In a delightful irony that would have made Gibbon weep with joy, Russia’s flagship economic forum in St Petersburg has been overshadowed not by the usual pageantry of petro-ruble decadence but by the hum of Ukrainian drones. The symbolic weight is impossible to ignore: as Putin’s oligarchs gathered to pretend that sanctions are merely a Western inconvenience, the very airspace above them was violated by the very technology those sanctions were meant to stifle. The UK’s strategy of calibrated escalation, dismissed by armchair diplomats as perfidious Albion at its most theatrical, now appears prescient.
We are witnessing, ladies and gentlemen, not a military defeat but a cultural one. The Romanovs built St Petersburg as a window to Europe; today, that window has been smashed by a cheap, off-the-shelf drone. The forum, a grotesque carnival of crony capitalism, has been reduced to a laughingstock.
The message is clear: no amount of bluster or brass bands can protect a regime that has mortgaged its future to a war it cannot win. The Victorian era, with its stiff upper lips and colonial boasts, understood that prestige was a fragile flower. Russia’s modern edition of that imperial delusion has wilted under the St Petersburg sun.
The drones did not cause a single casualty, but they did something far more damaging: they exposed the regime’s impotence. And for that, London’s policy architects deserve a round of applause. For too long, the West has dithered, afraid of escalation.
The UK has shown that a steady drip of sanctions, combined with covert technological transfer, can turn a dictator’s parade into a pantomime. The forum’s attendees will go home with more than just champagne headaches: they will carry the knowledge that their empire is crumbling, not with a bang but with a buzz.
