On the very day President Vladimir Putin was preparing to address Russia’s business elite at the St Petersburg International Economic Forum, Ukrainian drones struck the heart of the city. The symbolism is impossible to ignore. For those of us who remember St Petersburg as the glittering window to Europe, a city of canals and imperial grandeur, the whine of drones overhead felt like a fracture in the Russian psyche.
Ordinary Russians, already grappling with the war’s creeping toll, now see the conflict brought to their doorstep. The forum, meant to project strength and resilience, instead offered a backdrop of smoke and sirens. One local, sipping coffee near the Neva, told me: “We came here to feel safe. Now nowhere feels safe.” The human cost is not just in lives but in a deeply ingrained sense of security, a luxury that war has now revoked.
This is a cultural shift as much as a military one. For years, Putin’s promise was stability. The strikes suggest that stability is a mirage. The drones may do little physical damage, but they deliver a message: the war is coming home. And for Russian society, that recalibration of expectations, from invincibility to vulnerability, is the most profound change of all.
