Charles Means
speaker
38 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 25 Jul
Charles Means’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Thanks for having me on the show.
Well, starting last Saturday and just about every day since, Ukrainian drones have struck these giant warehouses belonging to wild berries, causing massive fires to facilities outside of Moscow, outside of St.
Petersburg and several cities in the south of Russia.
The costs have come in lives.
At least nine workers are dead, dozens more injured, several of whom were migrant workers from Central Asia.
But, of course, there's also material costs.
Wildberries is Russia's largest online retailer, and its warehouses are full of goods from small and mid-sized Russian businesses who've taken to social media to say these attacks have caused their financial ruin.
So this is just one example.
Kirill Valov, who runs a small clothing line, sounding rather depressed here as he describes how a third of his product, $150,000 in goods, just went up in smoke in a Wildberries warehouse outside of Moscow.
Well, you know, you might have this impression of Russian business as run by oligarchs, gray men in gray suits.
Wildberries is about as far as that as you can go.
It's really kind of a remarkable story.
It was founded by a woman named Tatyana Kim in 2004.
She was a school teacher turned stay-at-home mom who started selling hard-to-find quality clothes out of her family's apartment.
Now, critics will say there's a bit of public relations myth-making going on here.
Kim got a bit of money from her then-husband who worked in the IT sector that helped launch the business.
But fundamentally, Wild Berries is a story of a woman who had an idea that caught on.
You know, it's not a business empire handed to her from the spoils of Soviet industry or, say, resource extraction.
It is not a very Russian name, Scott.
Yeah, you know, Kim chose Wildberries and the company's neon pink WB logo because she thought it sounded positive, progressive, and Western.
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