On 18 July 2026, Ukrainian drones began systematically destroying Wildberries warehouses across Russia. More than a dozen sites have been struck; Elektrostal, St Petersburg, Ryazan, Krasnodar, Nevinnomyssk, Samara, and beyond. At least eight people are dead. Estimated economic damage has reached 100 billion rubles.

The western media response was largely to tell us about a soap-maker who lost her business. With respect to her eleven years of work, that is not the story.

What Ukraine Actually Hit

Wildberries, ‘Russia’s Amazon, like Amazon, does not just move boxes. Hidden in it’s warehouse sites runs the digital connective tissue of Russia’s data consumer economy: payment processing, seller platforms, inventory systems, logistics routing, customer data. Like Amazon, which embeds AWS compute infrastructure inside its fulfilment centres, Wildberries has been building its own data centre network inside its warehouse estate.

The Elektrostal facility, one of the first sites struck, hosts a 4MW data centre within one of Wildberries’ largest distribution centres. Data centers run both the internet and AI. They are large physical buildings packed with computer servers, routers, and storage drives that handle global digital traffic, cloud storage, websites, and the heavy processing power needed for artificial intelligence The Dubna facility, commissioned earlier this year, covers 5,500 square metres, holds up to 8,600 servers, runs at nearly 6MW of IT capacity, and sits inside a modular logistics complex.

When Ukraine hits a warehouse, it hits a data centre. This is military stratergy of our future wars now. Zelensky stated explicitly that the targeted hubs were involved in supplying Russian forces with drone components, navigation equipment, and military materiel — that the logistics network was functioning as military supply chain infrastructure wearing a civilian face. Of course Russia denied it.

Ukraine’s military intelligence did not consult the warehouse planning application or corporate press release. They looked at the buildings, the power draw, the cooling infrastructure, the network traffic. Military target embedded in plain site within civilian infrastructure.

The Concealment Strategy

In the United Kingdom, hyperscale data centre operators routinely apply for planning permission through shell companies and holding entities. AWS built its Didcot facility through a company called Willow Developments LLC; a ‘mysterious’ operator, as Data Centre Dynamics initially described it, whose identity took investigative journalism to establish. When AWS announced over £10 billion of UK data centre investment, it refused to disclose locations. The stated reason was security.

The function of this secrecy is to avoid public scrutiny of water consumption, power demand, and environmental impact; not as yet, to protect against adversarial states, who are not reading planning registers.

A Register forum post from 2022, discussing AWS applying under a dead company’s name in Oxfordshire, put it plainly: the reason ‘will either be to hide their plans and make them slightly harder to find for nefarious purposes, or to avoid anti-Amazon campaigners hijacking the process.’ Planning permission, once granted, transfers with the site regardless of who applied. The secrecy confers no security benefit whatsoever against a state actor with satellite imagery and signals intelligence. It confers considerable benefit against local councils, environmental groups, and journalists.

The concealment is not security theatre; it is civil resistance mitigation.

 

Fire and Water

Half of England is officially in drought conditions and all of Wales. More than 200 wildfires were reported across England and Wales in a recent 12-day stretch during hot, dry weather. Year-to-Date: Fire and rescue services in England and Wales have responded to 706 total wildfires so far in 2026. Additional Blazes: Major regional outbreaks, including in Scotland (such as the Cairngorms) and South Wales, have added strain to local services

 

The National Drought Group’s advice to the public was to delete old emails and take shorter showers.

 

Meanwhile: 84% of proposed UK data centres are sited in areas already classified as water stressed by the Environment Agency. Half of all planned facilities are clustered around London and the South East. Slough, (designated seriously water stressed) has 32 operational data centres with more in planning, including a 300MW gas-powered facility. Thames Water’s own modelling estimates that under a high-growth scenario, data centres would drive almost 30% of all new water demand in the region roughly 270 million litres per day.

Water UK’s deputy director called the situation ‘unforgivable’ and ‘a genuine failing of government.‘ The Royal Academy of Engineering has called for mandatory reporting on water consumption, energy use, and carbon emissions from data centres. Mandatory reporting keeps being proposed. It keeps not arriving.

 

The companies embedding data centres inside logistics facilities benefit from this opacity twice over: once because the data centre itself is not visible as a discrete planning application, and once because its resource consumption is folded into the broader footprint of a warehouse complex that nobody is looking at closely.

When the Cloud Becomes a Target

On 1 March 2026, Iranian drones struck AWS facilities in the UAE and Bahrain. This was the first confirmed military attack on a major cloud provider’s physical infrastructure. Iran’s IRGC claimed responsibility and stated its justification explicitly: the facilities were legitimate military targets because they hosted US military AI systems and intelligence simulations.

They were not wrong, legally or factually. The US military has been using AI hosted on commercial cloud infrastructure for intelligence analysis, targeting decisions, and operational support. International law scholars have been clear on the consequence: when a military runs on the cloud, the cloud becomes a legal military target.

This is the catastrophic structural problem created by the civilian face strategy. When critical national infrastructure, defence AI, financial systems, government services, medical records  is deliberately obscured inside buildings that read as warehouses, fulfilment centres, or logistics hubs, two things happen simultaneously:

First, the civilian populations living near those buildings lose the legal protections they might otherwise expect, because the buildings are now legitimate military targets under international humanitarian law.

Second, the infrastructure itself is more vulnerable, not less, because the concealment that works against democratic oversight does not work against adversarial intelligence services, who identify targets by power signature, cooling plant, network traffic, and satellite imagery.

The Argument, Plain

The strategy of concealing data centres inside commercial and logistics infrastructure creates a class of buildings that are simultaneously invisible to democratic oversight and visible to adversarial states. The populations living near them bear the risk without the knowledge.

The companies doing this know exactly what they are doing. The shell companies, the withheld locations, the resistance to mandatory reporting are a deliberate system for extracting public resource consent without public awareness. The drought is accelerated as each data center consumes the same amount of water as a small town daily! The planning register does not show it.

The mandatory, disaggregated reporting of water consumption, power draw, and physical location for all data centre infrastructure in the UK  including infrastructure embedded within warehouses, fulfilment centres, logistics hubs, and any other commercial building type. No exemptions for security. State adversaries already know where these buildings are. The only people being kept in the dark are the ones whose water is being used.

 

Want to know more? A fully referenced PhD working paper for the Brace Brace Collection will follow.

Mx.D.P. Matthews / August 2026