For months, the Kremlin has peddled a fiction to its people: that the war in Ukraine is a noble, distant affair, fought by gallant soldiers on foreign soil, far from the dachas and high streets of the motherland. Shelling in Belgorod? A provoked skirmish. Missile fragments in Rostov? Sabotage by Kyiv’s puppeteers. But the attack on the Moscow oil refinery this week, just miles from the heart of the capital, has torched that narrative more thoroughly than any Ukrainian drone could have. The smoke billowing over Moscow is not just physical; it is the exhaust of a great lie, finally choking the citizens who had so willingly swallowed it.
This is the tragedy of empire: it must always promise invincibility at home while waging war abroad. The Victorians understood this, though they were better at spreading the myth. The Boer War, for instance, was sold as a punitive expedition against farmers, yet when news of British prison camps and guerrilla ambushes reached London, the public grew weary. Russia’s leadership, however, has been uniquely inept at sustaining the cordon sanitaire. From the Chechen wars to the Georgian incursion, the state always managed to keep the home front serene, often by stifling the press and redrawing maps of the battlefield. But the drone that struck the oil refinery did not need to cross a border; it simply had to breach the capital’s airspace, a place where Muscovites had convinced themselves they were immune to the horrors of ‘special operations’.
What does this mean for the national psyche? I shall tell you. It means the end of the ‘sacrifice without suffering’ bargain that has underpinned Russian public support for the invasion. The average Ivan and Olga in the high-rise blocks can no longer ignore the war when the smell of burning crude wafts through their windows. They will ask why their country, supposedly a great power with nuclear teeth, cannot protect a single refinery. They will wonder, as all subjects of failing empires do, whether the adventure is worth the risk. And when the state answers with bombast and arrests of ‘saboteurs’ (a favourite trick of weak regimes), the scepticism will curdle into contempt.
Historically, this is the moment when regimes begin to crack. The Roman populace, long insulated from frontier skirmishes, turned hostile when Gothic warbands looted Italy’s north. The French elite lost all credibility after the Prussian army marched through Paris in 1870. True, Putin is not Caesar or Napoleon, but the dynamic is the same: a ruling caste that cannot guarantee the safety of its core will find its authority evaporating. The refinery attack is not a military turning point; it is a psychological one. It tells every Russian that the war is no longer ‘over there’. It is in their backyard, their bank account, their brief commute to work. The silence of the Kremlin’s propagandists in the hours after the attack was more telling than any denial. They had no script, no euphemism large enough to cover a burning oil depot in the city of Stalin’s war parades.
Let us not mince words: this is what the degeneration of a modern ‘great power’ looks like. The same decadence, the same delusions of invulnerability, the same inability to admit that a war fought by mercenaries and convicts cannot be contained forever. The drone did not just hit an oil tank; it hit the last remaining pillar of Putin’s credibility: the promise that Moscow was sacred. Now, every siren, every closed metro station, every rumour of another explosion will deepen the corrosion. The Victorian equivalent would be if a Fenian bomb had struck the heart of Whitehall during the height of empire. The psychological damage would have been irreversible. Russia, I fear, is now on that path. The fires in Moscow are small today. But they will burn for years in the minds of a people who believed they were special, immune to the wreckage they were helping to create.
So yes, Steve Rosenberg is right: this war has come home. The question is not whether the Russian populace will turn against the conflict, but when the growing fear and resentment will manifest in a way the state cannot suppress. The oil refinery burns, and with it, the last vestige of the old illusion. For the Kremlin, the only way to restore faith is to win a victory so total that it rewrites the narrative. But victories are not won by dropping incendiaries on civilian infrastructure in a neighbour’s land. They are won by holding your own ground. And right now, that ground is smouldering.
