8 August, 10:03
Russian strikes have destroyed over 400 thousand square meters of Ukrainian business warehouse space in a single month, the equivalent of 56 football fields, Forbes Ukraine has calculated. Fozzy Group, Rozetka, Epicentr, Nova Poshta, and hundreds of entrepreneurs who stored their goods on the infrastructure of the big players have all come under fire.
The warehouse real estate market of the Kyiv region has already lost more than half of its pre-war capacity: of the roughly two million square meters that existed before the full-scale invasion, over one million two hundred thousand have been destroyed.
Let us think this picture through. The players who spent years monopolizing and carving up the market among themselves have today become the most convenient targets for the Russian fascist occupiers. Those same "market monsters" have proven the most vulnerable precisely because of their size. One accurate strike on a logistics hub, and the goods of hundreds of entrepreneurs who rented space from the giant burn along with it. Meanwhile, tens of thousands of small entrepreneurs scattered across the country, with their garages, basements, and small warehouses, keep working. There is simply no point in shooting at them: a missile worth millions of dollars against a warehouse worth a few thousand never pays off.
This is not an accident. This is a law of war that humanity learned long ago, and learned at great cost.
Lessons Written in Bombs
When the Luftwaffe was methodically knocking out British aviation industry in 1940, London responded with the "shadow factories" program: the production of engines and airframes was split across dozens of sites scattered around the country, critical components were duplicated, workshops were moved out of industrial agglomerations. Coventry, where industry was concentrated, the Germans burned out in a single night. The dispersed system they could not burn out: it lost individual links, but never the ability to produce aircraft.
The Soviet Union did the same in 1941 in a panicked but massive version: the evacuation of thousands of factories beyond the Urals was nothing other than the forced decentralization of industry, without which the war would have been lost within a year.
And when the atomic bomb appeared, the Americans turned this experience into state doctrine. In 1951, the Truman administration adopted a national industrial dispersion policy: new defense plants were to be built not in metropolitan areas but at a distance from existing industrial centers, precisely because concentration turns an economy into a set of convenient targets. Dispersion was recognized as a form of defense. Not concrete, not air defense, but geography and fragmentation.
The most beautiful example of this logic is one we use every day. In the early 1960s, RAND Corporation engineer Paul Baran was designing a communications system capable of surviving a nuclear strike. His conclusion was simple: a centralized network with a main node dies from a single hit, while a distributed network, where every node is connected to several neighbors, survives even after losing a significant share of its elements. From this idea grew ARPANET, and from it, the internet. The very architecture of the network on which you are reading this text was born from one understanding: centralization kills, distribution saves.
Energy: The Same Thing, Only in Pipes
Western societies learned this lesson in peacetime as well. Denmark, after the oil shock of 1973, deliberately abandoned the bet on a few giant power plants and over twenty years covered the country with hundreds of small cogeneration units and wind turbines: today the Danish system has no single point whose destruction would plunge the country into darkness. Germany's Energiewende, for all its contradictions, created millions of "prosumers," households that generate electricity on their own rooftops. And Puerto Rico showed what happens with the opposite model: Hurricane Maria in 2017 brought down the centralized grid of the state monopolist PREPA, and part of the island sat without power for nearly a year. Recovery came not through rebuilding the old vertical but through microgrids, solar panels, and local batteries: the communities that managed to decentralize no longer lost power during subsequent hurricanes. The Texas blackout of 2021, when the centralized grid of an entire state froze, merely added a signature to the same verdict.
Ukraine has already partly learned this lesson on its own skin. When Russia methodically knocked out large thermal power plants in 2022-2024, the country was saved not by new gigawatt units but by thousands of generators, solar panels, household batteries, and Starlink terminals: a distributed network that cannot be switched off with a single strike, because it has no center. A television tower can be toppled with a missile; a hundred thousand satellite terminals cannot.
Defense Production: The Garages That Ballistics Couldn't Reach
The same situation holds in defense production. Recall how it all began: in 2022-2023, drone production was scaled up by enthusiasts, literally in garages, workshops, and basements. Hundreds of small points across the country, each assembling dozens and hundreds of airframes. And this network was beyond the reach of ballistic missiles. Not because anyone was shielding it, but because you do not fire an Iskander at a garage: there are too many targets, each one is too small, and destroying any of them changes nothing. It was the same Baran principle, only not in cables but in soldering irons: a distributed system survives because it has no center.
And then the big players came and divided up the market. State contracts, billion-hryvnia deals, "consolidation of production," big workshops, big component warehouses, big legal entities with the right surnames among the beneficiaries. And at exactly the moment when weapons production became concentrated, it became a convenient target for the occupiers. Russia today methodically hunts precisely the large defense plants, and hunts them successfully, because a large plant cannot be hidden: it has an address, energy consumption, logistics, thousands of workers commuting to their shifts. The garage network had no address.
And here is the worst part: once again, no one will stop them from scaling up further. After every strike they will be compensated, rebuilt, given larger state orders, that is, the same target will be reproduced in the same place. Meanwhile, the grassroots initiative that proved its survivability under fire has been effectively destroyed: by regulations, by codifications, by a monopoly on contracts, by exclusion from financing. Destroyed to please those "insiders" who absorb the billions. The state, with its own hands, dismantled the only invulnerable model of defense production it had, and replaced it with a model optimized not for war but for absorbing the budget. All Russia has left to do is aim its missiles by the registry of large taxpayers.
The Irony of History: The Program Everyone Laughed At
And here we arrive at the central irony. Decentralization, the slogan under which Western donors' money was plundered for years, the program that was used for God knows what, has today turned out to be Ukraine's only possible survival strategy. The millions of euros of U-LEAD, DOBRE, and dozens of other programs, the seminars, the trainings, the "capable communities" - all of it often looked like a ritual of absorbing funds. But the war suddenly showed: the idea itself was right. Not concentration but, on the contrary, fragmentation and minimization. And this applies to literally everything: warehouses, retail, energy, water supply, heating, communications, governance.
The only question is whether the officials see it. Do they understand that for the sake of the country's survival and economic capacity, they must not help the "monsters" compensate their losses and restore the same capacities, that is, the same targets for the occupiers? The logic of survival demands the opposite: to do everything so that people gain the ability to decentralize heating, electricity, and trade alike. Not to build new heating mains with new vulnerable nodes, which Russia will knock out next winter with the same methodicalness, but to give people money so that they solve the questions of heating, electrification, and water supply themselves, point by point. A heat pump in every home cannot be destroyed with a Kinzhal. A boiler house serving a hundred thousand residents can, and Russia does it regularly.
But they will not do it. And the reason here is not a lack of understanding but the structure of ownership. Compensation for the "monsters," reconstruction of centralized networks, new giant nodes - all of this benefits the financial-industrial groups that own the very giants Russia is now destroying. Money handed out to millions of households for solar panels and heat pumps passes through no oligarchic cash register. Money poured into rebuilding monopoly infrastructure passes through it entirely. And so the choice between the survivability of the country and the survivability of the financial-industrial groups is one the Ukrainian authorities make in favor of the financial-industrial groups.
Even though the war is literally drawing us an instruction manual. Concentration of ownership breeds concentration of infrastructure, concentration of infrastructure breeds concentration of vulnerability, and along with it, concentration of power. A distributed economy with millions of owners not only has no convenient targets for Russian missiles. It also has no convenient targets for monopolization, corruption, or political blackmail by heat shutoff. Decentralization has turned out to be both a defense doctrine and a program of democratization at once. The war is showing us how to democratize the country. The authorities are doing everything to preserve the power of the oligarchy. The bill for that decision will be delivered by the next massed strike.
Oleh Cheslavskyi, exclusively for FEMIDA.UA