What Counts as a Target

Somewhere in Russia’s answer to Amazon, there is now a war story. Ukrainian drones hit two Wildberries warehouses overnight (Russia’s largest online retailer, the place ordinary Russians order phone cases and instant noodles), killing eight and injuring 62. Zelensky’s office says the buildings were moving “sanctioned components for drone production and navigation equipment,” which may well be true: modern war supply chains run through parcel networks as much as railyards now, and a logistics hub is a logistics hub whether it’s shipping artillery components or air fryers. Still, it’s a strange thing to watch, a familiar consumer brand turning into a legitimate military target overnight, the way a city block quietly becomes a supply line once enough of the right boxes pass through it.

It’s the same week Trump is threatening Canada with new tariffs over wildfire smoke drifting into US cities, a genuinely odd use of trade policy: reaching for the one lever (tariffs) that answers everything in this administration’s toolkit, applied here to particulate matter, a thing that does not negotiate and owes no import duty. Mark Carney didn’t take the bait. He reframed it as a shared climate problem rather than a trade grievance, which reads either as diplomatic restraint or as someone correctly clocking that you cannot tariff your way out of a fire season.

Two governments, two different tools, the same reflex: when the actual problem resists your instruments, redefine the problem until it fits them.

Meanwhile, quietly, India put its first privately built rocket into orbit today. Nobody’s arguing yet about whose airspace that was.