangerous — whether through kinetic or electromagnetic means, it’s an outright act of aggression.”
The U.S. Defense Department and ICEYE representatives declined to comment. An unnamed Ukrainian official told Axios that Ukraine’s military works with the Finnish company and “uses its capabilities,” but could not say whether ICEYE-X36 was involved.
In 2024, the Ukrainian Defense Ministry’s Main Intelligence Directorate said it had been using an ICEYE satellite for almost two years to identify “hostile targets” and “defend the country” and had taken more than 4,000 images of “enemy facilities” during that time. ICEYE and Ukraine’s Defense Ministry signed a new cooperation agreement in January 2026, giving Ukraine’s military expanded access to high-quality radar satellite imagery.
Russian satellites have made dangerous maneuvers before. In the summer of 2026, four Russian military satellites — Cosmos 2610, Cosmos 2611, Cosmos 2612, and Cosmos 2613 — changed their orbits and approached the ICEYE-X36 radar satellite.
At Meduza, we are committed to transparency about our use of artificial intelligence in the newsroom. The story you’re reading was written by one of our living, breathing journalists and translated from Russian using an AI model configured to follow our strict editorial standards. This translation process is the result of extensive testing and refinements to ensure our English-language coverage is timely and accurate. A Meduza editor reviews every draft before publication.
If you find any errors in this translation, please contact us at reports@meduza.io.
The Voroshilovsky Interdistrict Court in annexed Donetsk has sentenced military blogger and RT columnist Tetyana Montian to 18 months in a penal colony over calls for “extremism,” Mediazona reported.
The prosecution stemmed from Montian’s remarks during a December 2022 livestream about “regime loyalists,” whom she urged viewers to “take out without a shred of regret.” Montian said she meant government supporters who conceal problems at the front and change their views to match those of their superiors.
The criminal investigation into Montian became public in October 2025, when she was added to the list of terrorists and extremists maintained by Russia’s financial monitoring agency, Rosfinmonitoring. Before that, Yekaterina Mizulina, who heads the Safe Internet League and reports people to the authorities, said she had contacted the Interior Ministry after receiving numerous complaints about Montian’s posts “discrediting” the army.
Montian also faced criticism on propagandist Vladimir Solovyov’s channel, where host Boris Yakemenko alleged that she was involved in stealing money from fundraisers she had organized to support Russian soldiers.
Montian was born in Crimea and practiced law in Ukraine before moving to Russia in 2021. She began writing columns for RT in 2023. Her Telegram channel had more than 400,000 subscribers. Ukrainian authorities have opened several criminal investigations into her.
At Meduza, we are committed to transparency about our use of artificial intelligence in the newsroom. The story you’re reading was written by one of our living, breathing journalists and translated from Russian using an AI model configured to follow our strict editorial standards. This translation process is the result of extensive testing and refinements to ensure our English-language coverage is timely and accurate. A Meduza editor reviews every draft before publication.
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Ukraine’s parliamentary human rights commissioner, Dmytro Lubinets, said Russia and Ukraine had “begun working out the final details” of a plan to evacuate residents of Oleshky, also known as Aleshki, in the Russian-occupied part of the Kherson region.
According to Ukrainska Pravda, Lubinets stressed that residents would not simply be taken out of Oleshky but brought directly “to territory controlled by the Ukrainian government.”
“So there are still some difficult issues, let’s put it that way, but I hope we’ll all see concrete results from these talks soon,” he said.
Lubinets said talks with Russian officials were taking place every day. “I can’t share many details, but I’ll put it this way: In my view, we’ve made as much progress as possible,” he said.
Lubinets said there were also plans to evacuate residents of six nearby towns and villages. Preliminary estimates put the total number of people to be evacuated at 6,000, including up to 200 children.
Russia occupied Oleshky at the start of its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. By the fall of 2026, conditions there had become dire — residents were left without food, electricity, or adequate medical care. They cannot leave the city safely. Pope Leo XIV appealed to Russian President Vladimir Putin over the situation in Oleshky. In a phone call, the pope called for a ceasefire to allow humanitarian aid deliveries and let residents evacuate voluntarily and safely.
At Meduza, we are committed to transparency about our use of artificial intelligence in the newsroom. The story you’re reading was written by one of our living, breathing journalists and translated from Russian using an AI model configured to follow our strict editorial standards. This translation process is the result of extensive testing and refinements to ensure our English-language coverage is timely and accurate. A Meduza editor reviews every draft before publication.
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Moscow’s Dorogomilovsky District Court has ordered the arrest of Denis Yeskov and Anatoly Nagornov, administrators of the train photo site RailGallery, the press service of Moscow’s courts reported on October 16.
Yeskov and Nagornov are charged under Russia’s criminal statute against unlawful interference with critical information infrastructure causing serious consequences, which carries a prison sentence of five to 10 years. According to investigators, Yeskov and Nagornov gained unlawful access to a trade secret belonging to an organization, copied information stored “in a critical infrastructure facility of the Russian Federation,” and posted it on their own site.
Denis YeskovAnatoly Nagornov
The specialized Telegram channel “1520. Vse o zh/d” (All About Railways) noticed on the evening of October 15 that RailGallery had stopped loading, and the site remains inaccessible. The court had already ordered the arrest of the site’s administrators on October 14, according to case files published on the court’s website.
Telegram channels also carried a statement from RailGallery’s editorial board confirming the detentions:
We are all in shock over what happened, and this news came as a complete surprise to us. I think each of us is now feeling confused and trying to make sense of what happened, understand what occurred, and what to expect going forward.
At the moment, the situation remains uncertain. It’s too early to say what will happen to the site going forward, whether its usual operation can be maintained, or who will take over its management. Right now we don’t have enough information to draw any conclusions or make assumptions about the future. For many, RailGallery is not just a resource, but part of daily life, a place to communicate, share experience, and bring together people with shared interests. So it’s only natural that what’s happening is causing concern.
RailGallery launched in 2022 after the popular railway photo site TrainPix shut down. the independent Russian news outlet Mediazona reported that TrainPix was created by Ukrainians, who announced its closure in response to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. TrainPix’s administrators deleted the site’s entire archive and urged people to support the Ukrainian army.
RailGallery’s homepage in late April 2022
Yeskov spoke about RailGallery’s launch in August 2022, saying that within six months, the Russian community had restored half of TrainPix’s archive, or about 150,000 photographs. By the end of 2022, more than 3,200 users had registered on RailGallery and posted 194,000 photographs, including 161,500 restored images. According to “1520. Vse o zh/d,” the site became more than a photo gallery: an extensive database on the history and operation of railway equipment from various countries.
In 2023, Dossier Center published an investigation into an armored train that Vladimir Putin presumably rides. The investigation included a photo of a train belonging to the company Grand Service Express, taken from RailGallery’s site. Journalists found special communications antennas on the roofs of the train cars, and the train was pulled by three locomotives at once. Whether Putin actually rides the train pictured remains unknown.
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Russian figure skater Kamila Valieva has resumed training with Eteri Tutberidze’s team, a source told the Russian state news agency TASS. There had been no official statement on the matter as of the time of publication.
Valieva, 20, trained under Tutberidze for years, setting world records in the short program, the free skate, and the combined score of both programs. She was considered one of the top contenders for medals heading into the 2022 Winter Olympics. During the Games, one of Valieva’s doping tests came back positive. She won gold in the team event but left the individual competition without a medal.
In 2024, Valieva was still disqualified for four years over doping, and the results of Russian figure skaters’ performances in the team event were revised. In 2025, Valieva and Tutberidze ended their partnership, and Svetlana Sokolovskaya became her coach.
In January 2026, Valieva resumed her career after her disqualification ended (calculated from the date the violation was recorded) and even obtained neutral athlete status. But in September, the International Skating Union (ISU) revoked that status.
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U.S. Ambassador to the EU Andrew Puzder told the Financial Times that European companies would face “devastating” retaliation from Washington if Brussels moves forward with plans to restrict American competitors’ access to parts of the European market.
The dispute centers on a European Commission proposal to reserve part of the radio spectrum that lets smartphones connect directly to satellites for European companies, a move that would restrict spectrum access for Chinese and American companies, including SpaceX.
Asked whether European companies should fear retaliation, Puzder said they “should be wary that it could happen and it would be very devastating for those companies,” given the size of the American market.
Puzder said that if the goal “is to make United States less competitive, I think that that’s not a legitimate goal of this kind of legislation.” “You don’t make European companies more competitive by making US companies less competitive,” he added.
SpaceX has sharply criticized the European Commission’s proposal, warning that the move risks degrading communications quality in Ukraine, where Starlink plays a critical role.
On October 14, Ukrainian military officials reported restrictions affecting the operation of Starlink satellite communication terminals, or more precisely, their military version, Starshield. The restrictions emerged amid growing tension between Volodymyr Zelensky and Donald Trump, who, however, claims he did not order the terminals’ operation restricted. The Telegraph’s sources said that SpaceX head Elon Musk proposed restricting Starlink’s operation in Ukraine to Trump, and the U.S. president agreed.
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Vladimir Putin has proposed a trilateral summit with President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping to discuss Ukraine, The Wall Street Journal reported. Putin wants to reach a deal that ends the war in Ukraine on terms favorable to Moscow, according to sources cited by the newspaper.
The Kremlin proposed holding the trilateral meeting on the sidelines of the APEC summit, set for November 18–19 in Shenzhen, China. Moscow conveyed the idea to the Chinese side through diplomatic channels, and Beijing has signaled it would not object if Trump agrees to the meeting.
Trump has not yet agreed to the idea, but he could “be receptive” given his desire to fulfill a campaign promise and end the war, a senior Trump administration official told the newspaper.
Putin raised the idea during an October 9 phone call with Trump. He views this trilateral format, which would exclude Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and European leaders, as a new Yalta Conference.
Relations between Moscow and Washington have improved recently. During the same October 9 phone call, Trump and Putin agreed on supplies of Russian diesel fuel to the United States.
Trump also declined to impose so-called “sanctions from hell“ on Russia. The law, signed September 18, allows him to impose 100% tariffs on the largest importers of Russian oil and gas and 500% tariffs on Russian goods. He said the lenient decision stemmed from a reluctance to “drive, foolishly, Russia away from the bargaining table.”
At the same time, Trump has intensified his criticism of Zelensky. He has repeatedly called on Ukraine to stop striking Russian oil refineries, and in an October 16 interview he said he is “not a big fan” of Zelensky, adding that it is harder to reach an agreement with the Ukrainian president than with Putin.
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Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin presented Vladimir Putin with “proposals for a number of personnel changes in the government,” the Kremlin’s press service said. The two discussed the changes at a meeting held the morning of Monday, October 19.
Mishustin proposed making Finance Ministry head Anton Siluanov a deputy prime minister as well (Siluanov held both posts from 2018 to 2020). He also nominated Primorsky Governor Oleg Kozhemyako for deputy prime minister and presidential envoy to the Far Eastern Federal District, a post currently held by Yuri Trutnev.
Mishustin has also nominated Transport Ministry head Andrei Nikitin for deputy prime minister. He is proposing Dmitry Yadrov, head of Rosaviatsia, as transport minister.
Mishustin has also nominated First Deputy Finance Minister Irina Okladnikova for deputy prime minister and head of the government’s staff, a post currently held by Dmitry Grigorenko.
“These proposals have received the support of President Putin,” Russian presidential press secretary Dmitry Peskov said.
Under the Russian Constitution, candidates nominated by the head of government must be confirmed by the State Duma, the lower house of Russia’s parliament.
Anton Siluanov previously served as deputy chairman of the Russian government, holding the post of first deputy prime minister from 2018 to 2020.
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Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, U.S. President Donald Trump’s special envoys, proposed to European Union officials that they resume larger purchases of Russian gas, which had declined after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, sources told The New York Times.
Witkoff and Kushner also proposed that Ukraine resume transit of Russian gas.
The envoys see restoring Russian gas exports to Europe as part of a peace settlement. They argue it would benefit both Ukraine, which would recover revenue lost when transit stopped, and European politicians, whose constituents are unhappy about rising energy prices.
Europeans rejected the proposal, The New York Times’ sources said. Some European and Ukrainian officials believe the United States wants Russian gas to return to Europe partly because it wants a stake in the exports, according to those sources.
The European Union still buys Russian gas, though purchases have fallen sharply since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine: Russian gas accounted for 45% of the EU’s gas demand in 2021, compared with just 13% in 2025. Ukraine has halted the transit of Russian gas to Europe since 2025, losing about a billion dollars a year in transit fees.
In recent weeks, Donald Trump reached an agreement with Vladimir Putin to supply Russian diesel to the global market, declined to impose “hell sanctions” on Russia, and began pressuring Ukraine to stop its strikes on Russian oil refineries. Trump has said the strikes are driving up diesel prices worldwide, including in the United States, though the main reason for the increase is the U.S. war with Iran and the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz.
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President Donald Trump said the diesel deal with Russia and his refusal to impose ‘hellish sanctions’ were an attempt to start peace negotiations.
“My decision on Russia is a very simple one. I am in the process of negotiating Peace in the war between Russia and Ukraine, and don’t want to do anything that will drive, foolishly, Russia away from the bargaining table,” the U.S. president wrote on his Truth Social platform. Trump also said Russia is doing almost nothing to support Iran “compared to what they could be doing” and that he would like to keep it that way.
Trump again criticized Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, saying: “Zelensky is using Diesel Refineries in Russia as a target, knowing that these attacks are seriously hurting the world diesel markets, including those in the United States.” According to Trump, Russia “sending, at a low price, millions of barrels of diesel to the World,” but Zelensky “doesn’t care.”
Trump claimed that Zelensky “doesn’t want to end this war, and probably never did.”
“Two years ago, he could have made a better deal than now,” the U.S. president said.
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Russian forces struck Kyiv with ballistic missiles overnight on October 19, damaging buildings in the Desnianskyi and Dniprovskyi districts, Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko said. Three people were injured, and a 21-year-old woman was killed.
In the Solomianskyi district, debris hit the first floor of a 25-story residential building, injuring five people. Klitschko also said one of Kyiv’s metro stations on the left bank of the Dnipro was damaged but did not elaborate. Ukraine’s State Emergency Service reported that the strike killed one person and injured eight.
RFE/RL’s Ukrainian service journalist Alex Raufoglu said Ukraine once again received no warning of the ballistic missile strike on Kyiv. U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, responding to Raufoglu’s question about the strike, said:
“What happened last night, I don’t know exactly. I know a few nights ago there was a software problem involving their early warning system. I know EUCOM [U.S. European Command] had been involved in looking at it,” Rubio said, declining further comment.
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Wildberries and Ozon play an enormous role in Russia’s economy and in the lives of millions of Russians, as well as entrepreneurs and shoppers in the Commonwealth of Independent States, where both companies also operate. For some, these online marketplaces offer relatively low prices; for others, jobs at logistics centers where pay often exceeds the regional average; and for still others, a platform to grow their own businesses. Employees and sellers have always had strained relationships with Wildberries and Ozon because of the companies’ strict rules. But the situation became more complicated in the summer of 2026, when Ukraine began regularly striking the marketplaces’ infrastructure, destroying goods stored in their warehouses.
The independent journalists’ cooperative Bereg reports on how Ukrainian military attacks destroyed dozens of warehouses and disrupted the livelihoods of people who built their businesses through the marketplaces. Meduza is publishing the story in full.
Three months have passed since the first Ukrainian drone attack on Wildberries warehouses: On July 18, drones struck logistics centers in Elektrostal, outside Moscow, and Kotovsk, in the Tambov region. In late August, Ukraine attacked a warehouse belonging to another Russian marketplace, Ozon, for the first time. According toIBC Global, Russia saw 49 attacks on 36 warehouse sites belonging to various companies from July 18 to September 24.
part 1
How the war changed warehouse employees’ jobs
Russians take warehouse jobs for the high pay and flexible hours. For many, those two factors outweigh any risks
In 2023, inspecting returned goods at a Wildberries warehouse in Nizhny Tagil became Olga’s main job. (Her name has been changed.) She checks goods returned by customers, looks for defects, assesses damage, and determines what caused it.
Olga was drawn to warehouse work by the flexible hours and the pay: Wildberries paid more than many other companies in her city. Over three years at the warehouse, her income has grown substantially.
To get a job at a Wildberries warehouse, applicants download the WB Job app and fill out a questionnaire, choosing an employment format — a full-time staff position or part-time work under a civil-law contract — along with a position and a warehouse. The company hires without interviews and says the average income for 61% of its warehouse specialists is 125,000 rubles a month.
Ozon has a similar system for hiring warehouse workers, who can apply through the Ozon Job app. The company offers up to 126,000 rubles a month before taxes for warehouse work, with payments made daily or weekly depending on the contract. Corporate transportation brings employees to and from the warehouses, which are usually located outside cities, and staff employees also receive meals.
The average salaries the marketplaces offer are noticeably higher than what other employers are willing to pay in most regions. In 2026, the average salary exceeded 100,000 rubles in only 25 of Russia’s 89 regions.
Wildberries and Ozon operate warehouses and major logistics centers in more than 20 regions. Wildberries has more than 200 logistics facilities in total, including warehouses and sorting centers, while Ozon has more than 150.
The warehouse rules have always been strict, Olga tells Bereg. Before their shifts, employees change into uniforms without pockets and pass through security and a metal detector to enter the operations area, where goods are handled. They undergo another inspection at the end of the workday. Phones with cameras, lighters, and other personal belongings are banned from the operations area.
Olga says employees understand these requirements. Still, some workers have objected: Women at warehouses in Tver and Vladimir, for example, complained that they struggled to bring in sanitary pads during their periods. They said they were forbidden to carry wet wipes or tissues, and there was not enough toilet paper for everyone.
The warehouse rules did not change after Ukrainian drone attacks began, Olga says. Shifts continued during air raid alerts. She says her warehouse has no designated shelter, so management allowed anyone afraid to remain at work after an air raid siren to go home.
Olga herself became frightened of going to work, even though she loves her job. “Every day, you’re scared you’ll leave in the morning and never make it home to your kids that evening,” she tells Bereg.
The warehouse where Olga works has never been struck by the Ukrainian military. “Ours is small, and they attacked the big ones,” she says. None of her colleagues have quit so far, although frequent drone attacks on warehouses have disrupted deliveries, and “there’s less work.” “We’re waiting for them to reorganize deliveries,” she adds.
The first Ukrainian drone strikes on Wildberries warehouses took place on July 18, hitting the company’s facilities in Elektrostal, outside Moscow, and Kotovsk, in the Tambov region. Over the following five weeks, Ukrainian forces attacked only Wildberries infrastructure, but overnight on August 21–22, they struck an Ozon warehouse with drones for the first time. It was a logistics center in Chapayevsk, in the Samara region. At the time of publication, Ukraine had attacked at least eight Ozon facilities.
Dmitry, who spoke to Bereg, has worked at an Ozon warehouse in Saratov for several months. Before that, he worked at the company’s logistics center in Adygeysk, which Ukrainian drones struck two days after the attack on the Samara region. Dmitry had left his job at the Adygeysk warehouse just a few days before the attack.
Dmitry says both warehouses where he has worked have signs and notice boards explaining what to do in a fire or during an air raid alert. Shelters were set up at the Saratov logistics center after the attacks.
As Ukrainian attacks on Wildberries infrastructure became more frequent, Dmitry began to worry that drones would start hitting Ozon warehouses too. “The attacks on warehouses in Samara, Krasnodar, and Makhachkala proved those [fears] right,” he says with a sigh.
Air raid alerts were issued every day in the Saratov region this past summer, Dmitry says. “As far as I know, a drone was recently shot down about 20–30 kilometers [12–19 miles] from the warehouse. That day, the fire alarms went off in every section, and they quickly gathered us in a safe place,” he says.
Dmitry says police and emergency personnel are now stationed near the warehouse. “I’ve personally seen two fire trucks and two ambulances. But I can’t say for sure whether they’re always there,” he says.
After the Ukrainian attacks, management at Dmitry’s warehouse became “more attentive to employees’ need to stay in touch with their families,” he tells Bereg. “They [now] let us bring a basic phone into the operations area. You can also bring your documents, which we used to be allowed to keep only in the lockers in the changing room.”
Despite the serious risks, neither Dmitry nor any of the colleagues he talks to plan to quit. He believes warehouse management and the company as a whole can keep employees safe. “Knowing my life is in the hands of professionals, I’m not worried,” he says.
The main thing keeping Dmitry in the job is the pay: “You can easily earn 5,000 to 6,000 rubles a day, or 80,000 to 100,000 a month.”
Some employees believe Wildberries is “working for the war effort” — and that Ukrainian strikes are justified
The Wildberries logistics center employees Bereg spoke to are also unwilling to quit. Some believe Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s statements that the marketplace sells military gear and parts for combat equipment.
Oksana, whose name has been changed, is in her sixth year working at Wildberries warehouses. She started at Koledino — the same warehouse Ukrainian drones have hit several times — and now works at the marketplace’s logistics center in Kursk, about 100 kilometers (62 miles) from the Russian-Ukrainian border.
“I’d be lying if I said nothing had changed [after the Ukrainian attacks]. But on the whole, life goes on: We work and hope for the best,” Oksana tells Bereg.
Oksana is 50 and has two university degrees, in economics and law. She previously worked for the Interior Ministry in Kursk, rising to the rank of police captain, and later worked at the regional trade union council.
“A lot of people say only losers work at WB [Wildberries]. Nonsense. I’ve got something to compare it with. The warehouse has given me a really good balance of freedom and pay: flexible hours, no pressure from management, and an income that’s higher on average than anywhere else for this kind of work,” Oksana says. She says she “really loves” what she does.
Oksana found her first Wildberries warehouse job almost by chance. After her husband died in the early 2020s, she left Kursk for Podolsk to work at a factory. She earned about 800 rubles a shift — not enough to live on. Women living in her dormitory who already worked at a Wildberries warehouse persuaded her to apply.
“The girls said I was a sucker for working for 800 rubles a shift and practically made me try WB. I remember it like it was yesterday: My first shift — 3,200 [rubles],” she says.
For Oksana, “the best time” at Wildberries was the period before 2022, before the warehouse introduced a new pay system and what it called “shared liability by barcode.”
The Russian abbreviation ShK refers to a barcode, an identifier for a particular item in the Wildberries system that can be used to determine which employees handled it. Under “shared liability by barcode,” if a parcel is lost or damaged at a warehouse and no one can establish who was responsible, its cost can be divided among the employees who handled it and deducted from their pay.
Overnight on August 15–16, 2026, a Ukrainian drone struck the warehouse where Oksana works. No employees were injured.
Koledino. August 17, 2026.
Oksana believes Wildberries had already “started working for the war effort” in the first year of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. In early August, Meduza published an investigation into whether Wildberries was helping supply the army. Reviewing 1,008 posts about fundraising for Russian troops, journalists found 1,882 items that pro-war volunteers and bloggers, foundations, and regional groups had ordered through Wildberries. They included first-aid kits, clothing, generators, body armor, weapon sights, night-vision devices, radios, Starlink equipment, and drone components. The purchases Meduza identified totaled about 18.6 million rubles.
“We’re still working for the war effort now. [That’s why Ukrainian forces] blew up a bunch of warehouses!” Oksana says angrily. “And look how many people in this country are out of work! And our wonderful leader [Vladimir Putin] is counting on everyone rushing off to the ‘special military operation.’”
Evacuations were poorly organized at the first warehouses hit
Thousands of warehouse workers across Russia have come under Ukrainian drone attacks. At some facilities, logistics center managers failed to organize evacuations. During the July 18 attack on the Elektrostal warehouse, security guards kept workers inside the buildings. People had to open automatic gates by hand, crowd through narrow doorways, and, once they had left the warehouse grounds, run through the woods.
In one section of the warehouse, workers were first sent to hand in their handheld scanners before evacuating, eyewitnesses said. When the situation became critical, people ran for the exits, causing a crush.
The news outlet Msk1.ru reported that senior supervisors in one section ordered employees to shelter in the mezzanine — a shelving structure used to store goods.
“That mezzanine is the space between the shelves. Basically, it’s a trap. Everything there catches fire easily, and an explosion could bring the structure down and bury someone. It wasn’t safe to stay there. But the section managers may not have made that decision [to evacuate] right away because they didn’t know how many drones were coming or realize that a fire had already started,” former warehouse employee Anna Yeperina told Msk1.ru.
Wildberries said the evacuation had gone “according to procedure and without delay.”
According to Russia’s Emergency Situations Ministry, one employee died in the fire at the Elektrostal warehouse and seven died at the warehouse in Kotovsk, in the Tambov region, which was attacked the same day. Wildberries did not give an exact death toll for either Elektrostal or Kotovsk, saying only that people had been killed and injured in Kotovsk.
Some colleagues of those killed do not believe the official figures. “What do you think? If they’d written that 500 people died there, would any sensible person have gone to work at the warehouse the next day?” Asya, an Elektrostal warehouse employee who was working on the day of the attack, told Msk1.ru. The outlet did not give her surname. North Korean citizens worked alongside Russians at the warehouse.
Msk1.ru reported that several dozen employees at the Elektrostal warehouse were unable to contact their families during the fire: They had left their phones, documents, and other personal belongings in lockers in the changing room, as the rules required. Retrieving them during the evacuation was impossible.
“There were about 7,000 people on the night shift. Everyone doing their own job. That’s fewer than during the day, but it’s still incredibly busy,” Yelena, whose name has been changed, told Msk1.ru. She was at the warehouse overnight on July 17–18.
On July 30, Wildberries said its emergency response team was “working around the clock to keep its own records and reestablish contact.” “Since it began making calls,” the team had determined “the whereabouts and condition of 99% of those working at the facility at the time of the attack,” the company said.
“Wildberries contacted one woman and just asked, ‘Are you alive or not? And where are you?’ That was it. No support, no compensation, no psychological help. People have no documents, everything they had burned up, and they don’t know what to do,” a former Wildberries employee told the investigative outlet iStories.
In late August, Alexander Shvets, head of the Wildberries workers’ union, told Post- magazine that the warehouses in Aleksin, in the Tula region, and Elektrostal, outside Moscow, were not operating. In Koledino, in the Moscow region, only one warehouse section was operating. Under the law, workers on staff were entitled to downtime pay. To avoid paying it, Shvets said, the company was pressuring them to switch to civil-law contracts, which carry no employment benefits or protections.
“They say, ‘The warehouse burned down; you can’t work there. To go to another warehouse, you have to terminate your employment contract and sign a civil-law contract.’ Instead of drawing up an addendum changing their workplace, they’re forcing people to quit,” Shvets said.
part 2
How Wildberries left sellers with little support and millions in losses
Ukrainian strikes are costing successful sellers millions. Wildberries offered support — but it hasn’t helped everyone
Anna Yemelyanenko has worked with Wildberries since 2020. She uses the marketplace to distribute products from the Russian professional cosmetics brand Alganika Spa, which she says is fairly popular with beauty salons, spas, and health resorts. Yemelyanenko also has her own sports nutrition brand, Eme, which is sold on Wildberries too.
“What can I say about the impact of the drone attacks [on Alganika Spa]? Everything burned up. The losses are enormous. A key business partner who’s been selling our cosmetics for years lost more than 5 million rubles’ worth of goods — 7,000 items gone,” Yemelyanenko tells Bereg. She asks that the warehouse where the destroyed goods were stored not be identified.
Unlike the larger cosmetics brand, Yemelyanenko’s Eme brand is considered a “small seller account” on the marketplace, meaning it has low turnover, a limited product range, and small shipment volumes.
Her own brand lost more than half a million rubles’ worth of goods. Yemelyanenko received 34,000 rubles from Wildberries in compensation. But the partner selling Alganika Spa cosmetics has not been compensated. “Wildberries just sends canned responses. Nobody says anything specific,” she says.
Satellite image of a warehouse in Volgograd after a Ukrainian drone attack. August 1, 2026.
Yemelyanenko says she didn’t fill out any forms to receive compensation and doesn’t know how Wildberries calculated the payout amount for her brand:
We filed claims about the goods that burned, but as far as I understand, entrepreneurs I know who didn’t file any claims also received payouts. Though of course, they don’t cover the losses incurred. And some people didn’t get anything at all. Only Wildberries knows how compensation is calculated, who gets it, and who doesn’t.
There’s no phone hotline for affected sellers to reach Wildberries, only a written feedback form on the company’s website, where Anna says all questions are “answered in fairly generic terms.”
“When the first attack happened [on July 18] — on the warehouses in Elektrostal and Kotovsk — it was a shock. Then they attacked the next warehouses… At some point I became depressed,” Yemelyanenko recalled. “I was apathetic for two weeks. I didn’t know what to do next. We never managed to get our business going on Ozon. We learned how to work with traffic specifically on Wildberries.”
Now Yemelyanenko and her colleagues are trying to figure out “how to go on living.” “Maybe we’ll rebuild our B2B business or start doing something else. I might have to go work for someone else. Right now we’re stuck in this stagnant swamp — everything’s at a standstill. I want to keep the business going, but right now it’s very difficult,” she lamented.
The marketplace was genuinely useful for growing a business in the early years of her work, Anna said, but lately “it’s made things much harder.” “It’s constantly introducing fines, changing its terms of service, and raising commissions and logistics costs,” Yemelyanenko listed.
The day after the July strikes on the Elektrostal and Kotovsk warehouses, Wildberries offered support measures to affected sellers. Along with compensation for lost goods (the company hasn’t said how it calculates the amount), Wildberries made preferential loans available through its WB Bank and offered a factoring service for inventory recovery. WB Bank also introduced a deferral of up to six months on current debt repayment for small and medium-sized businesses and dropped fees for internal WB Bank payments.
Wildberries also lowered certain fees and costs for sellers using the FBS model, in which sellers store and ship goods from their own warehouses rather than the marketplace’s. The platform extended the deadline for automatic order cancellation and added other benefits to make switching to self-run storage and shipping easier.
When announcing the support measures, Wildberries founder Tatyana Kim stressed that the company has no formal ”obligation” to compensate for lost goods. Wildberries representatives later said in official statements that the company sends sellers voluntary “supportive” payments.
Starting August 7, sellers on Wildberries can insure their goods against damage or loss from terrorist attacks, sabotage, drone strikes, and their aftermath. At the same time, Wildberries raised the cost of insurance for sellers. The maximum payout is now 50,000 rubles per item and 100,000 rubles per insured event — if five insured items were damaged in a single drone attack, for instance, that would count as one insured event with a total payout of 100,000 rubles. The insurance covers goods damaged during delivery, while stored at a pickup point, or during a return. It makes no mention of coverage for inventory stored in warehouses.
Despite these measures, Anna Yemelyanenko believes Wildberries “did nothing” to help affected sellers. She calls the compensation “a drop in the bucket.” Both she and the management of the cosmetics brand she distributes decided against taking loans from the Wildberries-owned bank, since their sales channel had stopped anyway.
Russia’s Finance Ministry didn’t announce support measures for Wildberries and affected sellers until August 24. The ministry said entrepreneurs whose losses exceeded 5% of their annual income would get a one-year deferral on value-added tax and corporate profits tax, along with other benefits.
Tatyana Kim called the measures “an important step for Russian business.” “An enormous amount of work by government agencies, industry associations, and, of course, our own team went into developing this program,” the Wildberries owner added.
Anna Yemelyanenko believes the government could “at least temporarily exempt sellers from taxes entirely, for three months or six months, say.” “Not a tax holiday like during the COVID era, which just deferred payments, but an actual exemption from taxes. That would be a more or less real support measure,” the entrepreneur said.
She also believes the government could lift the requirement for sellers to label their products with Chestny Znak. To comply, sellers have to buy labeling equipment at their own expense and pay for label codes.
“I don’t get what the hell [Chestny Znak] is even for. This system makes life a lot harder in many ways,” Yemelyanenko groused. “Scrapping it would also be a great support measure.”
Sellers stay in touch with each other — and watch as stores close one after another without adequate help
Wildberries entered Kazakhstan in 2021, 11 years after it grew from an ordinary online store into a marketplace, giving local entrepreneurs the ability to register on the platform as sellers themselves. Sellers from other CIS countries — Belarus, Armenia, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan — soon followed. In 2023, Tatyana Kim said foreign business accounted for about 10% of the company’s total turnover.
Lyazzat Muratkyzy is co-founder of the Kazakhstan E-Commerce Association and owner of the online store Tommy Ariko, which sells power tools, home appliances, and construction materials that she buys directly from Chinese manufacturers.
Lyazzat initially ran two brick-and-mortar stores, in Almaty and Astana, with monthly revenue of 20–30 million tenge — about 3.3–5 million rubles. (For convenience, subsequent amounts are given only in rubles.) Her company launched on Wildberries in 2021, and the physical stores soon closed.
“Once we shifted most of our sales to the marketplace, the business started growing at a completely different pace. Our turnover and purchasing volumes grew significantly, and today Chinese factories themselves are reaching out to us with cooperation proposals,” Muratkyzy said.
Wildberries gave her business the opportunity to expand beyond Kazakhstan into the markets of Russia and other CIS countries, Muratkyzy said. But the platform’s terms have grown less comfortable for sellers, she added:
Right now, Wildberries’ commission averages 25% [of the sale price of a product], logistics costs are around 10–15%, and payment processing is 3.5%. There are also storage and paid-delivery fees, which depend on the volume of goods. In total, Wildberries’ service fees come to about 40% of turnover. And that’s without counting advertising, which now eats up another 20–25% of turnover. We pay for that ourselves, out of pocket. Before June 2026, advertising costs were a maximum of 10–15%. And in 2025, no more than 1%.
Without paid promotion, it’s become much harder for products to land prominent spots in Wildberries’ search results, Muratkyzy said, forcing sellers to raise prices or work with almost no profit.
Like Anna Yemelyanenko, Lyazzat was shocked by the news of Ukrainian attacks on the warehouses. “It wasn’t just goods that burned in the warehouses — that was our working capital. After the first attack, we immediately started checking our inventory and calculating potential losses. At that point, we still hoped it wouldn’t happen again,” Lyazzat recalled.
After a third warehouse — in Koledino, in the Moscow region — was hit on July 20, Lyazzat developed “a kind of acceptance of the situation.” “You wake up and you’re no longer surprised by news of attacks. As scary as it sounds, at some point we started getting used to it,” she said.
Smoke over the Koledino warehouse grounds. August 16, 2026.
One of the warehouses where Lyazzat stored part of her goods sits near the marketplace’s Koledino logistics center but isn’t owned by Wildberries. After the drone attack, she and her colleagues quickly moved their products to another warehouse, farther from Koledino. “Logistics has become more complicated and takes much longer. But the safety of our goods matters more to us,” she said.
Lyazzat calculated that revenue from selling the goods that burned could have reached about 67–84 million rubles. Part of that would have gone to employee salaries, taxes, fuel, and packaging materials — 20–25% in total — while the marketplace would have taken another 40% for its services.
By the end of September, the drone attacks had cost Lyazzat’s company about 46 million rubles in damage, not counting the debt owed to manufacturers for the burned goods, which had been purchased in installments.
The Kazakhstan E-Commerce Association keeps a list of companies that suffered losses from the drone attacks, Lyazzat said. “Entrepreneurs fill out a questionnaire themselves and report the amount of damage. Then we send the list and a statement to RWB,” she said. By the end of August, the total damage sellers reported to the association exceeded 335 million rubles, she said.
The consequences have been critical for many sellers Lyazzat is in contact with, who had put almost all their working capital into the goods that burned. Most sellers whose businesses were seriously affected have already stopped operating or are close to it, she said — about 90% of entrepreneurs in her circle have made that decision. “I’m in about 10 Wildberries seller chats, and I know a lot of people personally. When I say 90%, I’m basing that on my own circle,” she said.
Those who are still operating — thanks to a financial cushion or because part of their goods were stored at warehouses not owned by Wildberries — are switching from the FBO model to FBS, restructuring their logistics, continuing sales through Kazakhstani online stores, and using warehouses in Kazakhstan.
“We [members of the Kazakhstan E-Commerce Association] met with Wildberries representatives [at the marketplace’s office in Almaty]. They said they would compensate the losses, but didn’t specify when or how. Compensation is coming in gradually, and the amounts vary. We received about 1.2 million rubles in promo bonuses — against losses of more than 27 million,” Lyazzat said.
But promo bonuses aren’t real money. As with the offer of preferential loans from the Wildberries-owned bank, by paying out promo bonuses the company forces affected sellers to keep using the marketplace’s services. “And if an entrepreneur’s goods have been completely destroyed and they have no working capital left for a new purchase, they simply have nothing to advertise,” she said.
Promo bonuses can’t be withdrawn to a bank account — they can only be used to pay for advertising within the WB Promotion service. “They’re only valid for 15 days. The first installment had to be used by August 16, the second by August 30. We did that,” Lyazzat said. But some sellers, she added, barely use paid advertising, so this kind of compensation won’t help them.
As a business owner herself, Lyazzat understands Tatyana Kim. “It’s hard to spend decades building a huge company and then run into circumstances you can’t control. It’s not just sellers taking losses right now. Wildberries is also going through a serious crisis and losing large-scale infrastructure,” the entrepreneur reflected.
She finds it hard to say whether Wildberries has done enough to support affected sellers. If she were in the company’s shoes, Lyazzat herself would handle compensation differently:
I would, for example, significantly lower commissions and the advertising burden on affected sellers, temporarily bring commissions back down to 2021 levels (7–10% for a number of categories), and introduce special advertising terms. In my view, entrepreneurs would feel that far more than promo bonuses.
The rules for working on Wildberries get stricter every year, and commissions and fines keep rising. But many sellers have nowhere else to go
Clothing, footwear, and accessories make up one of the largest product categories on Wildberries. The company launched in 2004 as an online clothing store and didn’t become a marketplace until 2010, when outside sellers began joining the platform and Wildberries started earning commissions on their sales.
Russian entrepreneur Alina Litvinova’s women’s clothing brand, Simple Paris, was “born specifically for Wildberries” in 2023. (She asked Bereg not to name the region where she lives.) Litvinova designs the clothing herself, creates the patterns, and analyzes the market. Her brand mainly sells shirts, blazers, tops, and corsets, which are sewn at a factory in Bishkek and then brought to Russia.
Wildberries seemed like a “very promising” platform at first, and its terms suited her. Litvinova took a course on how to quickly launch a profitable business on the marketplace, had her first batch of clothing sewn, and went live on the platform.
Soon after launching her store, though, Litvinova received a fine from Wildberries. In 2022, sellers often resorted to “self-buyouts” to boost their products’ ratings — buying their own products through a third-party service and leaving reviews on them. The practice didn’t violate Wildberries’ rules at first, but the company banned it in December 2022 and began issuing fines.
Litvinova had to pay the marketplace 500,000 rubles. Her sales volume at the time, she said, was about 200,000 rubles a month. “It took me about six months to dig myself out of that hole, and it hurt a lot. I even wanted to leave the platform. But I decided I could handle it. And I did, more or less,” Alina recalled. She added that “every year, things got harder and worse on Wildberries.”
The company then began raising commissions, logistics costs, and advertising prices. On January 13, 2024, a fire broke out at the Shushary warehouse in St. Petersburg, where Litvinova’s goods were stored. Investigators attributed the blaze to safety violations. The fire spread across tens of thousands of square meters and took 30 hours to extinguish. In August 2024, Tatyana Kim said Wildberries had paid sellers nearly 35 billion rubles in compensation.
Fire at the warehouse in Shushary. January 13, 2024.
“We received about half the value of the goods that burned back then,” Litvinova told Bereg. The Shushary warehouse caught fire again this summer, this time in a Ukrainian drone attack, but Litvinova didn’t have any goods there.
Wildberries’ commissions kept climbing throughout this period, with the most recent increase — nine percentage points at once — coming this summer. “Basically, our abusive relationship with Wildberries has really put us through hell all these years, but we kept working and turning a profit anyway,” Litvinova said.
Litvinova remembers the first news of Ukrainian strikes on Wildberries warehouses, in Elektrostal and Kotovsk, “very well.” “I was in Moscow, having a leisurely breakfast with a friend. Suddenly my manager messaged me that the Elektrostal warehouse had been attacked. We’d just had a big shipment of new items go there,” Litvinova recalled. “I was in shock and burst into tears; I couldn’t hold back. I had a train to St. Petersburg, and I cried the whole way. I couldn’t pull myself together the entire trip.”
The “creepiest” part, she said, was that shortly before that, on July 7, Wildberries changed its terms of service: the marketplace stated that it bears no responsibility for the aftermath of drone strikes.”
The company likely adopted this rule after smoke was reported at the Elektrostal warehouse in mid-June. Wildberries didn’t say what caused the fire, but it may have followed a Ukrainian drone attack: overnight on June 15–16, drones injured four people and damaged two residential buildings in the village of Sluchainy, near Elektrostal, where the company’s warehouse is located.
“Back then no one took it [the change to the terms of service] seriously, because no one could have imagined something like this would happen,” Litvinova said.
Ukrainian drone attacks continued after July 18, “and with every new warehouse, every new thousand units of burned goods, the stress got worse,” Litvinova said. “At the same time, our shipments [to Wildberries warehouses] kept going out. Naturally, we minimized them and started thinking about what to do,” she added. Like other Bereg sources, she has since switched to the FBS system.
However, shortly before July 20, she still sent a small batch of goods to the Koledino warehouse. “I read somewhere that it was a central warehouse and definitely wouldn’t be touched. But it got hit too. Our shipment burned,” Alina said with a sigh.
Litvinova estimates her brand’s losses at about 6,000 units of product, with a production cost of around 6 million rubles. Her products were stored at many of the large Wildberries warehouses hit by drones. “About 1,500–2,000 units were in Koledino, the rest at other warehouses,” she said. “The remaining goods are either being shuttled between warehouses, sitting in our fulfillment warehouse, or still being sewn at the factory in Bishkek.”
Litvinova hasn’t received any compensation yet. She knows sellers who were paid 10,000–30,000 rubles, but their accounts, she said, are “very small.” She calls her own account “medium-sized,” with a significantly higher turnover.
“In my view, Wildberries hasn’t done enough to support sellers. The platform could have lowered advertising costs. All they did was remove the localization index, which affects delivery and logistics costs and, ultimately, a seller’s margin,” Alina said.
Litvinova says she’s lost about half her business while still having to pay off loans worth millions of rubles. “Banks don’t want to offer reasonable deferrals and instead offer predatory restructuring deals where I’d have to pay several million rubles extra on top. That’s completely unacceptable to me. There are no reasonable deferral options,” she said.
Tax authorities also won’t grant deferrals, she said. “Because I was 11 days late paying VAT for the second quarter, they froze all my accounts, including my personal bank cards,” she said. Relatives helped her pay off the debt.
Litvinova used to withdraw funds from Wildberries daily, but Wildberries blocked that service without explanation. She waited about a month before her account regained access to weekly withdrawals. “The whole time, about two million rubles were frozen,” Alina added.
Other sellers she knows who were also affected by the Ukrainian attacks are still operating, but aren’t sure they can keep their businesses going.
Large stores are worse off than small and medium-sized ones when their logistics and storage discounts on Wildberries are tied to meeting sales targets, Litvinova said. They lost goods in the Ukrainian attacks, missed their targets, and lost their discounts for operating on the marketplace — discounts that are critically important for many sellers.
Under their contracts, she added, some stores can’t sell on other marketplaces, such as Ozon, and still receive benefits on Wildberries.
“I can work on Ozon, and I do. We already tried selling there, but it didn’t work out at the time. Now we want to try again with renewed effort, because there are products that can be sold there,” Litvinova said. Wildberries, she added, remains the most profitable platform in Russia for clothing sellers.
Demand for women’s clothing is highest on Wildberries specifically. The company’s pickup points are equipped with fitting rooms; after fittings, it’s convenient to accept, store, and then send large batches of returned goods back to the warehouses. Ozon’s system is geared more toward customers keeping everything they order, with minimal returns.
Alina declined to answer Bereg’s questions about the Ukrainian strikes on Ozon warehouses that began in mid-August, or about her future plans to do business on that platform.
In her view, Tatyana Kim reacted to the warehouse strikes like “a typical politician.” Litvinova calls Kim’s video address “completely puppet-like.” In it, the Wildberries chief lists support measures for sellers, calls the warehouse attacks “terrorist,” and asks the public to trust “only official channels of communication.” “It’s as if some political operatives came up with it,” she said.
Alina believes Kim should pay sellers at least part of the value of the burned goods “by whatever means available.” “Even at the expense of Wildberries’ net profit and owner dividends,” the entrepreneur stressed. “I would go to the government and ask for subsidies. And I would also give up part of my own capital to pay out sellers.”
A Wildberries ad in central Moscow. July 27, 2026.
Litvinova believes government involvement in helping affected sellers is necessary and justified:
Russia, which allowed this to happen, could [temporarily] cancel taxes for sellers, including VAT at the 5% and 7% rates. Then it could require banks to offer interest-free loan deferrals for a year or two. Not restructuring, but actual deferrals, so that we ultimately pay the same amount we owe now, and the state compensates the banks for the difference. As it stands, I’m paying taxes to a state that didn’t support me and that left me with loans and no goods.
part 3
How the crisis at Wildberries is affecting pickup point owners and couriers
Delays in deliveries from warehouses are the main, but not the only, reason pickup points are losing customers and income
Wildberries’ turnover grew sharply in the early 2020s, from 118.7 billion rubles in 2018 to 844 billion in 2021. An entire ecosystem formed around the marketplace, generating income not just for sellers and logistics center employees but also for couriers and pickup point owners and employees.
In spring 2023, the company got into a serious conflict with pickup point workers after the marketplace introduced rules that let it fine employees for product substitution or for handing a customer defective goods or items that didn’t match the order.
Pickup point workers were outraged — the company had effectively shifted the blame onto them for mistakes more often made by sellers or logistics staff. A strike began, coordinated through Telegram chats, and employees wrote appeals to lawmakers and filed complaints with the Prosecutor General’s Office, Rospotrebnadzor, and the Labor Ministry.
Under pressure, Wildberries canceled more than 10,000 fines and temporarily stopped issuing new fines for product substitution. The Federal Antimonopoly Service (FAS) also demanded that the company revise its rules for working with pickup point employees and create an internal arbitration process to resolve disputed cases.
Pickup point owners and employees remain unhappy with the marketplace’s policies, though. In summer 2026, new problems from Ukrainian drone attacks on Wildberries warehouses piled onto existing fines, unstable pickup point income, constantly changing rules, and other inconveniences. Most pickup points are also located in residential high-rises, which could themselves be hit by Ukrainian strikes.
Aksinya (not her real name) owns a pickup point in Lyubertsy, outside Moscow, where deliveries used to arrive two or three times a day. Amid the attacks on Wildberries’ infrastructure, deliveries have dropped sharply, and now a truck comes once every three days. Pickup point owners’ revenue from the company depends almost entirely on how many items are handed out.
Aksinya opened her pickup point in early June, and just a month and a half later, Ukraine’s military began regularly attacking the warehouses. She decided she wasn’t willing to take the risk.
“I had the bad luck to open at this time. There’s no point working at a loss, so I’m closing,” Aksinya said with a sigh.
Oleg (not his real name), from St. Petersburg, hasn’t yet run into problems from the Ukrainian strikes, unlike Aksinya. What complicates his work are Wildberries’ own rules.
Oleg bought an existing pickup point from its previous owner in March 2026 and invested 350,000 rubles at the start. The decision seemed like a good one: the location was already operating and didn’t need major upgrades. In the first few months, it brought in modest profit — an average of 10,000–20,000 rubles.
Another Wildberries pickup point operated not far from Oleg’s. Soon a third opened nearby as well. “There used to be two locations in the area — mine and one other — and each brought in 100,000 rubles in profit. When the third pickup point opened, the number of residents in the area didn’t grow. Now customers are split between three locations,” he complained to Bereg.
The company restricted pickup point density more strictly a few years ago, Oleg said, but now new locations can open right next to ones already operating, leaving owners almost no way to influence customer flow. As a result, his business started running at a loss of 30,000–40,000 rubles a month.
To make up the shortfall, Oleg installed an advertising screen at his location, part of a separate Wildberries digital-screen service that moderates all the ads it displays. A pickup point owner gets an additional bonus for showing the ads, equal to 40% of what the advertiser pays for the placement. Oleg’s main goal now is “at least to break even.”
Oleg complains that he has little freedom running his own pickup point. An owner can try to change operating hours — switching from 10 a.m.–10 p.m. hours to 9 a.m.–9 p.m., say — or ask Wildberries to raise compensation, he said, but the company almost never responds to such requests.
“It’s hard to call a pickup point a small business. The exception is entrepreneurs who have five or more locations. Either you open a pickup point as a side venture while already having a main business, or it’s a failing project,” Oleg said.
According to Oleg, in disputed situations — when goods are lost, don’t match the order, or turn out to be defective through no fault of the pickup point — Wildberries often sides with the customer and fines the pickup point.
Challenging the marketplace’s decisions is very difficult, Oleg said, as is getting rid of negative customer ratings on online maps. His pickup point once received a one-star rating with the comment: “I won’t be coming back here, I caught a cold.” A pickup point owner, he said, effectively has no way to dispute an unfair rating.
Pickup point owners are also left explaining Wildberries’ own rules to customers, Oleg said. If a customer receives defective goods, for instance, a pickup point employee can’t always just take them back — in some cases, the customer first has to buy the order and then file a separate return, which infuriates some customers.
Despite the losses, Oleg isn’t planning to close his pickup point for now. The easiest way to exit the business without losses, he said, is to sell it. Another option is to turn it into a family business and save on employee salaries — he currently has two employees. If he can’t “pull his pickup point into the black” in the near future, Oleg said he’ll hand it over to his daughter and son-in-law.
Some Russians own multiple pickup points — for them, it’s a full-fledged business and their only job
Irina (not her real name), who lives in the Krasnoyarsk region, decided to open her own pickup point in Minusinsk after a year of running an Ozon pickup point. Her investment there paid for itself in just two months, so in 2025 she wanted to “expand” and “try her hand with Wildberries.”
This pickup point didn’t start operating until 2026: Irina spent a long time renovating the space, and in February of this year, the marketplace changed its brand guidelines, so she had to redo the interior and order new furniture.
Irina hasn’t given much thought yet to Ukrainian drone attacks on Wildberries logistics centers, saying there are “no major warehouses in the Krasnoyarsk region that would attract the attention” of Ukraine’s military. But drones have already attacked neighboring regions — an air raid alert was declared in the Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Okrug on July 6, for instance.
“If something like that happens [in the Krasnoyarsk region], we’ll deal with it. I’m not scared for now,” Irina said. “A lot of people talk about this being ‘not the best time’ to work with WB. It’s different for everyone — some people are fine, some complain. I talked to pickup point owners in our city about a drop in order volume: nobody has noticed a decline. Nothing has changed for me on Ozon either.”
Marketplace signs on the wall of a building in Vidnoye, outside Moscow. July 28, 2026.
Milena (not her real name), from St. Petersburg, owns three pickup points. She opened the first one a year and a half ago, and the most recent one in June 2026.
Her work with Wildberries started “in a pretty mundane way,” Milena recalled — there simply weren’t enough pickup points in her neighborhood for her own needs. She invested about half a million rubles to open her first location.
The location turned out to be a good one, and the investment paid off in less than six months. After that, the pickup point started generating profit, which allowed Milena to open two more. By her estimate, a well-located pickup point in St. Petersburg brings in about 100,000–120,000 rubles in profit a month on average.
“All pickup points are very different. Mine are completely different from each other. It all depends on the location and the people who live nearby: whether it’s a new neighborhood with mortgaged homes or an older one with more elderly residents [where demand for marketplaces is lower],” Milena explained.
Everything got harder in summer 2026, Milena said. July has always been a “weak month” for business, she said, as people go on vacation and to their dachas and sales drop by about 20%. But this year sales fell much more sharply, by about 50%, which she attributes to the Ukrainian drone attacks and disrupted logistics:
We saw that people were ordering, but the goods just weren’t arriving. As a result, we had nothing to hand out — and no revenue. All our hope is that the supply chains will be rebuilt faster and goods will start arriving again. I’m not even talking about profit anymore — I just want to at least cover payroll, rent, and all the mandatory payments.
Despite the difficulties, Milena enjoys working at the pickup points. “I love talking to customers myself. All my regulars know me, many of them have my phone number, and they can come to me with questions. Sometimes they come with problems that even WB support couldn’t answer, and we help solve them,” Milena said.
The Ukrainian drone attacks have made her anxious about the future of her business. Milena fears that the cost of rebuilding the destroyed infrastructure could fall on everyone in the system — sellers, pickup point owners, and customers. “Money doesn’t come from nowhere,” she added.
Even so, Milena doesn’t think Wildberries is handling the aftermath of the attacks or supporting its workers poorly. “I think they’re doing everything they can. It’s a huge system, and it’s hard to even imagine the scale of its supply chains. Of course, it will never be enough for some people, but I don’t know what else the company could do,” she reflected.
In Milena’s view, it’s wrong to place the entire burden of the attacks’ consequences on Wildberries:
This is a business, and business carries risk. It’s just that now a risk of this kind has emerged. As a business owner and the head of a huge corporation, she [Tatyana Kim] is doing enough. Maybe something could have been done differently. But this is a gigantic company.
Couriers are also suffering from Wildberries’ rules. In some disputes, it’s easier for the marketplace to blame the delivery worker than to figure out who’s actually at fault
Income depends on order volume not just for pickup point employees but for couriers too, who have had little to deliver because of disruptions at the logistics centers. Wildberries hasn’t changed courier working conditions since the drone attacks began, and there have been no reports of delayed payments to couriers.
How many couriers currently work with Wildberries is unknown. In February 2025, the company told journalists that more than 20,000 couriers worked with it in 67 Russian cities, and by the end of the year it was already reporting “tens of thousands” of couriers in more than a thousand cities.
Wildberries says a courier’s average income is about 105,000 rubles a month, with a maximum of up to 250,000 rubles, and that payments are made weekly.
Alisa (not her real name), who lives in Magnitogorsk, has worked as a Wildberries courier for several years. It used to be her main source of income, but now she only takes shifts “from time to time.”
She likes the flexible schedule and the chance to be out and about around the city, but the job has downsides that really bother her.
Sometimes, an order a courier drove to a pickup point to collect turns out to have been canceled or disappeared from the task list for no clear reason. Other times, a pickup point employee can’t find the item, or customers aren’t home or don’t answer calls. In those cases, the courier spends time traveling to and from the pickup point without getting paid.
“I’ve hauled 15-kilogram (33-pound) bags of pet food and heavy [cat litter] that way. If you can’t reach the client by phone, you end up with a free round trip. Over five hours there can be several deliveries like that — so you end up working an hour for free,” Alisa complained.
What worries her most, though, is couriers’ financial liability for goods. The terms of service hold them responsible for the loss, substitution, damage, or shortage of an order for 90 days after delivery. After that much time, Alisa said, it can be difficult to reconstruct the circumstances of a disputed delivery. What’s more, “the courier will have one version of events, the pickup point employee another, and tech support a third.”
“It’s easier for WB to shift the blame onto the courier than to figure out who messed up and where. I don’t feel like a protected employee,” Alisa said with a sigh. “It’s hard to recommend this job. As a rule, couriers stick around until their first shortage claim. Then they leave.”
* * *
On September 18, Wildberries announced the third phase of payments: starting October 1, more than 200,000 sellers are supposed to receive cash compensation, and the company promised to fully reimburse losses of up to 500,000 rubles.
Ozon, through the insurer Ingosstrakh, began paying sellers insurance compensation: by September 18, about 90,000 sellers had received 8.2 billion rubles.
Sellers from both marketplaces have also begun taking the companies to court, the Russian business daily Kommersant reported in late September. Between July 15 and September 15, sellers filed 599 new lawsuits against RWB, which manages Wildberries, and 236 against Internet Resheniya LLC, Ozon’s main legal entity. Most of the lawsuits concern goods lost in the warehouse attacks and, in Wildberries’ case, delayed payments to sellers that came to light in early September.
Wildberries sellers complained to the government that many of them still hadn’t received payment for sales from the last week of July, which Wildberries was supposed to transfer by August 26. The Marketplace Sellers Union estimated the total debt at about 20 billion rubles. The seller service Tochka Sverki said payment delays had begun even before the Ukrainian attacks on the warehouses but grew noticeably worse afterward.
Wildberries attributed the delays to DDoS attacks on its Seller Balance service. The company also said that the number of lawsuits is proportionate to the scale of RWB’s business. Ozon attributed the rise in claims to the fact that “the volume of litigation against the company depends on the number of its transactions, which has grown substantially,” Kommersant reported.
Russian attorneys began telling their social media followers and journalists as early as July that sellers whose goods burned in warehouses after drone strikes should take the matter to court, and many believe sellers have a chance of winning. Attorney Anya Bagdasaryan, for instance, said that Wildberries’ addition of a clause disclaiming liability for drone-attack damage to its terms of service doesn’t, under the law, “mean the company is automatically exempt from liability.”
To be exempt, the marketplace still has to prove the goods were lost specifically because of force majeure — a drone strike — rather than for other reasons, attorney Sergei Zhorin said. Failures in the warehouse’s own operations, he said, such as “failing to take reasonable measures to contain the fire and preserve surviving goods,” don’t count as force majeure.
Attorney Artemy Volovik agrees: “The company still has to prove that it truly could not have prevented the aftermath of what happened.”
At Meduza, we are committed to transparency about our use of artificial intelligence in the newsroom. The story you’re reading was written by one of our living, breathing journalists and translated from Russian using an AI model configured to follow our strict editorial standards. This translation process is the result of extensive testing and refinements to ensure our English-language coverage is timely and accurate. A Meduza editor reviews every draft before publication.
If you find any errors in this translation, please contact us at reports@meduza.io.
Meduza recently launched “The Emigrant Questionnaire,” a series about Russians living abroad. We plan to tell the stories of emigrants both famous and little known. Russian singer Monetochka filled out the first questionnaire. The second respondent is Elmira Drau, a 32-year-old English teacher who volunteered to take part — and we were delighted to take her up on it. Drau left Gelendzhik for Yerevan in May 2022 after someone reported her to the authorities over an antiwar comment in a Telegram chat. The only money she and her husband had came from selling their car. Neither had a remote job, and they didn’t know anyone in the city. At times, things were so hard that they had only enough money to feed their cat. Still, Elmira launched a new project (more than one, in fact!) that earns her an income. She also helps stray animals and is writing a book about emigration.
Where do you live, and how long have you lived there?
I live in Yerevan. My husband and I moved here in 2022, and in March it’ll be five years since we arrived. Like many Russians, we hadn’t planned to move before 2022. In the very first days of the invasion, we looked into where we could move without too much difficulty and chose Armenia because I didn’t have a passport for foreign travel. Honestly, until then I hadn’t even known you could go anywhere with just a Russian domestic passport.
Early in the invasion, someone reported me to the authorities over a comment in one of Gelendzhik’s Telegram chats. People in that chat used to get together to go to various rallies, and when I opened it after the invasion began, I saw people inviting others to a rally in support of the president. I was absolutely outraged, and I wrote a long comment about how much I hated them all. They were saying, “We need to support our heroes,” and I replied that the heroes were the people speaking out against the war. Then I left the chat.
In mid-May, on a Sunday night, the local police officer called me and said there’d been an anonymous complaint. He said, “Come down to the station right now.” I refused: It was nighttime, it was Sunday, and I was scared. The next day, I got another call. I was in the middle of changing my last name on my documents, and someone from the passport office said they’d made some kind of mistake and I needed to come in urgently.
We were planning to leave Russia in just a few days, so I decided to go and check everything. They looked at my documents and said everything was fine. I walked out, and a police officer was right there waiting for me: “Let’s go sign the offense report.” At first I said no, but he said that if I refused, he’d call in detectives and I’d be jailed for 15 days. Well, let’s go, then.
I got into the car and pressed the button in the chatbot run by [the human rights project] OVD-Info, and they sent me instructions. At the station, they asked me all sorts of questions about my views on the “special military operation” and so on. I wouldn’t say they treated me badly, but being at the station was still hard. You feel like you’re all alone in the world, like you’re a minority of one. But then I walked out, turned on my phone, and all these messages of support came flooding in: Earlier, I’d texted a friend that I’d been detained. People offered to help raise money to pay the fine and find a lawyer.
We left 10 days after I found out someone had reported me. I was really worried about whether I’d be able to leave at all, especially because just a day before we left, an acquaintance of mine was detained, cited for the same administrative offense, and threatened with never seeing her child again. But even after I left, law enforcement officers kept coming to [my] relatives’ homes and asking, “Has she come back?”
What do you love most about your new country?
I ended up choosing Armenia by chance. I needed to get out of Russia very quickly, and on Instagram I came across a repost with guides on how to leave quickly. Armenia and Kazakhstan were on the list. Armenia looked more appealing, partly because you could stay for a long time without a visa. Once we arrived in Armenia, I relaxed a little: People are treated completely differently here. You realize your troubles are over and things will only get better from here.
I felt it in the very first minutes after we landed. There was a sign at Zvartnots Airport that said, “Welcome home.” After such a stressful flight, when I hadn’t even known whether they’d let me leave the country, that sign really struck me. Then it turned out our virtual cards on Russia’s Mir payment system didn’t work, and we couldn’t withdraw cash from an ATM — we didn’t know all the workarounds for transferring money yet. We got to the hotel and told the owner, and she said, “Check in, get some sleep, then sort things out and pay.” That won me over, too. I knew right away that we’d be all right here.
What I love most about Armenia is the people. Everyone here is ready to help: If you treat the country with respect, Armenians can sense it. They’re open and always happy to point you in the right direction. Locals would give you the last of what they have because you’re a guest. Second is the scenery. I’m from the Krasnodar region, and it mattered to me to have mountains nearby. Just a little way outside Yerevan, you’re surrounded by beauty.
Yerevan itself is also a beautiful city, at least the center. It’s well laid out, it’s a pleasure to walk around, you can get everywhere on foot, and I love walking. It’s big, with everything a city should have, but it isn’t as noisy or exhausting. You can rent a place in a quiet neighborhood and live in peace. I’m from Gelendzhik, which has about 80,000 people, so having a subway and living in a city of a million was a pleasant surprise.
It’s also easy to find something you enjoy doing here: There are tons of clubs and classes for adults, because so many emigrants came and everyone started something new. Back when there were more emigrants — a lot of them later moved away — something was happening every day: festivals, networking events, workshops. I’d go and think, “Wow, can you really live like this, with so many interesting things happening around you all the time?”
From a personal archiveFrom a personal archiveFrom a personal archiveFrom a personal archiveFrom a personal archiveFrom a personal archive
What was hardest to accept in your new country?
I don’t really think in terms of “hard” or “I don’t like it.” I know I have two options: Quickly accept everything that’s happening, or make myself miserable. In 2022, I decided I needed to assimilate quickly. I brushed off the little difficulties of adjusting to everyday life: I’d think, I could be in prison, and I’m not, so everything’s great.
The way people think took a little getting used to. People in Armenia live at a very relaxed pace. If you call a repairman, there’s a good chance he won’t show up that same day. But once I relaxed, I realized I needed to accept that pace: If you live that way, too, everything will be great.
The hardest thing to accept was having been forced to leave in the first place, because I miss home so much. It helped that everyone here was in the same situation, and that Russians stick together.
Armenians always try to support us. In the first year, they didn’t always understand why we were here, and there was a lot of pro-Russian sentiment. Taxi drivers would often tell me they needed a leader like Putin. They were saying it to make a good impression on us. But over time, the conversations changed. It mattered to me that, even though they didn’t always understand why so many of us had come, they still tried to make us feel welcome.
What’s your favorite place in your new city?
I love the Cascade in Yerevan. Before we moved, I decided to google where we were going, because, I’m embarrassed to say, I knew nothing about Armenia or Yerevan. I saw the Cascade and thought, “Wow, we have to go there.”
When we first walked around Yerevan, the Cascade really impressed me. Unfortunately, it’s unfinished. I think they’re planning to finish it, but it’s still a lovely place. You can grab a coffee, sit down, and look at Mount Ararat when it’s visible.
I also go to every coffee shop there is in Yerevan. If a new one opens, I’m there on the first day. Especially if it’s dog-friendly — then I’ll definitely be there.
Outside the city, Lake Sevan really impressed me, and it still does whenever we go. Its sheer size and incredible beauty are amazing. It’s a place where you can really recharge: You can come, sit, think, and watch the water and the seagulls. I really miss the sea, and Sevan helps me miss it a little less.
What’s your favorite local food?
I love zhingyalov hats — it’s a flatbread stuffed with greens, with as many as 20 different kinds of herbs. And, of course, I love dolma. I could eat those two dishes every day. Armenian food is pretty heavy and meat-based overall, but dolma is so good. I don’t make it myself; I only order it.
I don’t like fancy restaurants. I prefer coffee shops and little cafés, often family-run. We mostly get Armenian food delivered; I’m not that keen on going out to eat. Of the small Armenian restaurants, I really like the café Konservatoriya in Dilijan. We go there sometimes. They have dolma, Armenian wines, really good coffee, and desserts.
Have you taken up any new hobbies since moving abroad?
Lots. I always have a lot going on; I need to be doing something all the time, and when you’ve emigrated, it also helps you get back on your feet emotionally. I’ve started writing a book about emigration. It’s about moving and the experiences I think all of us who emigrated in 2022 shared. I’ve already posted a few chapters for anyone to read, and lots of people have written to say it’s hard to read because they’re reliving it all. That means it’s well written.
I also volunteer: I rescue cats and dogs and find homes for them. It helps keep you grounded a little: The news leaves me with this constant background anxiety, and doing something useful makes it easier. Right now, I’m fostering a cat we took home from the forest because we couldn’t bear to leave him there. Sometimes I go to community cleanups. All of that helps you realize that your life is here and now.
When I’m inspired, I paint — whatever comes into my head. I have a blog about English, and I’ve made a lot of friends through it. I study languages: Over these four years, I’ve learned Spanish and started learning Armenian. It took me a long time to get around to it, but now I’m taking it seriously.
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Have you managed to make new friends? How?
I have just one friend left in Russia. We’ve been friends since childhood — we’re like sisters. Keeping that friendship was really important to me, and I’m glad we’ve managed it.
My whole social circle has changed here, and I’m really happy about it, because the people who left are just amazing. Most of the people I meet here are really interesting and creative, with tons of projects and ideas. I’m an introvert, but I still managed to push myself to get out and meet people. In Yerevan, it was a bit like being kids in a sandbox: “Want to be friends?” “Sure.” All it took was sharing a couple of fundamental values, and suddenly you were best friends: Tomorrow you’re getting coffee, the day after you’re going somewhere else together. It all came easily because everyone needed people to talk to. I’m still friends with lots of them, people I’ve known almost since our first weeks abroad.
I’ve managed to make local friends, too. I met my first through helping animals, and the second and I bonded over coffee. Armenians are very open people; they’re always happy to meet someone new. I can strike up a conversation with someone in line at a coffee shop, and we’ll exchange contact information and make plans to get coffee. Talk for five minutes, and they might already invite you over. But that happens if you’re a nice, open person yourself: Then people treat you the same way.
Do you have enough money to live in your new country? How do you deal with financial difficulties?
We hadn’t planned to move, and we had no savings. We sold the car, which we still had a loan on, and afterward we had about $1,500 left. We used it to buy tickets, get the cat’s paperwork done, buy suitcases, and book a hotel — and in the end, we had about $500 left, no more.
I don’t know how we would’ve survived without the shelter run by Kovcheg. By sheer luck, I found out about it after we’d arrived, and I applied, but we didn’t hear back for a long time. Our hotel stay was almost over, and rents in Yerevan were high then. And it wasn’t just the prices: There simply weren’t any one-room apartments or studios available — they got snapped up so fast that renting anything was almost impossible. Then Kovcheg contacted us and offered us a place to stay. There, we teamed up with some other people who were looking for housing, too, and rented a big apartment together. It worked out pretty cheap.
Neither my husband nor I worked remotely. In Russia, I taught English in person at children’s centers. After I left, some of my students switched to online lessons with me, and I had to learn how to teach that way. The money barely covered anything: For the first few months, things were so bad that I had to choose between buying food for myself and buying it for the cat. Of course, we chose the cat: We’d brought him with us, and we owed him a good life. It was really hard, honestly. Sometimes I wondered whether we’d eat that day.
But I don’t spend much time dwelling on how hard things are. If it’s hard, I need to do something quickly to make it easier. We needed something to live on while my husband and I looked for work. So I started making videos about English on Instagram, thinking maybe someone would find me there. Gradually, the blog started growing, and since a lot of people had emigrated and needed English, things went pretty well. But that took a few months. Then my husband found a job, and things got a little easier, but for a while we were still on a very tight budget, counting every penny, and the exchange rate was really bad, too. Then the blog grew to a few thousand followers, rents fell, and things got much easier.
The first year and a half to two years were still tough. We rented awful apartments with terrible interiors that I’d never have lived in if we’d had enough money. We really had no luck with apartments. In those first months, I wasn’t thinking about what a great city this was: We didn’t have the chance to walk around and enjoy Yerevan; we were thinking about how to earn a living. Later, we got a taste of how lovely and fun it is here, and how good the food is. But even in those first months, when we were thinking about survival, I never considered giving it all up and going back.
What are you doing to learn the new language?
Not that much yet: I’ve downloaded various apps, and I’m learning how to write and say things. There’s one difficulty: For some reason, everyone speaks Russian to me. I try to say something in Armenian, and they switch to Russian because they want to make me feel comfortable. But I actually want to speak Armenian.
For now, I’m learning through apps, but I want to start lessons with a teacher: Personally, I need quick results, and a teacher gives me motivation — if I’ve paid, I have to study. Besides, Armenian varies a lot from city to city, so it would be important to me to study with a native speaker specifically from Yerevan.
From a personal archiveFrom a personal archiveFrom a personal archiveFrom a personal archiveFrom a personal archiveFrom a personal archive
How do you cope when you really miss home?
Writing the book helps me a lot: It helps me think a lot of things through. My main character is from my hometown, too, and I put my own feelings into the book, along with feelings that readers might relate to. It also helps to know that I’m needed here: I’m involved in activism — for example, I privately help LGBTQ people leave Russia, and I find homes for animals.
On my blog, I write about politics as well as English. I used to have a blog devoted entirely to feminism. I still run a low-cost English group for political emigrants who can’t afford lessons — that’s a small act of activism, too. When antiwar rallies were being held, we often went to the embassy with signs. We used to take things to a shelter for Ukrainians. A bit of everything, really: I do what I can.
When I lived in Russia, I felt like I was living under a concrete slab. It’s hanging over you, but it doesn’t crush you all at once — it does it little by little. They pass some law, and it presses down on you a little. Then you think, “Well, life goes on, everything’s fine.” Then it presses down a little more, and again. Here, that slab isn’t hanging over you, and you realize you can do whatever you want.
Sometimes homesickness still hits me. Then I read the news, and it passes pretty quickly. I also realize that I miss a home that no longer exists: It lives on in our memories. It’s great to have those memories, to be able to go back in your mind and spend a little time there. But then you need to be here.
Do you feel you’re losing your connection to your home country? Is it possible to keep it?
I don’t know if I ever had a connection to Russia as such. I miss the Krasnodar region, the sea, my relatives, and my friends, but I always wanted to leave Russia itself — just on my own terms. When I watched “Friends” as a kid, I thought, “Wow, what a great life they have. I want that, too.” I’d look at that New York apartment, while at home I had overhead storage cabinets and a rug on the wall — I wanted to leave so badly.
I keep in touch with my family, but not all of them: Some of my relatives are, let’s say, on the other side. But I have a grandmother I love very much. She supports me in everything I do, including emigrating, and we message each other almost every day. I have a wonderful godmother who always said I should live somewhere else. She’s an amazing woman who values freedom, and I really like her views. We talk from time to time.
I used to have two close friends, but unfortunately, it turned out that one of them and I saw things completely differently, and we couldn’t keep in touch. There are values that are fundamental to me, and in 2022, it became clear that a lot of people didn’t share them. She was one of those people. I decided I’d rather keep our friendship as a happy memory than fight, and we went our separate ways peacefully.
Are you happy living abroad?
I believe being happy is a choice. Here, bombs aren’t exploding over my head, it’s safe, and I can speak my mind. I have sad moments like everyone else, but overall I’m pretty happy, and I think I have a decent life.
I didn’t think I was unhappy even when we were sleeping on a mattress on the floor and had no money for food. First, I didn’t have time to think about it, and second, I was afraid: If I admitted to myself that I was unhappy, I’d fall apart and stop doing anything at all. That’s beating yourself up, and it’s really harmful. So every day, I choose to be a happy person that day, and that’s how I live.
How do you imagine returning home?
I’d definitely like to visit, see my grandmother and grandfather, and just walk around the places I grew up. But I’m not sure I could live in Russia. Even if the government changes and something happens, the people who report others to the authorities — the reason I left — will still be there, and I’d find it hard to live alongside them. So I’m more likely to picture coming back for vacations, maybe once a year, but probably not living in Russia permanently.
At Meduza, we are committed to transparency about our use of artificial intelligence in the newsroom. The story you’re reading was written by one of our living, breathing journalists and translated from Russian using an AI model configured to follow our strict editorial standards. This translation process is the result of extensive testing and refinements to ensure our English-language coverage is timely and accurate. A Meduza editor reviews every draft before publication.
If you find any errors in this translation, please contact us at reports@meduza.io.
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