The explosion that lit up the Moscow sky last night was more than a tactical strike. It was a message, delivered with the precision of a drone and the force of history. Steve Rosenberg’s report, that this brings Russia’s war with Ukraine closer to home, is not merely a journalist’s observation. It is a confirmation of a pattern as old as war itself: the steady march of conflict from the periphery to the centre.
For months, the Western commentariat has been content to analyse this war as a grim but distant spectacle. We have watched the devastation of Mariupol and the grinding attrition of Bakhmut with the detachment of a Roman senator contemplating a barbarian raid in Dacia. But now the fire has reached the imperial capital itself. The attack on the Moscow oil refinery is not just a military embarrassment for the Kremlin. It is a symbolic rupture, a crack in the illusion that war can be contained, managed, and kept far from the salons of power.
One is reminded of the opening stages of the First World War, when the assassination of an archduke in Sarajevo seemed a Balkan oddity until the guns of August turned all of Europe into a charnel house. Or consider the American Civil War, where the fall of Fort Sumter was but a prelude to the burning of Atlanta and the march through Georgia. Wars, once begun, have a terrible logic of their own. They expand, they mutate, they come home.
What does this attack signify? First, it is a profound humiliation for the Russian security state. If not even the skies over Moscow can be reliably guarded, what trust can the elite place in its protectors? Second, it transforms the domestic calculus of the war. Russian citizens, who have largely experienced the conflict through state television and higher grocery prices, now face the visceral reality of fireballs and evacuation sirens. The social contract of Putinism has been perforated.
Yet let us not succumb to wishful thinking. The attack does not necessarily spell the end of the war or the collapse of the regime. It may instead trigger a new phase of escalation. Historically, powers under threat in their home territory often lash out with greater brutality. The bombing of German cities in World War II did not break Nazi morale; it steeled it. The question is whether the Russian populace will react with anger against the government for its incompetence or against the enemy for its audacity.
This is where the intellectual decadence of our own age becomes relevant. We have become enamoured with the idea that war can be a clean, surgical affair, a matter of drones and precision strikes, divorced from the messy reality of blood and rubble. The attack on Moscow is a rude awakening. It reminds us that war is a feedback loop of violence in which the distinction between front and rear is an illusion.
For Ukraine, this strike is a strategic imperative. It signals that the war is not static, that the battlefield is everywhere. But it also carries risks. The Kremlin has long warned that attacks on Russian soil would invite a response that could spiral into a wider conflagration. We have already seen the use of hypersonic missiles and threats of nuclear escalation. The next step could be a direct attack on Ukrainian command centres or even strikes on NATO supply lines. The escalatory ladder is slippery.
What, then, is the responsible intellectual posture? It is not to cheerlead for either side, but to recognise the tragic inevitability of the dynamic at play. The war has entered a new phase, one in which the home front is no longer a sanctuary. The oil refinery blaze illuminates a truth we have been reluctant to face: that this conflict, like all great ones, will not end until one side has exhausted its capacity to absorb pain. And that capacity is now being tested not just on the steppes of Ukraine but in the very heart of Russia.
In the end, Steve Rosenberg’s dispatch is more than a news item. It is a mirror held up to our own civilisation’s naivety about war. We thought the 21st century had banished such horrors to the periphery. But history, that inexorable teacher, has a way of bringing the lesson home.
