The whole architecture of Russian military space power runs through one building, one cleanroom in Samara. This is a central node of the terror state and its illegal war, and Ukraine just hit it. The cleanroom is no longer so clean, and with this strike, Russia’s efforts to develop an alternative to Starlink may have been consigned to the trash bin. Good riddance.

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At around ten to three in the morning on the fifteenth of August, the missile alert went off across Samara oblast. Nine hundred kilometres from the Ukrainian border. Deep in the Russian interior, in a city that had gone four and a half years of full-scale war without a single strike of this kind on its industrial zone.

Minutes later, residents heard a jet engine overhead, then the detonation. By dawn there was a column of black smoke over the eastern edge of the city.

Volodymyr Zelensky confirmed the target himself that Saturday. The Progress Rocket and Space Centre. A core enterprise of Roscosmos. Struck, in his words on X, with Flamingo missiles - “Flamingo missiles were used. A good achievement.”

Ukrainian - design; Ukrainian imagination; Ukrainian will to triumph. Consequences arrived nine hundred kilometres from the frontline. And here is why this matters more than the refineries, more than the airfields, more than almost anything Ukraine has hit this summer. Because Progress in Samara is the only place in Russia that serially assembles the Soyuz-2 rocket. Not the main place. The only place. And the Soyuz-2.1b is the sole launch vehicle carrying Rassvet - Moscow’s answer to Starlink - into orbit.

A centrally planned terror economy can move fast. It can concentrate capital, override cost, ignore the citizen and their welfare, and get a thing built. Much faster than anyone expected. That is its advertised virtue. It is also, precisely, its fatal architecture. Because when everything runs through one vast industrial shed, then Ukraine only had to hit one target.

BUILDING 106A

The Samara governor, Vyacheslav Fedorishchev, acknowledged a missile strike on an industrial enterprise and reported two people seeking medical treatment. He did not name the plant. Mayor Ivan Noskov called it a massed missile attack causing localised damage to city industrial infrastructure. Standard Russian practice: confirm the smoke, hide the address. Deny drones or a missile caused the damage - but rather attribute any impact to shot down fragments.

Fire Point - the Ukrainian manufacturer - named the target Progress. Chief designer Denys Shtilierman posted footage of the FP-5 launches within hours.

Then the OSINT community CyberBoroshno went to the satellite imagery and geolocated the impact point: Building 106A. Containing a high-class cleanroom, where the onboard electrical systems, the instrumentation, the printed circuit boards are installed on the Soyuz airframe. The control system. The cable network. As the analysts put it, reported by Ukrainska Pravda: “Without this stage, the rocket cannot be assembled, even when the body and tanks are ready.”

Building 106B, where final assembly happens, stands next door.

The recovery problem is significant. Fire, soot and firefighting water inside a certified cleanroom is not a repair job. It is a requalification job. Recertify the clean zones. Re-run the dust-control validation. Requalify the process. CyberBoroshno’s assessment: months, not weeks. The extent of the damage is still being clarified. We don’t know if Russia’s space programme is dead, but it is certainly wounded. Defense Express floated exactly that framing, and they hedged it - conditional on effectiveness being confirmed. It isn’t yet. What is established is this: the target was correctly identified, the impact point is credibly geolocated, and the function of that building is not substitutable.

THE BOTTLENECK

Russia flies six to eight Soyuz-2.1b launches a year. That is the historic rate since 2022, and every one of those slots is fought over - military reconnaissance, the Liana signals-intelligence constellation, the Persona and Razdan optical satellites, ISS resupply, the occasional commercial payload.

Rassvet needs, on UNITED24’s reporting, at least eighteen Soyuz-2.1b launches to reach a 288-satellite constellation. Eighteen launches at six to eight a year. Do that sum before the strike and it is already three years of the entire national launch cadence dedicated to one project. Do it after the strike and it becomes something else entirely.

The fallback is Angara, assembled in Omsk. Since 2022, nine Angara vehicles have flown. Nine. In four and a half years. That is not a substitute. That is a museum piece with a drip-fed production line attached. And it was fragile before Ukraine arrived. In January, Dmitry Baranov - the Roscosmos official responsible for launch systems, and the former director of Progress itself - said orders for Soyuz vehicles were already outrunning what the plant could build, with demand exceeding capacity by thirty to fifty per cent between 2027 and 2030. That is the man who ran the factory, telling you the factory was already the constraint.

Then there are sanctions. CyberBoroshno flag it and it is the quiet killer: Soyuz onboard electronics depend on imported components Russia cannot legally buy in the quantities required. You cannot rebuild a cleanroom faster than you can smuggle its contents.

One plant. One assembly line. One choke point. Anatoly Zak of RussianSpaceWeb, quoted by Gizmodo, describes Progress as “a prime developer of rockets and spacecraft, including Soyuz-2 and Soyuz-5 launch vehicles, as well as military satellites.” All of it. In one place. Centralisation is Russia’s unexpected superpower, and its Achilles Heel.

WHY RUSSIA WAS RACING

Why the hurry on Rassvet? Because on the fifth of February this year, Ukraine and SpaceX switched off the grey-market Starlink terminals Russian units had been running on the front line. It hurt. Communications and assaults degraded across multiple sectors. As recently as the tenth of August, the SBU said it had rolled up two more schemes registering terminals inside Ukraine for transfer to Russian forces.

Russia’s army had been fighting a war of drones and dispersed command on an American billionaire’s network - and got unplugged.

So, Bureau 1440 - a private Russian company, not Roscosmos - was pushed hard. Sixteen satellites up in March. A second batch in July. Vadym Skibitskyi, deputy head of Ukraine’s military intelligence, told RBC-Ukraine on the tenth of August that Moscow was moving faster than its own plan: “they have begun launching it significantly faster than was envisaged in their plans.” The target: 292 satellites by the end of 2027, 924 by 2035.

Ukrainian estimates of what is actually in orbit vary - 16 on Skibitskyi’s count, 32 on Euromaidan Press’s, around 40 according to Zelensky adviser Serhii Beskrestnov on the eleventh of August. It doesn’t change the conclusion, because Bureau 1440’s own engineers put the threshold for continuous coverage at 200 to 250 satellites.

Rassvet today gives Russia intermittent windows over Ukraine. Rassvet finished would give Russian strike drones persistent, jam-resistant, sovereign command and control. That is the prize. And Ukraine has just put a missile through the roof of the only factory that could deliver on those ambitions.

THE VERTICAL’S OWN TRAP

Authoritarian systems can get stuff done, when there is a real will. No planning enquiries. No inconvenient unions. A docile, compliant workforce. No accountability. Decide, and it is built. That speed is real. It also produces monocultures - spots of excellence, and concentrations of vulnerability. One assembly hall. One cleanroom. One point of failure, defended by an air-defence network that let two subsonic cruise missiles fly nine hundred kilometres into the Volga basin and hit a specified building right on target.

Ukraine does the opposite, and it is not an accident. Fire Point is a company founded in 2022 by people from outside the defence industry. Its Flamingo carries an eleven-hundred-and-fifty-kilo warhead three thousand kilometres, and it is built cheap enough to scale. Ukraine’s deep-strike capability is distributed across dozens of firms, dispersed workshops, and open competition - messy, democratic, un-planned, impossible to decapitate with two missiles.

The Flamingo’s AI-25 engine was designed by Ivchenko-Progress, in Zaporizhzhia. A Ukrainian Progress just took apart a Russian Progress.

Same night, Ukraine also struck Savasleyka airfield in Nizhny Novgorod oblast - home to the aircraft that carry the missiles that hit Ukrainian apartment blocks - and an oil facility at Ust-Luga on the Baltic. Three strategic targets, three directions, one night, all beyond seven hundred kilometres.

This is Ukraine setting the tempo, choosing the targets, and reaching the industrial spine of a nuclear state with weapons Ukraine designed and built itself, four years into a war it was expected to lose in three days.

The kinetic ceiling we have imposed on Ukraine was never about escalation management. It was about our own discomfort with a second-tier ally that wins against a first-tier adversary. Our lack of imagination that such a thing was possible. Our lack of courage to back that ally to victory, and the coercive fear we have of Russia, that prevents us from arming strategically to ensure its defeat, and indeed to ensure our own peace and security.

A ‘poor country’ that is doing the job NATO was designed to deliver on and doing it better than we could in our present state. That country Ukraine is still not being invited into the security organisation that it has literally saved, and the members of which are reliant upon to guarantee their sovereign borders from Russian aggression.

Russia bet its military space programme on a single building because the vertical always concentrates resources. Ukraine found the building and degraded it. Ukraine alone among Western democracies is doing what is necessary to hold back the forces of tyranny and darkness. Shame on us, that we are not doing more. Ukraine is winning, evil will not prevail.

The whole apparatus of a nuclear-armed state, bent to one purpose: keeping a frightened 73-year-old man alive and in power.

On the morning of 11 August, residents of apartment blocks along one road in Novosibirsk received a notice from their management company. It cited instructions from the security organs. Do not go outside. Do not approach your windows. Do not use electronic or optical devices.

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Students at Novosibirsk State University got their own version. Draw the curtains. Stay away from the glass. In Dormitory Four, a room-by-room inspection, and every resident required to register with the warden by eight in the morning. The canteen closed. The swimming pool closed. Electric scooter rentals switched off across most of Akademgorodok. Metal barriers of the kind normally used to pen in protesters erected around the new university buildings. Police posted along the motorcade route every fifty metres from eight o’clock the previous evening.

And before all of that - the asphalt. Fresh tarmac. Repaired pavements. Washed road signs. Mown verges. New turf. All because Vladimir Putin was coming to open a synchrotron. Is this evidence of a state appreciative of its benevolent ruler, or of a paranoid dictator with an oversized ego, who’s living in a fantasy world? We suspect more of the latter.

That is what the president of the Russian Federation now requires of a Russian city. That its inhabitants be cleared from their own streets. That they be forbidden to look out of their own windows. That they be instructed not to raise a phone. To film, or perhaps something else?

Tonight: the geography of a frightened man. What twenty-seven anti-aircraft towers around a single holiday house tells us about Putin’s state of mind. And why the fear at the top of the Russian state has become the most demanding and costly line item in its budget of 2026.

THE MAP OF FEAR

Start with where he goes, because it is more honest than anything he says. Putin’s last ordinary working trip to a Russian region was to Samara on 6 November 2025. After that, nothing. Kremlin, Novo-Ogaryovo, St Petersburg, Valdai - the addresses where he already lives. By 21 May, the investigative outlet Agentstvo had counted 196 consecutive days without a single visit to a region outside his own residences. He travelled more during Covid than he travels now.

He resumed on 17 June. Agentstvo tracked it: of the five regions he has visited since, four sit outside European Russia altogether. Krasnoyarsk Krai, where not one Ukrainian drone has been shot down in the entire war. Irkutsk Oblast, which has seen exactly one attack - during Operation Spiderweb in June 2025. Omsk, where drones were downed for the first time on 6 July this year, the same day the airport closed and the local refinery was hit. The single European exception was Kazan on 17 June, for a Russia-ASEAN summit locked into the diary months in advance.

Then, this week, on 12 August he addressed Pacific Fleet exercises from the deck of the cruiser Varyag. On 13 August he landed on Iturup - the first Russian head of state ever to set foot on the Kuril Islands. A fish plant. Red caviar. A hospital. A school.

Tokyo read it as a provocation. Japan’s prime minister Sanae Takaichi said the visit “offends the sentiments of the Japanese people and is absolutely unacceptable.” Foreign Minister Motegi lodged a formal protest. The diplomatic row swallowed the coverage - and buried the detail that matters. More on this in another episode, because it’s an important signal. But it tells us something else important too. Putin’s fear of his people and of Ukrainian drones. Iturup is more than seven thousand kilometres from the front line. There is nowhere further to go. He has run out of road and is running out of safe places to be in Russia.

THE FORTRESS, AND THE ARITHMETIC IT EXPOSES

In April, RFE/RL’s Systema project analysed Planet Labs satellite imagery of Dolgiye Borody, the Valdai estate. Seven new towers for Pantsir air-defence systems went up in March. Construction on all of them began on the same day - 17 March. Total air-defence positions around one holiday residence: twenty-seven, arranged in two concentric rings, inner and outer, in exactly the pattern used to defend Moscow. Meduza’s account puts it at twenty-six Pantsirs plus an S-400.

Moscow - a city of thirteen million - is covered by roughly sixty Pantsir units. So that one man’s dacha now carries close to half the air-defence density of the Russian capital.

Twenty-one of Russia’s thirty-eight large refineries struck since January. Facilities accounting for a quarter of national refining capacity halted or throttled. Petrol queues in occupied Crimea. Gasoline production statistics classified since 2024 because publishing them became too humiliating. The refineries do not get twenty-seven Pantsirs. The dacha does. That is not an air-defence policy. That is a personal-survival policy sucking air-defence systems away from strategic objects. It is the short-term preservation of one man, that is being hedged against the long-term survival of the state that he rules over. It shows that Putin now has no good options and must protect his short-term survival against the long-term viability of his regime.

In March, the Federal Protection Service published a draft order establishing a security zone around Bocharov Ruchey in Sochi - some three square kilometres over land and sea. Inside it: no drone flights, no vessels at anchor, no helipads, no shooting ranges, no vehicle repairs, no animal husbandry, no rubbish dumps. And, listed separately, no banners strung across the street. No drone has ever been stopped by a prohibition on keeping livestock. But someone, somewhere in the FSO, wrote it down anyway.

Then came 7 August, and the demonstration that the whole architecture is pure theatre of paranoia. Near Gelendzhik, where the palace exposed by Alexei Navalny’s foundation sits behind a permanent no-fly zone and seven thousand hectares of FSB-owned land, Ukrainian drones destroyed a Volna Kupol Garant electronic warfare complex at military unit 2156 - a Starlink jammer shielding a twenty-square-kilometre bubble. Satellite imagery confirmed it. Two nights later, with the jamming gone, they hit the S-400 battery five hundred metres away. Robert “Madyar” Brovdi, commander of Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Forces, said the position burned for three hours. The military analyst Yan Matveev, speaking to The Moscow Times, explained the flaw: a station that size is effectively a small military base, trivially identifiable from the air. His verdict: “Now Putin’s palace is left without protection.”

A hundred billion roubles of construction. A dedicated guard regiment. A permanent no-fly zone. Undone in forty-eight hours by two drone sorties. This can only feed the tyrant’s paranoia and sense that few places are safe anymore.

And on 14 August, Kommersant reported the logical endpoint. A draft Ministry of Transport order expanding the list of prohibited flight zones across the entire country - 818 of them, drawn up on submissions from the FSB, the FSO, the Defence Ministry, Rosgvardia, Rosatom, Roscosmos and regional governments, and applying explicitly to unmanned aircraft.

The Ministry then spent the same day disputing its own newspaper briefing, telling RBC that the existing order already contains 781 zones and only 37 are new. Take whichever version you prefer. The direction is identical. The three-square-kilometre protection zone around one man’s holiday house is being scaled up to the size of a country. It may be difficult for anyone to get close to Putin to take him out. But now we see the outlines of a strategy for Ukraine, and it’s a smart one. A strategy they may have been perusing for some time, and indeed there is evidence that foreign intelligence services are trying to feed this same strategy. Increase the paranoia of the dictator. Make him believe there is nowhere safe for him to reside. Destroy his bases and palaces. Convince him there are plots against him everywhere - from outside and within - to the point where he consumes all the state’s resources to protect himself and starts to turn on all those who were once loyal to him.

THE ENEMY INSIDE

Putin has multiple fears now. Known knowns - Ukrainian drones. Known unknowns - Foreign intelligence services. Unknown unknowns - internal rivals and opponents within the system. The drones are the fear he can name. But the others also feed his rampant paranoia.

On 22 December 2025, a car bomb in a Moscow car park killed Lieutenant General Fanil Sarvarov, head of the General Staff’s Operational Training Directorate. Three days later Putin convened the heads of the security services. According to a European intelligence dossier obtained by CNN, the Financial Times and iStories in May, that meeting degenerated into a brawl. Chief of the General Staff Gerasimov attacked FSB director Bortnikov for failing to protect senior officers. Bortnikov pleaded shortage of resources and manpower. Putin ended it by demanding concrete solutions within a week.

The solution was to extend enhanced protection to ten more senior generals, including three deputy chiefs of the General Staff. The three most powerful security chiefs in Russia cannot agree who is responsible for a failure, or even who is obliged to protect whom. Rivalries and resentments do not lead to better security, but a struggle over scarce, and at times ineffective, security resources. The answer is not more bodyguards, but an improvement in quality and effectiveness. But in time-honoured fashion, Russian always throws more bodies at a problem, rather than tackling the root causes of the problem. And so, guards are simply added to the broken thing, creating the illusion of a solution to the security problem.

It has not worked. Igor Kirillov, killed by a scooter bomb in December 2024. Yaroslav Moskalik, killed by a car bomb in Balashikha in April 2025. Sarvarov in December. And on 1 August this year, an improvised device detonated at the Balzi Rossi restaurant on Kudrinskaya Square, where - according to Russian and Ukrainian media, though never confirmed officially - Colonel General Alexander Chaiko, newly appointed commander-in-chief of the Aerospace Forces and sanctioned by the EU over Bucha, was marking his fifty-fifth birthday. A woman carrying a gift box was intercepted by a guard. The bomb killed the guard, a bystander and the bomber. Two of the twenty-one injured later died.

The same dossier describes what this has done inside the Kremlin walls. Surveillance systems installed in the homes of close staff. Cooks, bodyguards and photographers banned from public transport, and all electronic devices confiscated. Two levels of screening for anyone on the presidential team before entering the presence of the Tsar. Phones without internet access for those working nearest the president with any regularity. Putin spends weeks at a time in modernised bunkers, frequently in Krasnodar Krai, while state media broadcasts pre-recorded footage to suggest he is moving freely. The report names Sergei Shoigu - Security Council secretary, four years his defence minister - as a “potential destabilising actor.”

This may well be a psychological operation by foreign intelligence services, to increase regime paranoia and in-fighting, as we suggested in the episode earlier today. There is evidence it may be working. On 5 March, the arrest of Ruslan Tsalikov, Shoigu’s first deputy at the Defence Ministry since the 1990s. The unspoken guarantee to the elite - serve loyally and you will not be touched - publicly withdrawn. Shoigu’s circle of minions broken apart.

And in February came the fear he did not see coming. Israeli intelligence hacked Tehran’s traffic camera network, used AI to build a pattern of life for Ayatollah Khamenei, and killed him on 28 February. The Financial Times reported in June that Russian services responded by shutting down parts of the closed video-surveillance system that protects Putin and his inner circle, restoring it only after isolating it from the internet. An independent Ukrainian hacker told the FT that cameras in Moscow and around the Kremlin remain live and are hacked regularly.

The irony is palpable. Russia built a nationwide surveillance state to find any citizen who steps out of line. It then discovered that the same lens can be looked through from the other end - and the most valuable face in the frame is his own.

AFRAID OF HIS OWN PEOPLE

Which brings us to the fear that explains all the others. On 10 August, Russia’s Supreme Court cancelled the registration of Yabloko’s federal list for next month’s State Duma elections. The suit was brought by the nationalist party Rodina. The formal grounds were copyright violations in campaign materials and foreign funding. Yabloko is Russia’s oldest liberal party and the only registered party running on ending the war. It had been cleared by the Central Election Commission twelve days earlier.

Meduza reports why. Yabloko had been let onto the ballot to soak up protest votes. Then it started polling at six per cent. Six per cent - from a party that took 1.34 per cent in 2021 - was enough to trigger the first judicial removal of a federal list in the history of the Russian Federation. Yesterday, 14 August, Yabloko filed its appeal; the court will hear it on Monday. Also yesterday, prosecutors in Pskov asked for twelve years and one month for the party’s deputy chairman Lev Shlosberg, over a debate in which he argued for an urgent ceasefire and a Telegram repost from February 2022. His colleague Maxim Kruglov is already serving seven years for two posts expressing regret at the dead.

This is not the behaviour of a confident autocracy. It is the behaviour of a regime that no longer trusts a rigged ballot to produce the right answer. Even quasi-systemic opposition is no longer tolerable. The polling explains the panic. In early July, the state pollster VTsIOM recorded approval of Putin’s work falling 3.5 points in a single week, from 70.4 to 66.9 - the sharpest weekly drop in two years. All three major Russian polling organisations have registered declines since spring, against a backdrop of fuel crisis and deepening strikes.

So, the imagery is being manufactured instead. Across the summer, carefully staged encounters with schoolchildren and with a 101-year-old veteran. Two categories that can be vetted and seated in advance. Meanwhile the real symbols are quietly withdrawn. For the second consecutive year, the Main Naval Parade in St Petersburg was cancelled. Fontanka reported on 15 June that no presidential decree had been issued and no preparations ordered. A navy source explained it plainly: “You understand - now is not the time for that.” On 26 July, Putin marked Navy Day at the Admiralty standing in front of a large, printed photograph of a submarine. It was the most absurd manifestation of a Potemkin village strategy, but not the only example. As we have noted, the falsifying of petrol prices at petrol stations on Putin’s tour routes, and the selective supply of fuel to make queues disappear are other examples that the entire country has become a propaganda façade for the Tsar.

And the manpower question waits behind all of it. Janis Kluge’s analysis of budget payments shows contract recruitment fell to roughly 800 signings a day in the first quarter of 2026 - the lowest in three years - before stabilising near a thousand. Meduza reports that a new mobilisation wave is under discussion for after the September elections.

The fear runs down the vertical too. Vedomosti, citing procurement analysis by Tenderplan, found regional spending on governors’ personal security nearly doubled from 59.7 million roubles in 2021 to 112.4 million in 2025, with the number of regions buying bodyguards rising from eight to fourteen. The system is potentially faze shifting from a vertical power, with loyal minions, to one of proto warlords, tooling up for the anticipated fight for survival ahead.

None of this is exceptional. It is the standard terminal syndrome of personalised tyranny. Stalin at Kuntsevo, moving between bedrooms so no one knew which sofa held him. Ceau?escu’s tunnels. Gaddafi’s tent and his convoy of decoys. Hitler in seventeen metres of concrete, ordering phantom armies into battle that had ceased to exist. The paranoia is not a bug, but a feature of a tyranny is the end game of its existence, when no one within the system can imagine a future without the strongman, who is rapidly becoming a weak man.

And look at what the survival of the strongman now requires. A vast bloodletting from the eternal war every week. Twenty-seven anti-aircraft positions around a lakeside house, Putin’s dacha, while Russian refineries burn weekly with nothing left to protect them. A prohibition zone over a Sochi villa expanding towards the borders of the state itself - not to protect the treasures of the state and its economy, but to save one old man from the impending and inevitable mortality. Cooks, cleaners and drivers under camera surveillance in their own kitchens. Meetings filmed weeks in advance and broadcast as though they happened this morning. Duplicate offices built in separate residences so that no viewer can determine which building he is standing in.

There is no succession mechanism. There is no institution designed to outlast him. He is seventy-three, in his twenty-sixth year of power, and the constitutional order he constructed contains exactly one point of failure - himself, and no points of salvation- all those have been intentionally and ruthlessly purged. Inside his own mind, a threat to his life reads as a threat to the existence of the state. He has become the state, and in his mind, it dies with him.

The Valdai towers were built because drones reach Novgorod. The Gelendzhik palace was stripped bare because Ukraine can now dismantle an air-defence node in sequence, at will. The 818 zones exist because Ukrainian deep strike has made the map of Russia a target list. Putin fled to the Kuril Islands because that is the only ground where the war he started cannot find him. And yet he must be seen to initiated ever more conflict and summon up more existential threats to the state. More phantom enemies to fight.

Putin has an entire country’s security apparatus devoted to keeping him breathing, and he still cannot walk down a Russian street without ordering the windows closed. He cannot sail his own fleet past his own capital city and northern capital. He cannot let a small liberal party stand in his own rigged election. That is not a strongman. That is a hostage in a hellish palace of his own construction, who has taken 140 million people hostage into the cell with him.

Ukraine is winning, evil will not prevail.

In December 2025, Vladimir Putin stood in front of Russia’s military command and complained that European leaders were “stoking up hysteria” about the Russian threat. That was the public performance, reported from the Russian record by RBC-Ukraine. Is this just a clear-cut case of projection, or is there something more to this performative, fake outrage?

Misunderstood Moscow. Warmongering Europeans. This narrative turns the world on its head. Not unusual for Russian geopolitical games though.

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According to The New York Times, published today, 14 August 2026, and sourced to officials of two countries familiar with that closed meeting, Putin turned to his intelligence chiefs and his generals and gave them their objective for the year. Not Pokrovsk. Not Huliaipole. Not a slice of Zaporizhzhia. The New Voice of Ukraine carries the line as reported: the task for 2026 was to “break NATO and the European Union apart from within.”

Every Western politician who has spent four years telling you this is a territorial dispute that can be settled with a line drawn on a map, or freezing of the contest lines, is being openly contradicted by the only man whose opinion on Russian war aims matters. Putin.

The most important thing in the Times report is the gap between the two narratives - or rather the gap between the narrative and reality.

In the public room, Russia is the victim of European hysteria. In the private room, Russia is running an operation to dismantle the two institutions that hold the European order together. And the Kremlin’s answer today follows the same architecture. Dmitry Peskov, quoted by UA.NEWS, called the reporting “all false claims that have no basis in fact.” Of course he did. That denial is not evidence about the meeting. It is evidence about the method - the same method as the December speech, deployed within hours of exposure. Denial is not merely messaging, but diplomatic trolling, open mockery and an assertion of superiority. Our politicians don’t get it, because their electorates don’t think them clever or superior when they are caught out in a lie. But many Russians, especially within the elites, see brazen lying as a mark of intelligence and strength, and submission to that lie, and appeasement towards the liar by European powers, as a signal of victory. It’s alien to us. All too real to them.

Let us be precise about what is confirmed and what is reported. The December briefing is intelligence testimony carried by the Times, not a published Kremlin transcript. There is no such transcript or official record. But look at what Russia has done in the seven months since - because the record is not classified, and we can see Russia’s behaviour, if we really want to.

MOLDOVA IS THE TEST BENCH

The Times places Moldova at the centre of the plan, and Western intelligence officials quoted across the coverage rank Moscow’s priorities in order: conquer Ukraine first, take control of Moldova second.

Two point four million people. Not in NATO. Not in the EU. Wedged between Ukraine and the alliance’s south-eastern flank. Russian troops already garrisoned in Transnistria - the remnant of the old 14th Army, sitting inside Moldova’s internationally recognised borders for three decades. And, per the officials cited by the Times, Putin still intends to seize southern Ukraine to open a land corridor to it. Odesa is not a Russian obsession because of Catherine the Great. Odesa is the door to Chi?in?u.

The interference machinery described in the reporting is not subtle. Paid Orthodox priests. An organised vote-buying scheme. And training camps - run under GRU supervision, according to the Times as carried across the European press - in Serbia, in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and in Moscow itself, where Moldovan citizens were taught to handle firearms, break police lines and start fires effectively. Reported payment: four hundred dollars a head. That is the market rate Moscow set for a Moldovan willing to burn his own capital.

It did not work. Moldovan police ran hundreds of searches and arrests, the riots never materialised, and in the September 2025 parliamentary elections Maia Sandu’s Party of Action and Solidarity won outright. Moldova held. Moldova is still holding.

Moscow moved to the tools that do not require a majority. In March, a Russian strike on a Ukrainian hydroelectric plant near the border sent pollution down the Dniester and disrupted water supply in Moldova’s third-largest city. Russian drones then hit the high-voltage line in western Ukraine carrying a large share of Moldova’s electricity, and the lights went out. Militarnyi, citing Sandu, records fifteen unauthorised incursions into Moldovan airspace this year by the ninth of August alone.

On that same 9 August, something exploded two and a half metres above a treeline outside the village of Crocmaz, in ?tefan Vod? district, scattering debris across a wide area and damaging homes. Moldovan police said the fragments resembled guided-missile components, and that no aircraft of this type had ever been recorded on Moldovan soil. I’ll be careful here, because the police did not formally declare it Russian, and Meduza notes the attribution was left open. But the Moldovan Foreign Ministry recalled its ambassador from Moscow the next day and framed the incident in its statement because of Russia’s war of aggression. Downplaying or suppression of such news on Russia’s hybrid war is now common, from Moldova, to Poland, to the UK to Germany. Why? Because to acknowledge the severity of it, and to attribute it, would demand a strong leadership response. Costly and risky.

THE OTHER HALF OF THE ORDER

Moldova is the soft route. The hard route is the alliance itself - and the same fortnight has delivered the evidence. On 6 August the Wall Street Journal reported the American intelligence assessment that Putin could test NATO’s Article 5 commitment by striking a member state between this autumn and 2029. Germany’s Chief of Defence, General Carsten Breuer, told the same paper that Russia is systematically using drones to map European air defences and find the seams.

Two days before that assessment landed, a quadcopter carrying plastic explosive flew unchallenged into Leipzig/Halle - a NATO airlift hub - struck a Ukrainian cargo aircraft, failed to detonate, and lay on the tarmac until a bus driver trod on it four hours later. Al Jazeera’s reporting on the European drone wave carries the detail. More on this in a separate episode.

Then this week the shape of the intended provocation came into focus. Reuters reported that Poland, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia are hardening dams, power plants and gas infrastructure against a false-flag attack using captured Ukrainian-made drones - an operation, according to a Baltic intelligence official, designed less to destroy anything than to detonate a political argument inside NATO about whether Russia did it and whether the alliance is obliged to answer. Lithuania’s Defence Minister Robertas Kaunas put it plainly to Reuters: “We are not naive.”

And on Thursday, Donald Tusk announced that Polish services had arrested a Russian national on 7 August, recruited by Russian intelligence, tasked with carrying out a killing in Warsaw. The target held both Ukrainian and American passports and was, in Tusk’s words to reporters, “inconvenient to the Putin regime.” Tusk called it the first time Russia has ordered the assassination of an American citizen on the soil of a NATO state. Reuters, CNN, the Washington Post and the Kyiv Independent all carry it.

That is not a series of isolated incidents. That is a sign the hybrid war is scaling up from a series of disparate tests of allied response, to a coordinated campaign to dissuade allies from supporting Ukraine, and to disrupt the military assistance that they are providing Ukraine.

AND YET THE TALKS CONTINUE

Today, 14 August, Ukrainska Pravda reported Moscow’s rejection of Türkiye’s proposed moratorium on military action in the Black Sea, with Lavrov ruling out any ceasefire along the line of contact and promising to intensify strikes on everything the West sends to sustain Ukraine’s defence. The Kremlin will receive American envoys. It will not stop the aggression though, and the U.S. simply will not apply any pressure that would compel the Kremlin to stop. This is the operationally bankrupt diplomatic channel in its purest form. Not a negotiation that is failing. But a negotiation that provides the aggressor with more time and capacity to extend and deepen their murderous campaign. It is a process of becoming complicit in evil, either through wilful and negligent ignorance, or unfortunately, by design.

Because the man asking for the meetings is the same man who told his generals in December that the goal is the destruction of NATO and the European Union from the inside. And the degradation of U.S. global power and authority remains a primary aim too. You cannot negotiate a durable settlement with a counterparty whose stated war aim is the dissolution of the institutions that would have to guarantee it. There is no roadmap for peace, only a war map that stretch to infinity, drafted by the Kremlin. There is no clever compromise on the Donbas possible, because the war is not, and never has been about the Donbas.

For four and a half years the appeasement caucus across Europe and Washington has rested its case on a single claim about Russian intentions: that Putin is a limited actor with limited aims, provoked into a limited war, containable by a limited concession. That claim is now contradicted by Putin himself, in private, to his own commanders - as reported by the Times.

The aim is Ukraine. Then Moldova. Then the alliance. Then the EU, and finally the emasculation of U.S. global power. Not as a paranoid fever dream from Russia hawks. But as a work order with a deadline of 2026.

Here is the part that stings. Moldova - two point four million people, no Article 5, no nuclear deterrent, a Russian garrison inside its own borders - has spent a year absorbing this campaign and beating it. Arrests. Prosecutions. An election won. An ambassador recalled. Chi?in?u has shown more institutional nerve against Russian subversion than states twenty times its size and a thousand times its wealth. That includes the U.S. that fell for Russian lies and still finds itself shackled from acting in a politically moral way by the same warped lies.

The question is not whether Putin intends to break us. He has said he does, and the debris keeps landing to prove it. The question is whether the strongest alliance in human history can summon a fraction of the resolve shown by a small country on the Dniester, and by the Ukrainians - and answer the December order with something Moscow can feel. Something that causes it pain and compels it to rethink its actions. Article 5 needs to be an unambiguous doctrine, that is not worth testing. Currently it is being tested and may soon break entirely.

Ukraine is winning, evil will not prevail.

Twenty-eight ballistic missiles over Kyiv. Zero stopped. Seventeen dead. And a West that has run out of interceptors, run out of urgency, and run out of excuses. Have we also run out of compassion? Run out of political capacity to defend ourselves and our allies, run dry of strategic clarity to see and oppose our enemies - those that would seek to destroy is - and run out of any sense of geopolitical morality enough to care? There is a slaughter taking place daily, nightly in Ukraine, on our watch, enabled by our inaction and weakness. And the consequences may soon be a full-scale genocide and ecocide that we are allowing, enabling.

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Twenty past midnight, Kyiv time. Kyiv Independent journalists on the ground heard the first detonations. The explosions went on for an hour. By the time the sun came up on Wednesday the fifth of August, seventeen people were dead across Kyiv and the surrounding oblast and forty-four were wounded. Fourteen of the dead were in the region outside the city - Tymur Tkachenko, who heads the regional military administration, called it one of the most tragic nights the region has endured.

Ukraine’s Air Force logged twenty-four Iskander-M or S-400 ballistic missiles, four Zircon or Onyx missiles, and a hundred and fifteen Shahed-type drones. Ninety-eight of the drones were shot down or jammed. Not one ballistic missile was intercepted. Zero out of 28.

Ukraine’s defensive system against ballistic has stopped functioning against the specific weapon that is killing Ukrainian civilians with impunity and in an indiscriminate way - missiles. And there is an increased risk now from so-called Reactive Shaheeds, or rocket-powered drones, for which there are currently few economically viable or technologically adequate solutions. And it is not an accident, and the timing not incidental - Russia knows that the weakness and lack of capacity of the West is giving them total impunity to indulge in this wholesale slaughter. It is the direct, traceable, entirely foreseeable consequence of decisions taken in Washington and tolerated in Brussels, Berlin and London.

Volodymyr Zelensky put it unambiguously on social media on Wednesday morning: ballistic interceptors are what could have saved the lives of those killed today.

WHAT WAS ACTUALLY DESTROYED

There is only one consolation from these attacks. Russia is not behaving strategically and current the attacks will not affect Ukraine’s war effort. The slaughter is entirely senseless. A parcel depot. A hardware chain. A brewery. A supermarket warehouse. A railway station.

The Nova Poshta sorting centre in Kyiv’s Obolonskyi district - Ukraine’s largest private postal operator - was destroyed by a missile with a cluster warhead. These are illegal - and this was a war crime. Two drivers working for a partner haulage firm and one contractor were killed. Eight more were injured. The company’s own statement to Interfax-Ukraine was blunt: the enemy has once again committed a war crime against the civilian population, using cluster munitions. Cluster munitions. Over a parcel depot. In a residential district of a European capital. And we seem to not be in a hurry to stop or deter these brutal attacks.

In Brovary, twenty kilometres north-east of the city, three ballistic missiles hit the main distribution warehouse of Rozetka, Ukraine’s biggest online retailer. Its co-founder Iryna Chechotkina had been due to publish a post that morning marking the company’s twenty-first birthday. Instead she wrote on Facebook, as reported by Meduza, that she had watched the work of her whole life burn after a strike by three ballistic missiles. The site processed more than a hundred thousand orders a day. It cannot be rebuilt quickly - maybe at all.

That was the third Russian attack on that one warehouse in five days. On 1 August a drone strike on the same Rozetka complex killed an employee, Volodymyr Melnychenko, and injured seven others while two hundred and seventy people were working inside.

And around them, the rest of the catalogue. Epicentr, the DIY and home-improvement chain. Novus supermarket warehouses at Borshchahivka. Fozzy Group. The Raben logistics group. Twenty-six impact locations recorded, with debris at six more. A twenty-storey residential block in Obolon on fire. A private house in Holosiivskyi destroyed with people underneath it - two of them pulled out alive from the rubble of a collapsed warehouse in the same district. An ammonia leak. An ambulance hit by a repeat explosion, its driver injured.

Let’s broaden this listing of recent Russian terror, and the focus Russia has on inflicting terror on civilian objects. On 1 August a Russian drone burned the Ranok publishing corporation’s warehouse in Kharkiv. Eight million books, according to the publisher, reported by AFP. Textbooks for children among them. Ranok called it the largest single loss to Ukraine’s book infrastructure of the entire full-scale war. The analytical portal Chytomo now estimates that between May and early August, Russian strikes destroyed or damaged some nine and a half million books - close to thirty per cent of everything Ukraine printed since 2025.

On the night of 3 to 4 August, the warehouse complex of the ice cream maker Lasunka was destroyed. The company told its customers, in a statement reported by UNN, that the entire consignment awaiting despatch to shops across the country had burned.

Books. Ice cream. Parcels. Paint and screws and garden furniture. Civilians. People’s lives and dreams razed to the ground? For what? The delusions of one old tyrant, and the moral and political impotence of that country’s cattle like population.

Moscow’s Defence Ministry announced it had struck transport, logistics and distribution centres holding dual-use goods, drone components, electronic warfare systems. This is the usual Russian bullshit. It also claimed three cargo ships south of Odesa. Are there drone components hidden inside children’s textbooks? Electronic warfare system hidden inside ice creams perhaps? Russians can’t tell the truth and are terrible at lying.

Against drones, Ukraine is still extremely good. Ninety-eight of a hundred and fifteen last night were intercepted. Eighty-three per cent on 1 August. Guns, jammers, interceptor drones, F-16s, Mirages - that layer works.

Against ballistic missiles there is exactly one answer in Ukraine’s inventory: the Patriot system firing the PAC-3 interceptor. There is no substitute that works at long ranges, and with the accuracy required. There is no workaround. And unfortunately, the world’s stocks of these tools have been severely depleted by Trump’s controversial and incompetent war in Iran.

On 1 August: twenty-seven ballistic missiles at Kyiv, one intercepted, nine dead. Analysts at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies calculated that Ukraine’s interception rate against Russian ballistics had already fallen to around ten per cent in early 2026. Last night: twenty-eight in, zero stopped. That ratio is dropping and the body count is rising.

Why are there none? Because the war with Iran drained the global pool. Reporting this week put US expenditure at more than eight hundred Patriot interceptors in the opening days of that conflict alone, against a Lockheed Martin production line delivering roughly six hundred and twenty PAC-3 MSE rounds a year. Reuters reported on 4 August that American stocks of ATACMS and Precision Strike missiles are at rock bottom, with virtually all of them expended in Iran. THAAD and Patriot assets have been pulled out of the Indo-Pacific to plug the hole.

The Financial Times reported that at an Oval Office meeting last week, President Trump refused Zelensky’s request for around three hundred additional PAC-3 interceptors - rounds Ukraine wanted specifically to protect its energy grid before winter. The reason given: American stocks are short and needed elsewhere. On licensing Ukrainian and European production of Patriot rounds, Trump told the Financial Times that Washington must be careful who it gives licences to. The delays and the ambiguity only play into Moscow’s hands. More of this in another episode - where we ask if Trump is back to trying to force a capitulation on Ukraine, especially in the context of Russia’s genocidal plans for this upcoming winter.

The US Ambassador to NATO, Matthew Whitaker, told Fox News on 3 August that a Patriot co-production agreement with Ukraine is unlikely to be reached before winter. I have news for him; this partnership will not be closed out or deliver anything in a strategically meaningful timeframe. Ukraine’s allies need to stop pretending and seek to stop pandering to the sadistic games that the White House has been playing since Trump returned to office.

Ukraine is to spend the winter under ballistic missiles with an empty magazine and has been told so in advance. Russia is preparing volleys of cruelty and pain ready for this winter period.

WHY NONE OF THIS WILL WIN PUTIN THE WAR

But the killing achieves nothing militarily. Nova Poshta announced within hours that it is compensating every customer at full declared value and continues to operate nationwide. Rozetka is trading today. Epicentr is counting the damage and reopening. The Ukrainian book industry is asking readers to walk into bookshops and buy stock to support the industry. Ukraine’s real GDP grew zero point six per cent in the second quarter.

You cannot bomb a country into surrender through its parcel network. The British Government learned that lesson from the receiving end in 1940 and the Germans learned it from the delivering end by 1945, and every serious air-power study since has confirmed it. Terror bombing of civilian logistics has never once broken a determined society. Not once.

Meanwhile the actual war is going the other way. Ukraine’s General Staff recorded over forty-two thousand Russian casualties in July - the highest monthly figure of 2026 - bringing the cumulative total past one and a half million, at 1,451,750 as of 4 August. Ukrainian drones are burning Wildberries logistics centres from Vladimir to St Petersburg and the Syzran refinery with them. Russia dropped a record eight thousand three hundred glide bombs in July and still cannot convert them into ground.

What are the ballistic missiles for? In one sense they are for us also. They are aimed at the political nerve of the West, not only the industrial base of Ukraine. Putin may not believe in Ukrainian resilience he may not even care about it. But the variable he is counting on is Western tolerance - durability, or rather the lack of it. He is not testing whether Ukraine will break. He is testing whether we will act and continue to pay vast sums to keep our ally in the fight. He is banking that we will not, and that political upsets in Europe will affect that. Unfortunately, in this gamble, he is not entirely wrong.

TERRORS UPSTREAM

Now the harder question: how much worse can this get? North of Kyiv at Vyshhorod sits the Kyiv Hydroelectric Power Plant - a 288-metre dam holding back a reservoir of roughly 3.7 billion cubic metres of water, immediately upstream of a city of three million people.

Russia struck it on 26 February 2022, in the first days of the invasion. It struck it again on 26 August 2024. Ukrhydroenergo’s director Ihor Syrota has said that no station in his portfolio has escaped attack.

Now the honest part, which few are talking about openly. Ukrainian hydro engineers and the NSDC’s Centre for Countering Disinformation have consistently assessed that missiles cannot breach that dam, that the structure was built with Cold War margins, and that damage to the sluice gates would produce localised flooding downstream, not a Kakhovka-scale wall of water. I am not going to tell you Kyiv is one missile away from being washed into the Dnipro, because that is not what the engineering says, and Moscow would love us to say it - Russian propagandist Maria Zakharova was pushing precisely that panic line in 2024.

But we must not dismiss the Russian intent to commit evil acts on a massive scale. The intent is there. This is the state that blew the Kakhovka dam from the inside in June 2023 and drowned southern Ukraine - an ecocide whose consequences are permanent. This is the state that has taken the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant through blackout after blackout. When Russia can reach a structure whose failure kills at industrial scale, it reaches for it.

How do I know - well, I drove through there last week. The localised flooding cause by Russians attacks is clear and terrifying. The damage is obvious, and it is evidence of intent.

The second is the target it can destroy: the grid. Not the dam - the generation and transmission behind it. Ukraine’s Prime Minister Serhii Koretskyi has put the energy sector’s unmet needs before winter at around six hundred and fifty million euros. The three hundred interceptors Ukraine asked Washington for last week were requested for exactly that job.

That is the humanitarian catastrophe on the near horizon. Not a flood. A cold and unforgiving winter. Millions of people in unheated apartments in a country whose anti-ballistic defence is practically and demonstrably at zero. And it is entirely preventable, if there was the will by Ukraine’s allies to prevent this evil. As we get closer to winter, the harder and more distant will be any possible solution to this impending catastrophe - this slow-motion car crash crime.

SEVENTY MILLION EUROS

Which brings us to Brussels, and to the single most revealing number of this entire day. A number that reveals the lack of strategic intent to deal with Russia, to deter it, to punish. To stop it even. On Wednesday morning, hours after the missiles, Ursula von der Leyen announced one point four billion euros for Ukraine from the proceeds of immobilised Russian assets. Russia must pay for the destruction it has caused. But most of that money repays existing G7 and EU loans. Seventy million euros of it goes to military assistance.

Seventy million. Five per cent. A PAC-3 interceptor costs around three point seven million dollars. Do that arithmetic and Europe’s military response to seventeen dead civilians and twenty-eight unopposed ballistic missiles amounts to roughly a dozen and a half munition rounds - assuming any were available to buy, which they are not.

This is the strategic / kinetic ceiling. There is a hard limit above which the West will not act, and Russia mapped that ceiling years ago and now operates comfortably beneath it. Everything under the ceiling is permitted: cluster munitions over a postal depot, drones stalking a vegetable seller in Kherson, a children’s hospital in Zaporizhzhia, eight million burned books.

And the UN numbers show what happens when a ceiling is discovered and never raised. Its monitoring mission recorded 1,396 civilians killed in the first six months of 2026, up thirty-seven per cent year on year, with casualties from long-range missiles and drones up sixty per cent. June was the deadliest month since April 2022. Then July, on Ukrainian government figures cited by CNN, took 377 lives and was worse still. Now August has opened with nine dead on the first and seventeen on the fifth.

That is not a war grinding on. That is a growth curve - an aggressor on a killing spree, that is increasing in its intensity - and every point on it was plotted by the gap between what our leaders say and what they are willing to do. Zelensky, to his enormous credit, gave the West a second option on Wednesday. If you will not send interceptors, sanction the missiles. A significant share of Russia’s ballistic missile production, he pointed out, remains outside sanctions. Even now. Four and a half years in. The West is a moral and strategic vacuum now.

Ultimately responsibility lies with Russia, and indeed with every Russian. Russia fired the missiles. Russia is the aggressor. Russians failed to stop their leaders. Many failed to care at all. Russia’s Defence Ministry lied about the targets before the fires were put out. There is one criminal party in this war; it is Moscow. But our complacency also carries with it complicity.

We are not watching a tragedy - but an intentional slaughter by an imperial aggressor. And we are watching a policy outcome. The outcome of western weakness and hesitancy. We thought history had ended in the 1990s, but what really ended, was our willingness to defend ourselves and our values. We disarmed mentally and physically. But the aggressors are back. The tyrants are back. The killers are back, and we are not prepared. Only Ukraine has shown it can fight back, and we are letting them do it alone. Ukraine is winning, evil will not prevail.

THE MOBILISATION TRAP: Russia under Putin has become a cage. Sure, the door is half open at present but could slam shut at any moment. At a moment of Putin’s choosing. Putin has built the cage the trap Russians for the slaughter - but it still won’t save him.

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In the space of an intense four days, and over the preceding months, the Russian state has quietly assembled every component of a mass call-up - the laws, the registries, the internal-security powers, the exit controls - without saying the word “mobilisation” out loud once. The decision has been made in all but name. And here is the thing the Kremlin will not tell the men it is about to feed into the zero line, the meat grinder: this mobilisation is engineered to fail. It will be the largest deliberate transfer of Russian men into a drone-saturated kill zone in the history of this war. Putin has no choice. And no chance of success, if this is his delusion.

Look at the last week of Russian lawmaking, and we must stop pretending this is ambiguous. On 21 July, Rosgvardia - the National Guard, Putin’s internal army - published proposed amendments expanding its civil-defence powers to protect Russian society from unspecified “dangers” during mobilisation, martial law, and wartime. The force whose job is suppressing Russians is rewriting its own rulebook in preparation for the day the call-up is announced. On 22 July, the State Duma passed a law allowing citizens with active, unexpunged criminal records - including convictions for drug trafficking and organised crime - to sign Ministry of Defence contracts during a formal mobilisation. Deputy Defence Minister Viktor Goremykin praised it openly: it expands the pool of Russians fit for service and eases recruitment for the war in 2026.

On the same day, the Duma passed what the Russian legal-rights group First Department calls a “law on the deprivation of citizenship” - a civic-death package creating a Justice Ministry register of Russians abroad. Those listed lose access to passports and consular services, banking apps and transfers, loans and their own accounts, property and vehicle transactions, driving licences, the Gosuslugi state portal. Their income gets diverted into special state-controlled accounts. On the evening of 24 July - Friday night - the exiled human-rights defender Vladimir Osechkin, founder of Gulagu.net, told Mark Feygin’s stream that the Federation Council had waved the package through and that, in his assessment, the machinery it completes exists for one purpose: to make sure that this time, when mobilisation comes, there is no rush for the exits. No repeat of September 2022. The exits are being sealed before the call -up, and all routes to the exit, physical and financial are being brought under state control, so they can slam shut as soon as the command is given.

And on 24 July, President Zelensky put the intelligence picture on the record: “We have clear intelligence that Russia is preparing a new, quite large-scale wave of mobilization this autumn.”

The Institute for the Study of War connected the dots in its 22 July assessment: the Kremlin is preparing not only to mobilise, but to manage the domestic unrest it knows the mobilisation will cause. They are not planning a call-up. They are planning a call-up and a crackdown, simultaneously, because they understand their own population well enough to know the second is inseparable from the first. We drew attention to this earlier in the year, as the regime practiced for a sudden shutdown of the banking sector and mobile internet.

Tonight, in six minutes: why the decision is effectively made. Why the exits are welded shut. And why the whole enterprise is doomed - because Putin is about to march half a million untrained men into the most lethal defensive environment in the history of land warfare, and four years of evidence says his generals have learnt precisely nothing.

WHY PUTIN HAS NO CHOICE

Ukraine’s Foreign Intelligence Service reported in mid-July that Russia has signed only 195,000 military contracts against a 2026 target of 204,500 - while losing 196,700 personnel in 2026 alone, roughly 115,300 of them irretrievable. Read those two numbers side by side. Russia’s losses this year now exceed its recruitment this year. The contract-soldier model - the signing bonuses, the convict battalions, the North Koreans, the roughly 20,000 foreign recruits the GUR says Moscow is chasing from Central Asia to Sudan - has hit its ceiling. The Western analytical group Frontelligence estimates desertions could reach 70,000 this year. Entire regions report the well of men willing to die for money has run dry.

So, the Kremlin reaches for compulsion. Andriy Kovalenko, head of Ukraine’s Centre for Countering Disinformation, reported on 18 July that Russia is preparing an autumn mobilisation of 500,000 - some thrown into the eastern front within two weeks of call-up, others held back to open a new axis. According to Kovalenko, Sergey Kiriyenko and Valery Gerasimov have personally assured Putin that this will deliver the defeat of Ukraine. Russian Z-channels talk of numbers running far higher - the milblogger Romanov has floated figures north of a million, per EUobserver’s battlefield tracking. Former Commander-in-Chief Syrskyi assessed early this year that Russia’s theoretical mobilisation pool exceeds 20 million.

This is the cornered-dictator logic we set out in May. A democratic leader who loses a war loses an election. Putin loses everything. Against that personal arithmetic, feeding another half-million men into the grinder is not madness. It is, for him, the rational move - combined with the delusional thinking that this may lead to significant victories. It cannot and will not.

THE DIGITAL GULAG IS ALREADY BUILT

September 2022 taught the Kremlin one lesson, and it was not a military one. When the partial mobilisation was announced, somewhere between 700,000 and a million men fled Russia in weeks. The regime has spent four years making sure that can never happen again.

The infrastructure is in place. The unified digital draft registry, operational since last year: an electronic summons on Gosuslugi is legally served the moment it is issued, whether you open it or not - and it triggers automatic restrictions. Exit ban. No loans. No property sales. No new passport. No driving licence. A 30-day departure ban attaches on receipt. Independent monitors call the existing system “crypto-mobilisation” - a continuous, low-visibility call-up running without a televised decree. The televised decree, when it comes, will simply switch the machine to full power. Maybe a public statement will not be required - but this will be mass mobilisation by stealth.

The population can feel it coming. The independent outlet Mozhem Obyasnit documented over 26,000 Yandex searches for passport costs in June alone - up 221 per cent on late 2024 - while Muscovites report a total absence of passport appointment slots and Ukraine’s Centre for Countering Disinformation assesses the backlog as deliberate obstruction ahead of the autumn wave. Osechkin, on Friday’s stream, added the detail from his sources inside the system: FSB officers seconded to international airports report their processing software and hardware being upgraded for a multiple increase in workload; the FSB has acquired around ten pretrial detention centres of its own, beyond any prosecutor’s reach; espionage and treason prosecutions have multiplied. Single-source claims clearly attributed - but they sit in perfect alignment with everything the public legislative record shows.

If you are a Russian man of fighting age, understand what happened this week. The state did not merely prepare to conscript you. It prepared to erase you civically if you run, imprison you if you resist, and shoot you if you retreat. The gulag is now delivered via an app, but its consequence is not just digital, but visceral. This Gulag is a death machine on Chekist steroids.

THE KILL ZONE THAT EATS ARMIES

And now the part Kiriyenko and Gerasimov are not putting in Putin’s folder. The battlefield these 500,000 men will be sent into no longer rewards mass, or bends to mass. It devours it.

Forbes’ defence analysis has documented it across 2026: the Russian offensive has effectively stalled, unable to push through Ukraine’s drone-patrolled kill zones - belts of surveillance and strike drones extending kilometres beyond the defensive line, where any force entering in strength is detected within minutes and destroyed by FPV drones and artillery before it ever closes with a Ukrainian trench. Russia’s answer - so-called drone corridors - has failed to convert into breakthroughs, not least because Russia is now running short of trained drone operators, who die in the same kill zones as the infantry they support. Finnish President Alexander Stubb put the exchange rate on the record in April: “the killing ratio right now is 1:5” - one Ukrainian to five Russians. The CIA’s assessment, cited in Western reporting, is that an inexperienced Russian soldier’s life expectancy during a mass assault can be as little as twenty to thirty minutes. These ratios will accelerate in 2026, and not in Russia’s favour.

Twenty to thirty minutes. That is what the Kremlin is purchasing with the civic death of its own population. And here is the precedent the mobilised men already know; of the 300,000 called up in autumn 2022 - trained, such as it was, in a less lethal war - estimates cited in Western battlefield tracking suggest only a fraction remain alive and combat-capable. The 2026 intake gets two weeks. Osechkin described soldiers at the line maiming each other - dropping bricks on feet, staged gunshot wounds - because self-mutilation now rates as the survivable option. Blocking units behind them, Ukrainian drones ahead of them. Have Putin’s generals learnt anything in four and a half years? The evidence of Pokrovsk, of Huliaipole, of the failure by Russia to gain territorial since May, says no. Mass without answers to the drone is not an offensive. It is a procession into the meat grinder - this time with the doors locked from behind. Putin does not intent for anyone to return from these killing fields and ditches.

THE TRAP CLOSES ON ITS BUILDER

Putin mobilises because he cannot recruit, locks the country down because he remembers 2022, and sends half a million men into a kill zone his army has failed to solve for two years - to postpone a defeat the mobilisation cannot prevent. The trap Putin built for his people is also a trap closing around his regime. The West’s task is not to watch this with fascination and dread. It is to accelerate it - more drones, more deep-strike capability, more pressure on the fuel, more finance for Ukraine to scale production of middle strike and deep strike capability. Ukraine has built the machine that breaks Russian offensives - we need to make sure that machine is well oiled and maintained. Only a catastrophic and humiliating defeat has any chance of snapping Russia out of its imperial fever dream. Even then, defeat, containment and total isolation make be the only solution to the problem, the plague that is Russia.

Ukraine is winning, evil will not prevail.

PUTIN, JUST GO: The whole systema is begging the dictator to end the war - and it will change nothing, because in the vertical of power only one vote counts.

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IT’S TIME TO STOP, VOVA. That is the message now arriving at Putin’s desk from every floor of his own regime - from his advisers, his oligarchs, his governors, his pollsters, his last remaining allies. Everyone inside the systema can now see what we have documented for months: Russia has failed in its objectives and is burning through its final reserves of fuel, money, and men. Everyone sees it. Except the one man whose opinion, in a dictatorship, is the only one that counts. Tonight: why the chorus of “stop” is real, why it is genuinely remarkable - and why you should not be fooled into thinking it will stop anything. Because the oligarchs have no agency, the generals have no agency, and the men brawling at the petrol pumps have no agency. Putin has lost touch with every reality except one: survive at all costs, and fight to the last Russian.

EVERYONE IS SAYING IT NOW

Start with the most extraordinary document of the past week. On 9 July, Reuters published an exclusive based on three sources close to the Kremlin. Buried in the middle of it: a group of Putin’s own advisers came to him with a proposal to freeze the war along the current front line. Think about what that means inside the vertical of power. These are men who know exactly what happens to the bearer of bad news in Putin’s court. They know the fate of Prigozhin. They came anyway - because staying silent had finally become more dangerous than speaking. And Putin’s response? He rebuked them. One source said he has, quote, “dug in his heels” on seizing the rest of Donbas. Another told Reuters he needs some kind of victory - any victory - and considers the capture of Donbas a matter of principle.

The next evening, 10 July, President Zelensky said the quiet part in his address to the nation: Ukraine’s peace proposals now have support not only among partners around the world but inside Putin’s own circle - people who understand, in his words, that there is “no alternative to peace.” This is not a rhetorical flourish. Zelensky has a physical channel to that circle, with a name attached: Roman Abramovich, the courier oligarch, whose Kyiv mission we covered in earlier episodes.

Then came the flügel - the weathervane. On 9 July, The Economist published an essay by Andrei Melnichenko, the fertiliser king, eighth on the Russian Forbes list, over twenty billion dollars, whose plants supply ammonia that ends up in Russian ammunition. A sanctioned oligarch, living mostly in Russia, gave a Western magazine roughly sixty hours of interviews and a manifesto on post-war Russia. He lists four Western scenarios for Russia’s future - humiliation, Chinese vassalage, disintegration, North Korean fortress - declares them all catastrophic and proposes a fifth: a “sovereign” Russia in which business regains a role in strategic decisions. How realistic is this? Could he even have made these statements without some powerful protection from, within the regime? This is hotly debated, and we’ll do a separate episode on the themes this emissary raises.

His implication that Russia transitions into being ruled by a transitional leadership that still contains Putin, is frankly ludicrous, and the idea that the West could deal with such an entity is pure fantasy. The Economist itself notes he is no dissident - he has never criticised the war; he is positioning himself as an architect of change, but he is hardly that.

So, is the outer ring of Putin’s circle crumbling? On 13 July - this Monday - at the Shusha Global Media Forum, Ilham Aliyev of Azerbaijan, a man who signed a declaration of allied interaction with Moscow two days before the full-scale invasion, said it flatly: “this war must be stopped, and this must happen immediately.” He advised Ukraine never to agree to occupation. The Kremlin’s Peskov spluttered the next day that Moscow “categorically” disagrees. And in Minsk on 25 June, Lukashenko - the man who owes Putin his throne and possibly his life - looked Russia’s ambassador Boris Gryzlov in the eye, on camera, and told him: “There’s no need to get dragged into a war.” The Wall Street Journal has documented what that was about: Moscow pressuring Minsk all year to open Belarusian territory for strikes and hybrid operations, with Gryzlov threatening to cut the financial lifeline. Within a week of Zelensky’s ultimatum, Belarus switched off the Russian relay stations guiding drones onto Ukrainian cities. When even Lukashenko refuses orders from the bunker, what do the men who owe Putin nothing conclude?

And the Russian public? Levada now records Putin’s approval at its lowest point since the invasion began, with support for negotiations at wartime highs. Even the court pollsters cannot hide it anymore. Let’s not delude ourselves the Russian public have any influence.

WHY THEY ARE TALKING - IT’S NOT CONSCIENCE

Do not romanticise this chorus. Nobody in the systema found a conscience, no one has expressed remorse for the monstrous crimes of their country. They are realising the consequence of those crimes of aggression. The elite pacifism of July 2026 was written by Ukrainian deep-strike drones, by the attrition of fuel supplies and marketplace warehouses.

The fuel catastrophe first. By early July, on CNN’s analysis, nearly all of Russia’s eighty-three regions were reporting gasoline shortages or supply disruptions. Occupied Crimea declared a state of emergency on 21 June and at one point banned retail fuel sales outright. Meduza’s data desk crunched sixty-five thousand transactions on the St Petersburg exchange: gasoline and diesel volumes down forty-seven percent in the first half of the year, prices up forty-six percent. Foreign Policy reported this week that by early July every one of Russia’s largest refineries had been hit - the last domino, the Soviet-era giant at Omsk, twelve hundred miles from the front, struck the very week Zelensky announced a new long-range strike command. Sevastopol’s own installed governor told Putin to his face that premium petrol in his region hit 197 roubles a litre; resellers in Yalta are charging up to 450. That is among the most expensive petrol on the planet - in the “trophy” peninsula the war was supposedly about. Moscow, one of the world’s great oil producers, is now importing petrol from India and buying it back from Belarusian refineries. The Kremlin’s answer? A decree legalising Euro-3 and even lower-grade fuel - winding Russian petrol quality back twenty years, because the equipment that made the good stuff is burning.

Then the manpower ledger. Janis Kluge of the German SWP institute, working from Russia’s own budget data: 71,216 contracts signed in the first quarter of 2026 - roughly eight hundred a day, the lowest rate in three years, down twenty percent year on year - while regions paid death compensation for 250 to 300 killed soldiers per day. Verstka reports Moscow’s recruit flow collapsed by a third this spring despite record signing bonuses averaging 1.47 million roubles. The recruiters’ own verdict, in the reporting: the fools for hire have run out. Frontline units, by soldiers’ own accounts, are manned at thirty to forty percent.

And the property ledger. The state that once sold oligarchs protection in exchange for loyalty now confiscates from the loyal. The Rusagro case of 2025 - five days from lawsuit to the seizure of half a trillion roubles from Vadim Moshkovich, a perfectly loyal billionaire - told every fortune in Russia that loyalty is no longer a shield. Melnichenko himself bought a reprieve from nationalisation with a thirty-two-billion-rouble donation to Putin’s pet Sirius foundation, per The Economist’s reporting. He knows he purchased a pause, not safety.

Ukrainian strikes plus Western sanctions raised the price of the war. The Prosecutor General removed the reward for tolerating it. That - not morality - is the entire mystery of elite peace-mongering.

THE ILLUSION OF AGENCY - WHY THE CHORUS CHANGES NOTHING

Now the hard part. Western commentary is already spinning this chorus into a palace-coup fantasy. Resist it. The vertical of power was engineered, over twenty-six years, to ensure that no oligarch, no general, no governor, and no mob at a petrol station possesses independent agency. The oligarchs are not a class with real power; they are hostages with allowances. Even the scenes at the petrol pumps - the queues stretching kilometres, the fistfights over jerry cans caught on video, drivers berating each other over rationing rules while the pumps run dry - are not signs of organised or effective opposition. These do not exist. The empire that weaponised gas against Europe cannot fuel its own trophy peninsula in tourist season. It is amusing. It is deserved. But is not politics, not yet. Atomised, frightened people fighting each other for petrol are the opposite of a revolutionary crowd. Russians have been trained for generations to direct their rage horizontally - at the queue-jumper, the intermediaries, their neighbour - never vertically, at the man who caused it. From the videos and memes, it’s clear many cannot think strategically, and in fact exists in a bizarre self-interested or conspiratorial bubble, that has absolutely nothing to do with reality - political reality.

This is the dictator’s trap in its purest form. On the fifth year of this war, it no longer rests on a system. It rests on the stubbornness of its owner - a man who, as we documented in May, is visibly deteriorating, marinated in fabricated reports of imagined victories, and for whom defeat means not retirement but, quite possibly, death. Such a man does not respond to a chorus of minions begging him to stop. Reuters’ sources tell us exactly how he responds: a “high probability” of escalation in the coming months. And the calendar tells us when. Duma elections, 18 to 20 September. Verstka’s and iStories’ sources inside the presidential administration say a new mobilisation wave is being discussed for October, once the last political brake is off. Czech President Petr Pavel says it plainly: the window to pressure Russia is open until September, and then it starts to close.

THE MORAL ARITHMETIC

There are two camps trying to feed their messages to the Kremlin, the pro war zealots and those who think it should now be paused. The ‘pause the war’ chorus is real, and matters - not because it will change Putin’s mind, but because it maps the fractures that will matter on the day the regime breaks. And the chorus was produced by pressure: by drones over Omsk, by sanctions, by the fuel queues, by the six-trillion-rouble budget hole his own advisers warned him about. Every refinery that burns, every sanction package that bites, hands another argument to the men who already came to Putin once with a plan to stop. The lesson for the West is not “wait for the elites to do it for us.” They can’t. They have no will, no courage, nor capability. The lesson is the opposite: since only a single man votes, the only strategy is to make his war physically impossible to continue - and to do it before October, before the mobilisation window opens, before the cornered dictator reaches, as cornered dictators always do, for escalation instead of exit. Before the next brutal winter begins. It’s time to stop, Vova. The whole systema is whispering it. He isn’t listening. So, Ukraine will keep saying it in the only language he has ever understood - raining fire and violence on his refineries, attrition of his army, destruction of logistics networks and power infrastructure, and the unambiguous defeat of his imperial project. Ukraine is winning, evil will not prevail.

Wildberries Is Over - This is a case of Russia against modernity. Putin is dragging the country back to the 1990s, but a darker version, with fewer nice things even than then. But he does not care about modernity, or about Russia’s passive population.

OUT OF STOCK: A week of “long-range sanctions” burns Russia’s Amazon from Moscow to St Petersburg to occupied Crimea - and proves a modern economy cannot survive the war its dictator started.

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WILDBERRIES IS OVER: Seven days. At least ten Wildberries logistics complexes struck across nine locations - Elektrostal, Kotovsk, Krasnodar, Nevinnomyssk, Voronezh region, and now, overnight, St Petersburg, the Leningrad region, Tver, and occupied Simferopol. The deadliest Ukrainian deep strikes inside Russia in two years. Around a tenth of the company’s national warehouse capacity gone. Pulkovo airport shut while the second city of the empire watched its own sky fill with smoke. Russia’s marketplaces have rewritten their contracts to abandon their sellers, and the Moscow Exchange has fallen through the floor. Putin tried to drag the twenty-first century back into the eighteenth - and the twenty-first century is burning down around him. Zelensky calls this campaign “long-range sanctions”. They are only going to increase. The scene is being set for Russians to ensure a brutal winter.

In the early hours of Friday 24 July 2026, two columns of smoke rose over St Petersburg. Not over a refinery this time, but over the logistics hubs of Wildberries - Russia’s largest online retailer, Russia’s answer to Amazon. The company’s own press office confirmed it: operations suspended at its centres in Shushary and Utkin Zavod on the city’s outskirts. In Novosaratovka, in the Leningrad region, a third warehouse burned, three people injured, as per governor Alexander Drozdenko. In occupied Simferopol, in Crimea, a Wildberries sorting hub was hit and evacuated - the company confirmed that too. In Tver, residents filmed thick smoke over yet another reported logistics fire. Pulkovo airport suspended flights for hours; around fifty departures were disrupted. And Tatyana Kim - Wildberries’ founder, Russia’s wealthiest woman - was reduced, on Friday morning, to reassuring the country that “parts” of her warehouses had been saved.

This is the third wave in under a week, and by the Kyiv Independent’s count the fifth attack on this single company in seven days. It began on 18 July with Elektrostal and Kotovsk. It reached Krasnodar and Nevinnomyssk on the 22nd, the Voronezh region on the 23rd. Now it has reached Peter the Great’s window on Europe. A window that is being slammed shut by Ukrainian long range drone operations. This is not a raid. It is a campaign. And it is aimed at something far bigger than warehouses. It is aimed at the central delusion of Putin’s war - that a modern, connected, just-in-time economy can wage a nineteenth-century war of imperial conquest and keep functioning. It cannot. Tonight, what burned, why it was targeted, and why this is a war against modernity that Ukraine’s model of modernity is now winning.

The numbers first. The 18 July strikes on Elektrostal - over 360,000 square metres, eight thousand employees, fifty kilometres from the Kremlin - and on Kotovsk killed eight people and injured more than sixty, per Russia’s own regional governors: the human toll of Putin locating his war economy inside his consumer economy. Russian analysts cited by The Moscow Times put the damage from that first night alone at up to 100 billion roubles - around 1.3 billion dollars - among the costliest strikes on Russian commercial infrastructure of the entire war. Rebuilding those first facilities: up to 35.8 billion roubles, per experts speaking to Kommersant, a bill the insurers are unlikely to cover. Before last night’s wave, Kommersant’s estimate was that roughly eight percent of Wildberries’ national warehouse capacity had already been disabled. Add St Petersburg, Novosaratovka, Simferopol, and the reported Tver fire, and the running total moves towards a tenth of the logistics network of a company Forbes Russia valued at 12.6 billion dollars this year - the retail bloodstream of the Russian consumer economy, reaching every household, from Kaliningrad to the Kurils.

WHY THIS TARGET

President Zelensky said Ukraine had hit “warehouses used to supply war materiel: navigation equipment, components for drone production, and other supplies for the Russian army”, framing the campaign as retaliation for Russia’s deadly strikes on Nova Poshta - Ukraine’s civilian postal and logistics company, bombed without a second thought. The Kremlin denies Wildberries serves the military. Yet CNN reported this week that a simple search for “military supplies” on the Wildberries site returns over 78,000 items - body armour, first-aid kits, rations - and Meduza has documented drone components and fibre-optic cable sold openly on the platform. Serhii Kuzan of the Ukrainian Security and Cooperation Centre put the logic plainly to CNBC: “The destruction of this logistics infrastructure deals a significant blow to Russia’s economy”. Russia militarised its consumer economy. Ukraine is now treating it accordingly. That is the moral arithmetic of this war, and it is entirely of Russia’s own making.

And note the geography of the past twenty-four hours. Simferopol - the logistics anchor of occupied Crimea, already the peninsula’s worst-supplied summer since annexation. Tver, on the Moscow-Petersburg axis. And St Petersburg itself, Putin’s home city, the imperial showcase, its airport closed and its skyline smoking. Zelensky has a name for this doctrine: long-range sanctions. Sanctions the West debates for months, Ukraine now delivers overnight - and no veto in Washington or Budapest can water them down.

THE FRAGILITY OF THE MODERN

Here is the thesis. Remember Azovstal. In 2022, Ukrainian defenders held a Soviet-era steel plant for weeks under direct bombardment, because industrial-age infrastructure is, almost by accident, a fortress - metres of reinforced concrete that swallowed bomb after bomb. A modern economy is the opposite. A modern logistics centre holding goods worth a measurable slice of GDP is a fast-assembled steel-frame shed. It has sprinklers and fire codes, because the entire system rests on one assumption: that nobody is deliberately trying to destroy it. Its address is public. It cannot be hidden, hardened, or dispersed without ceasing to be what it is. A drone costing tens of thousands of dollars erases hundreds of millions in assets, jobs, tax base, and consumer confidence in a single night - and Russia is too vast for any air-defence umbrella to cover the thousands of such targets it has built. That asymmetry is the new deterrence. Modern states cannot afford war - not because their leaders became virtuous, but because everything that makes an economy modern also makes it burnable.

Russia’s own corporate giants have already confessed as much through their behaviour. Ozon rewrote its seller agreement, effective 1 July, exempting itself from any claims arising from drone strikes and military action. Wildberries did the same on 7 July - eleven days before its warehouses started burning. This week, per Vyorstka’s reporting carried by Meduza and The Moscow Times, Yandex Market followed. Russia’s three biggest marketplaces have formally written the war into their contracts and dumped the entire risk onto their sellers - hundreds of thousands of small businesses, the last functioning entrepreneurial class in Russia, who told The Insider they have lost millions of roubles with no insurance, no compensation, no recourse. The markets have read it correctly: the Moscow Exchange’s all-session index closed below 2,000 points on 17 July, down twenty percent in a month per Investing.com data, and Ozon shares slumped when trading reopened after the first strikes. Bloomberg reports Russia’s biggest food retailers are now scrambling to decentralise their warehouse networks. Decentralisation means duplication, duplication means cost, and cost means inflation - paid, as always, by ordinary Russians, three times over: as consumers, as taxpayers, and as the collateral of a regime that classifies its own statistics rather than admit what is happening.

Step back and see the whole picture. Vladimir Putin’s understanding of the world froze somewhere around 1999, the year he took the presidential chair - before the smartphone, before the marketplace economy, before the cheap long-range drone. He believed territory could still be seized and held, that war could still solve political problems, that the twenty-first century could be marched backwards into the eighteenth at gunpoint. Four and a half years into his three-day war, the verdict is arriving nightly, by air. The empire he wanted cannot be taken. And the modern economy he governs - the delivery apps, the data centres, the marketplaces that touch every Russian household - is precisely what his war is destroying. There is bitter symbolism in where the smoke rose this morning. St Petersburg was built as Russia’s window on Europe, on modernity itself. Putin slammed that window shut - and now the fires of his own war are visible through the glass. The long-range sanctions will not stop. They will scale - because they work, because they are cheap, and because every strike lands where the Kremlin’s lies cannot reach; in the prices, the empty shelves, the burned inventory, the delayed flights, the abandoned sellers. The West should study this doctrine and fully support Ukraine in maintaining and extending it. Ukraine has found the pressure point of the swamp empire, and it is pressing harder every night.

Ukraine is winning, evil will not prevail.

They’ve Started Burying Putin Alive. The oligarchs are running, Beijing is hedging, the ratings are collapsing - every group that holds this regime up is quietly preparing for the world after Putin. They have not yet moved against him, but the life support for his regime is being switched off one input at a time. Soon the plug will be pulled, as Putin’s relentless war is dragging Russia down the abyss and taking everyone in a benighted, failing empire with him.

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In a single week in July 2026, Bloomberg documented the oligarchs stampeding for the exits with tens of billions of dollars; the Wall Street Journal revealed that Xi Jinping now treats Putin as a supplicant and is quietly building relationships with the people who will run Russia after him; the Kremlin’s own pollsters recorded the steepest one-week collapse in Putin’s approval since the mobilisation panic of 2022; and Russia’s Defence Ministry admitted its flagship drone force has recruited barely a quarter of its plan. Four pillars. One message. The people who know this regime best have stopped believing in it.

21 July 2026 - dictators are rarely toppled by crowds at the gates. They fall when the people holding the structure up quietly let go. The population obeys out of fear or belief in the man’s indispensability. The elites support him because they calculate life without him would be worse. Foreign patrons back him while the backing pays. And when all those groups - at the same time - start planning for a future without him, that is not the cause of a dictator’s fall. It is the forecast of it. Birds fly low before the rain, so the Russian phrase goes.

This week, the birds flew very low indeed.

THE MONEY VOTES FIRST

Start with the people who know the true state of the system better than anyone in Russia: the people whose fortunes depend on reading it correctly.

On 16 July, Bloomberg published an investigation confirming that several of Russia’s richest people - including figures close to Putin himself - have moved billions of dollars out of the country over the past year. A conservative estimate of unofficial outflows since the start of 2026 alone runs to the tens of billions of dollars, according to people familiar with the investment decisions of several Russian billionaires. And the pace is accelerating. The money is going into cryptocurrency, gold, Dubai property, private funds in the Gulf. The routes run through Armenia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, the Emirates.

Think about the historical irony here. After 2022, Western sanctions forced these men to bring their assets home. The West froze their yachts, their villas, their accounts. Four years later, the same men are fleeing their own state - because the risks inside Putin’s Russia now outweigh the sanctions risk outside it. They could shield themselves from a hostile foreign government. They cannot shield themselves from their own.

The reason, Bloomberg’s sources say plainly, is fear. Since 2024 the state has been spinning up a confiscation machine. Vadim Moshkovich lost Rusagro, one of the country’s biggest agricultural holdings. Konstantin Strukov lost his gold-mining empire. Dmitry Kamenshchik lost Domodedovo Airport. And at a closed meeting in March, billionaire Suleiman Kerimov floated the idea that big business should make a substantial “voluntary” contribution to the state - a proposal Putin reportedly welcomed, and the Kremlin later denied. The elite read that signal instantly. First the contribution is voluntary compulsory. Then it is simply compulsory.

Capital flight is the most honest polling data that exists. These are the best-informed people in Russia, and their verdict on the regime’s future is written in wire transfers. Massive shifts.

THE PATRON PREPARES FOR THE SUCCESSOR

The standard objection: Putin has China. A bottomless market, an eternal friend, insurance against any collapse. Beijing has a different view, and the Wall Street Journal laid it out in forensic detail this week, in a piece built on sources inside the Chinese state apparatus. The headline says everything: Putin was Xi’s role model. Now he’s the junior partner.

In 2013, on his first foreign trip as leader, Xi went to Moscow and reportedly called Putin a role model. In May 2026, Putin flew to Beijing - his fourteenth pilgrimage - with one overriding objective: the Power of Siberia 2 gas pipeline, a project Moscow has chased for two decades and now desperately needs, having lost Europe. The Chinese answer, delivered to Gazprom’s delegation before Putin even landed: we will sign only if Russia sells the gas at its own subsidised domestic price - far below market. In essence, Moscow would pay to subsidise the Chinese economy. And, per the Journal’s sources, Beijing told the Russians not to raise the subject again until they accept the terms. Putin flew home without his pipeline. Beijing didn’t even bother explaining.

Kremlin spokesman Peskov insists the relationship “is founded on the principle of equality.” The numbers laugh at him. China now accounts for nearly 40 per cent of Russia’s foreign trade. Russia accounts for less than 4 per cent of China’s. That is not a partnership. That is a dependency. One could say unhealthy addiction even. Putin has made Russian hooked on Beijing’s cash and largesse. Xi is ruthlessly exploiting that strategic weakness.

But the most important detail in the Journal’s reporting is the quietest one. Beijing, per RBC-Ukraine’s read of the same material, is preparing for a power shift in Russia - cultivating relationships with the officials and elites who will shape the country after Putin’s departure. Translated from diplomatic language: Russia’s indispensable ally has stopped treating Putin as permanent and is hedging its investment for the era after him. The anti-Westernism Putin planted will outlive the man - so his successors, Beijing calculates, will have nowhere else to go. Carnegie’s Alexander Gabuev has described the Chinese strategy as waiting for Russia’s economy to rot until Moscow signs anything put in front of it. There is precedent: the first Power of Siberia deal was haggled over for years - and signed on Beijing’s price, two months after the annexation of Crimea slammed Europe’s door.

When your only remaining patron starts interviewing your replacements, you are not a tsar. You are a caretaker. And one bad job report away from being canned and dumped.

THE PEOPLE STOP PRETENDING

Now the base of the pyramid. On 17 July, the Kremlin’s own pollster FOM - the outfit that measures public mood for the presidential administration every week - recorded a five-point collapse in Putin’s approval in a single week: 71 to 66 per cent. The steepest weekly drop since the autumn of 2022, when mobilisation sent hundreds of thousands of men fleeing through Verkhny Lars. Sixteen per cent now rate Putin negatively, and twenty per cent say they do not trust him - both wartime records. The state’s other pollster, VTsIOM, shows the same curve: approval down for a third straight week to 65.1 per cent, trust down from 76.7 in mid-June to 71 - with early July producing the fastest weekly fall in trust of the entire war.

Read dictatorship sociology correctly: the absolute numbers are meaningless - people lie to strangers in their doorway when honesty carries a prison sentence. The dynamic is everything. Same methodology, same fears, and the curve is falling across every Kremlin pollster simultaneously.

And we know exactly why. Asked to name the event of the week, Russians put the fuel shortage above the war itself. After four years of carefully not noticing the invasion, Russians have been handed something physically impossible to ignore: the empty petrol station on the way to work. CNN’s analysis found shortages or supply disruptions in nearly all of Russia’s 83 regions. Occupied Crimea and Sevastopol have effectively halted open fuel sales to the public and declared a state of emergency - in peak tourist season. Regions are rationing by odd and even number plates. The oil superpower has banned its own fuel exports through July and is importing petrol from Belarus and even India.

The cause has a name: Ukraine’s deep-strike campaign, now at maximum tempo. On 6 July, Ukrainian drones flew roughly 3,000 kilometres - and forced the Omsk refinery, Russia’s largest and its top petrol producer, to halt processing, per Reuters. Sirens over Siberia. Distance no longer protects anyone.

And note what the polling proves about that campaign. The claim that strikes would rally Russians around the flag is dead. There is no rally. Support is falling precisely as the war arrives at the pump - because this is not a defensive war, nothing existential is at stake for Russians, only the ambitions of one ageing man. When his war starts costing them personally, they withdraw their belief. The feedback loop the Kremlin spent four years severing has been rebuilt - by Ukrainian drones.

THE ARMY THAT CAN’T BUY SOLDIERS

The last pillar is the one Putin trusts most: the money-for-bodies machine. It is seizing up. Federal budget data analysed by Janis Kluge shows just 71,216 enlistment bonuses paid in the first quarter of 2026 - roughly 800 sign-ups a day, down 20 per cent year on year, the lowest in three years - and this at record average signing bonuses approaching 1.5 million roubles. The price of a Russian life is rising faster than the willingness to die. That may be the most hopeful chart of this entire war. Ukraine’s Foreign Intelligence Service, cited by the Kyiv Post this week, says Russia has signed fewer than half the troops its 2026 plan requires.

Then, on 17 July, came the confession. At the Defence Ministry’s own board meeting, Deputy Minister Kryvoruchko boasted that over 8,000 specialists had been trained for Russia’s flagship new Unmanned Systems Forces this half-year. Sounds impressive - until the Conflict Intelligence Team checked the ministry’s own planning documents: the target for this point was 34,400. Less than a quarter of plan. The students the military counted on are refusing to sign, because they believe - correctly - that “drone operator” contracts end in an assault group. The army has lied to its people so long that it is no longer believed even by its own recruiting posters. Fear, it turns out, is also a finite resource.

Put the week together. The elite is moving its money out. The Chinese patron is courting the successors. The population’s belief is falling at mobilisation-panic speed. The military cannot buy recruits at any price. None of these groups is storming the Kremlin. They don’t need to. Dictators are rarely overthrown; far more often, their system simply stops executing their will, because every participant is already mentally living in the next era and making decisions accordingly. The oligarch chooses a jurisdiction. Xi chooses his interlocutors. The student chooses not to sign a military contract.

We saw this system wobble once before, in autumn 2022, and it held - because elites, Beijing, the public, and the army all judged that Putin was still safer than the alternative. The difference now is that no group, at any level, is making that judgement anymore. Ukraine is winning, evil will not prevail.

A communist deputy from Buryatia has just told Putin the country is on the brink of a social explosion. How did it come to this, when Kyiv was supposed to fall in 3 days? No sirens, no shelters, no truth: why the Russian state no longer protects its own people, why the Z-bloggers are being forced to cover it up.

On the morning of Thursday 18 June 2026, approximately 200 Ukrainian drones entered Russian airspace heading for Moscow. The Russian capital has the most concentrated, most layered, most expensive air-defence architecture in the world - A-135M, S-400, S-300PM2, Pantsir-S1, Tor-M2, with Pantsirs mounted on the roofs of the Foreign and Defence Ministry buildings in the city centre. Three to four concentric defensive rings around Moscow itself.

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That morning, the residents of Moscow heard no zero air-raid sirens. They received zero alerts to their phones. The Sobyanin city-government emergency-alert system, modelled on those operating in Vilnius and Tallinn and Warsaw, did not activate. Two-hundred drones flew over the imperial capital’s residential districts, the Moscow Oil Refinery in Kapotnya burned, civilian apartment buildings were damaged by falling intercept-missile fragments - and the Russian state did not warn its own population. No shelter directives. No evacuation guidance.

Drawing on the Michael Naki long-form analysis of 18 June 2026, the Meduza, Moscow Times, Kyiv Post, Kyiv Independent and Eurasia Review reporting of 12-18 June 2026, the Janis Kluge / German Institute for International and Security Affairs Q1 2026 Russian-budget analysis, the VTsIOM rating-suppression record, and the Z-blogger Telegram archive of the 18 June Moscow strike day.

This episode is about what that silence reveals. About the Russian state’s casual contempt for the safety of the citizens, it claims to protect. About the active pressure campaign now being run against the Russian war-blogger ecosystem - the so-called Z-bloggers - to stop them from reporting what is happening. And about the moment a sitting Communist deputy from Buryatia, a former OMON commander, broke the silence and told Vladimir Putin to his face that Russia is on the brink of a social explosion.

THE STATE THAT WILL NOT WARN ITS OWN PEOPLE

Michael Naki, broadcasting from Vilnius on 18 June, captured it very evocatively. “Here in Lithuania, where I live, when something on the edge of the map gets a single meteorite scare, the alert system goes off across the country. Everyone goes to the underground parking lots and the shelters. In Moscow, on the same day, two hundred drones flew over a city of thirteen million people, and the Russian state issued no sirens, no signals, no alerts, no shelter directives, nothing.”

The Russian state has systematically refused to operationalise a civil-defence early-warning system for its own population. The reasons are political - operating the alerts would acknowledge that the war has come home. The cost is paid by ordinary Russians. The reporter Filatov, on 18 June, posted what one Moscow resident told him: attack on Moscow is ongoing, things are exploding above us, I live in Mamonovo, the closest village to the MKAD ring road - as usual, no warnings to the population, none today, unlike previous attacks no helicopters in the air, the close-range air defence is firing, but it’s surprising - no helicopters, my opinion: the Moscow Oil Refinery was deliberately surrendered.

This is classic Russia - in a population of politically inert cattle, without agency and responsibility, and existing in an information bubble where the war was supposed to be a distant problem that didn’t concern them. Instead of seeking rational answers to the issues they are experiencing, they reach for conspiracies and fanciful narratives. “The refinery was deliberately surrendered.” An insane idea, with no supporting evidence. Where incompetence of Russian air defence, hubris and disorganisation, is a far simpler explanation, (using Occam’s razor), many Russians will reach for the most convoluted, complicated and conspiratorial explanations.

Why? Because where the truth is simple, it’s also scary. Acknowledging the truth places a burden of responsibility on the one who has internalised that truth and imposes an imperative for action on people. Embracing conspiracy narratives makes solutions seem distant or even impossible. Why bother even trying to fix something if there is no solution within the agency of an individual? It can externalise certain issues, project them not into the realm of the solvable, but onto shady, and powerful entities. We are small people, how can we be expected to fight such nefarious, mysterious and almost omnipotent forces?

In the context of Russia, the mechanic is clear - your political agency is suppressed and denied, so rather than fight to retrieve it, people are far more amenable to denying the very possibility of political agency or denying that it is even real. You cannot win against something so abstract, where their victory is surely guaranteed? So, we see a Russian war-supporter, posting from inside Moscow, on the morning of the strike, publicly accusing the Russian state of failing to defend its own infrastructure, and even of surrounding that infrastructure - for reasons that are unknown, and ultimately unknowable. The Russian information firewall is no longer holding the Z-blogger ecosystem in place - but the learned helplessness within the population, well, that still works.

THE Z-BLOGGER COVER-UP CAMPAIGN

The next layer of this story is the active pressure campaign the Russian state is now running against its own propaganda apparatus - the Z-blogger ecosystem of military-correspondent Telegram channels that has, for four years, been the parallel-state war-news machine.

Naki, on 18 June, walked through the day’s evidence channel by channel: Major pro-war channels were under pressure to not publish video of strike impacts and to praise Moscow air defence for its excellent performance. His verbatim framing: the channels are literally writing praise for Moscow air defence, which has failed in absolutely every possible way. Within minutes of posting, he deleted the post. The Z-blogger’s fate, in his own description: forever to be under the boot, with a gag in the mouth, only permitted to repeat after Putin that we are advancing on all fronts, and everything is under control.

“Two Majors” - the channel attempted to defend Moscow air defence by blaming Starlink and NATO, arguing Russia is fighting NATO rather than Ukraine. Naki dismantled the argument: no NATO soldier is engaged in this war; NATO’s military capabilities are vastly greater than Russia’s; the plan Two Majors is proposing is not implementable. Two Majors then redirected his complaint at the Moscow city government rather than the military - Naki: it’s somehow safer that way.

“Maxim Kalashnikov” - published the video of strike impacts at the Moscow Oil Refinery in Kapotnya. He was summoned to the police to give explanations for the publication. The Z-blogger who was indispensable to the regime’s information warfare in 2022 is, in 2026, being interrogated for showing what was happening at the refinery.

“Reporter Filatov” / Dmitry Borisenko - asked Muscovites to send him photos and videos of the attack directly. Verbatim: people must know the truth. The Russian state has decided the people do not need to know the truth. The Z-blogger has decided they do.

“Old Soldier” - woke up to the first explosion, watched the fires from his window, refused to publish the video. Verbatim: Moscow will get up in three, two, one - like hell it will. We have electric trains and the metro. But how? Two days after a probing attack into the most defended refinery in Russia? Endure.

The pattern across the ecosystem on 18 June was uniform. Z-bloggers who published strike imagery faced consequences. Z-bloggers who praised the failed air defence were rewarded. Z-bloggers who tried to honestly analyse what had happened deleted their posts under pressure within minutes. Then, the official escalation. Moscow has officially banned publication of drone-strike imagery. The new federal regulation - fines from 3,000 roubles for individuals up to 200,000 roubles for legal entities - criminalises what tens of millions of Muscovites with smartphones can document from their own windows.

THE COMMUNIST DEPUTY WHO CONFRONTED PUTIN

This is where the story breaks open beyond the Z-blogger ecosystem.

On 12 June 2026, Vyacheslav Markhayev - Communist Party of the Russian Federation, sitting State Duma deputy, former Buryat OMON riot-police commander, former colonel of the Russian Interior Ministry - published a Telegram statement that, by the standards of the Russian state in 2026, should have produced an immediate Article 280.3 dissemination-of-false-information prosecution. Cross-confirmed across Meduza (12 June 2026), The Moscow Times (12 June 2026), Kyiv Post (12 June 2026), Novaya Gazeta Europe (12 June 2026), the statement read in part - and we paraphrase to preserve the substance:

The country is on the brink of a social explosion. Responsibility for it will fall squarely on the entrenched ruling power. Utility tariffs have grown 366% in 25 years while infrastructure inherited from the USSR is collapsing. According to Forbes 2026 data, Russia has a record 155 billionaires with combined wealth of nearly $700 billion - one-and-a-half times the federal budget. What would a foreign enemy do if it conquered Russia? Appropriate the resources, loot industry, hike utility rates, build mansions. Yet no invasion happened. The authorities have done all of that themselves - more efficiently than any aggressor.

Markhayev demanded a clear, public plan for ending the SVO based on Russia’s national interests. The precedent context: just two weeks earlier, on the same KPRF benches, Renat Suleymanov - Duma deputy from Novosibirsk - told Kontinent Sibir the same thing in less dramatic language. The earliest possible end to the SVO is simply necessary because the economy will not withstand a prolonged continuation of the fighting. Suleymanov in 2022 had demanded Ukraine’s capitulation and called mobilisation harsh but necessary. The same hawk, in 2026, did the arithmetic and realised it does not look good for his bosses or himself.

The pattern across 2026 is now unmistakable. Ilya Remeslo - the pro-Kremlin lawyer and propagandist - broke in March 2026 and called Putin a war criminal and a thief, demanding a trial. The Z-bloggers - as we have just walked through - break iteratively across the 18 June Moscow strike day. The KPRF - Russia’s managed opposition - begins openly demanding war-termination from inside the Duma. Putin is losing control of the regime’s parallel-information apparatus that has, for fifteen years, held the political system together. Fear of a disastrous outcome to the war, and its consequences are starting to outweigh their fear of the Tsar and his retribution. But they know they have no real control or influence over anything.

THE NUMBERS THE KREMLIN TRIED TO HIDE

And then the numbers that confirm the picture is not political - it is economic.

VTsIOM - the Russian state polling agency, Kremlin-controlled, regime-aligned, designed to produce reassuring numbers - stopped publishing Vladimir Putin’s open trust rating after April 2026. The open methodology asks respondents to name politicians they trust without prompting. The methodology that asks respondents do you trust Putin - the closed methodology - produces ratings around 73%. The open methodology, where respondents have to remember Putin as a politician they trust, collapsed to 29.5% in March 2026 - the lowest level since the start of the war. VTsIOM responded by removing the open rating from public release, as documented by The Moscow Times, Mezha, Charter97, UNN, and Dagens across the 8 June reporting cycle. The state pollster stopped showing the number when the number became inconvenient.

And then, on 14 June 2026, Volodymyr Zelensky published photos of what he described as internal Kremlin documents intercepted by Ukrainian intelligence - internal Russian regime polling projections prepared for Vladimir Putin’s own desk - covering trajectories to the September 2026 Duma elections. Cross-confirmed across the Kyiv Independent (14 June 2026) and Kyiv Post (14 June 2026) reporting:

- Putin approval projected to fall from 77% in late 2025 to 55% by 20 September 2026.

- Disapproval projected to rise to 33%.

- United Russia projected at 22% - the worst result for the party of power in the regime’s polling history.

- The internal Kremlin analyst’s verbatim conclusion, as published: with continuation of current trends, the ratings of Putin and United Russia will continue to decline, and there will be no plateau before voting day. Not that the vote is real, but the regime does care about the trends in opinion and support, because they need to calibrate propaganda and repression to remain in control. It’s a fine balance, because the machinery of repression is not cheap to run.

The economic picture under this is the Janis Kluge analysis the German Institute for International and Security Affairs (SWP) has published across 2026. Q1 2026: Russia spent 5.9 trillion rubles on the war. That is 46% of all federal budget expenditure - almost every second ruble. Up 30% year-on-year. Military spending consumed two-thirds of all government revenues in Q1 2026. Oil and gas revenues fell 45% year-on-year. The Russian fiscal arithmetic, on the German economist’s documented numbers, does not extend more than a few quarters before collapsing without further escalation or further concealment.

The Russian state will not warn its own population about incoming drones. The Russian state is criminalising the photographs and videos its own population takes of the strikes. The Russian state is pressuring the Z-blogger ecosystem to praise the air defence that has visibly failed and is summoning the bloggers who refuse to police interviews. The Russian state is hiding its own pollsters’ findings when the findings become inconvenient. The Russian state’s own classified internal polling projects a continuous slide in support to and through the September Duma elections with no plateau. The Russian state’s own fiscal arithmetic, as documented by German economist Janis Kluge, runs out of road within quarters. And a sitting Communist Party deputy - a former OMON commander, a colonel of the Interior Ministry - has publicly told Vladimir Putin that the country is on the brink of a social explosion and demanded a public plan for ending the war.

Putin is losing control. He is losing it of the air defence over Moscow, of the information apparatus that holds the regime together, of the parallel-opposition channels designed to absorb popular discontent, of the regime’s own internal polling architecture, of the federal budget, of the Z-blogger ecosystem that has been the regime’s parallel-state war-news machine, and of the elite-class political coordination that has, for fifteen years, held the political system in place.

But the weakening Putin is still a dangerous Putin. A regime that finds itself in this position will reach for escalation - more drones at Ukrainian civilians, more cultural-heritage destruction, and may even switch to hybrid and kinetic operations over European cities. Of course they will reach for more hollow nuclear signalling, cognitive-war intensification, but they will also unleash conventional and hybrid violence at a much greater scale simply to survive.

The Russian state has no good options left. The dissident Russian journalist Michael Naki names three doors: end the war now, escalate to closed borders and full mobilisation, or do nothing and watch the trajectory deepen. The first door requires Putin to swallow his own ego - which is unlikely, because the consequences for him are unpredictable and could be dire. The second door collapses the United Russia electoral position. The third door delivers him to the September elections in worse condition than he is in now. But elections may be the least of his worries, if Russia starts to lose precipitously on the battlefield.

The Russian state has spent four years convincing its own population that the war is something happening somewhere else. The Russian state has now lost control of its capacity to maintain that fiction. The Z-bloggers know it. Russian state pollsters know it. Ukraine’s intelligence services know it. And Putin’s own internal-projection analysts are, on the documented evidence Zelensky published, telling Vladimir Putin, so he maybe knows it too.

Where is Nabiullina? - Russia’s central banker vanishes, triggering rumours and uncertainty. Two weeks of unexplained absence, surrounding a figure that has done more than anyone else to keep Putin war economy going, through 4+ years of full-scale war in Europe. She supposedly didn’t attend SPIEF, and an important rate cut has been signalled without her presence. Nabiullina was the most strategically consequential enabler of Putin’s war, and she has not been seen in public since 28 May. So, the rumours go, she reached a red line in service of Putin’s regime, beyond which she was not prepared to go. And no, that red line did not involve the industrial slaughter of Ukrainians. The limit for her was apparently a proposed closing of the Russian border under the auspices of martial law. Could this be a sign that Putin is about to crank his senseless war into a new phase - full mobilisation of the Russian herd population? A final effort to shovel everyone into the meat grinder?

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Elvira Nabiullina was last seen in public on Thursday 28 May 2026, accompanying Vladimir Putin on his trip to Kazakhstan. Since then Nabiullina - Chair of the Central Bank of the Russian Federation since 24 June 2013, the technocrat that the IMF’s Christine Lagarde once held up as an exemplary monetary policymaker, the woman who in March 2022 reportedly tried to resign over the invasion of Ukraine and was told no by Putin personally - has disappeared from Russian public life.

An empty chair maps the disappearance. On 3-6 June, she was scheduled to speak on the main macroeconomic panel at the St Petersburg International Economic Forum - alongside Maxim Oreshkin, Anton Siluanov, and Maxim Reshetnikov. Her name was removed from the guest list one day before her scheduled appearance. On 9 June, she missed the National Association of Securities Market Participants (NAUFOR) conference - and so did all her deputies. On 10 June, she missed the Vladimir Putin investment-and-interest-rates meeting at the Kremlin - the meeting most directly within her institutional remit - and once again, no representative of the Central Bank of Russia was present. The Russian investigative outlet The Agency documented the empty Central Bank chair on camera. This is huge, and it’s extraordinary that this is not getting more coverage in the mainstream media.

The Central Bank’s official explanation: sick leave. Barely plausible, under the circumstances. The Kremlin’s official explanation, via spokesman Dmitry Peskov on 10 June: “People get sick sometimes - there’s nothing unusual about that. It shouldn’t be grounds for any conspiracy theories.” No statement was more likely to trigger speculation and conspiracies.

Then, on 11 June, the Russian investigative Telegram channel Mozhem Obyasnit - “We Can Explain” - citing sources close to the Central Bank and the presidential administration, dropped the explanation that the Kremlin warned against. Nabiullina is allegedly planning to leave the Central Bank. She is prepared to serve out her term to June 2027 - but only on one condition. Paraphrasing the Mozhem Obyasnit source disclosure: she is dissatisfied with the Kremlin’s course; she agrees to work to the end of her term only if the war does not enter a new phase involving martial law and border closures. She informed the chief, diplomatically called in sick, and is waiting for his answer. The delay here is the key - the giveaway signal that border closures, martial law and full mobilisation are exactly what the Kremin is planning.

Tonight: we ask where Nabiullina is, what the “diplomatic illness” signals, and the analytical argument this channel has been building toward - that the most strategically consequential enabler of Vladimir Putin’s war is the central-bank technocrat the West gave international awards to before 2022. And we ask whether she should be tried as one of the most significant war criminals of Putin’s regime, having done more than anyone else to enable this slaughter, ironically through her expert stabilisation of the Russian economy and currency. The case for the prosecution. The argument Nabiullina is comparable to talented Nazi enabler, architect and technocrat Albert Speer.

THE DIPLOMATIC ILLNESS - WHAT THE LEAK SAYS

Nabiullina’s last verified public appearance: Thursday 28 May 2026, accompanying Putin to Kazakhstan. Sixteen days of unexplained absence at recording time.

The three documented missed appearances:

- 3-6 June - SPIEF main macroeconomic panel. Removed from speaker list one day before. The most-watched economic event of the Russian year. Russia’s central bank chief was not there.

- 9 June - NAUFOR conference. Neither Nabiullina nor any deputy attended. The Central Bank press service confirmed she was on sick leave.

- 10 June - Putin’s investment/interest-rates meeting. Attendees were PM Mishustin, Economy Minister Reshetnikov, Finance Minister Siluanov, and Presidential Aide Oreshkin. No Central Bank representation at all. Putin nonetheless used the meeting to praise her monetary policy and signal an interest-rate cut at the next Central Bank board meeting on 19 June. The juxtaposition - public praise for an absent central bank chief - is itself diagnostic.

The diplomatic illness - “she informed the chief, diplomatically called in sick, and is waiting for his answer” - this is quite a risky negotiating posture, in the context of Putin’s wartime regime. She’s signalling to Putin: give me an answer on whether the war is entering a martial-law phase. While I wait for your answer, I will not run your central bank. This could backfire.

WHY NABIULLINA MATTERS - THE WAR-ECONOMY ARCHITECT

To understand why this disappearance is consequential - you must understand what Nabiullina has done across the past four-plus years. February-March 2022. Russia invades Ukraine. The West imposes the most severe sanctions package against any major economy since the Second World War. The Russian Federation’s foreign exchange reserves - approximately $640 billion - are partially frozen overnight. The rouble collapses by 30% in three days, briefly trading above 150 to the US dollar. Foreign investors flee. The Moscow Exchange closes for three weeks. Russian sovereign debt is downgraded to junk. Every Western prediction in those first days is the Russian economy will collapse within six months.

It did not collapse. And the reason it did not collapse is, in significant measure, Elvira Nabiullina. She doubled the key interest rate from 9.5% to 20% in 36 hours. She imposed capital controls. She forced exporters to convert 80% of foreign-currency revenue into roubles. She managed the parallel-import architecture. She rebuilt the SWIFT-substitute payment systems. She quietly engineered the rouble’s recovery to pre-war levels by mid-2022. She kept inflation broadly in single digits through 2022 and most of 2023. She built the macro-financial infrastructure that allowed the Russian state to absorb sanction after sanction without producing financial collapse that would have brought Russia to the negotiating table.

In 2024, with inflation accelerating because of unprecedented military spending, she hiked the key rate to 21% - a level that effectively froze new corporate investment and triggered the Russian recession Putin and his advisers are now scrambling to manage. She did this even as Russian nationalist hawks attacked her on Russian state television for “sabotaging the Russian economy to help the United States,” even as Kremlin critics outside Russia called her the Albert Speer of Putin’s war machine. She did her job - and her job was to keep the Russian state’s wartime economic apparatus operationally functional.

In April 2026, she lowered the rate from 21% to 14.5%, beginning the gradual normalisation. The expected cut on 19 June would extend that arc. The economic picture in 2026: Russian GDP contracted 0.2% in Q1; growth projected at 0.4% for the year; corporate overdue debt at 3.8% of GDP versus 2.4% at the start of 2022. Without her it could have been so much worse.

This is what she has done. Without her technical competence the Russian war economy would have collapsed long before now. The Russian state has had two indispensable wartime operational figures across the past four-plus years. One was Sergei Shoigu, until his transfer to the Security Council in May 2024. The other has been Elvira Nabiullina. And of the two, Nabiullina’s contribution to the war’s sustainability has been greater by far.

THE SPEER COMPARISON

Reuters, in its November 2025 exclusive on Nabiullina’s continued tenure, captured comparison. Paraphrased: when the war started in 2022, Nabiullina was lambasted simultaneously by nationalist hawks who questioned her loyalty to Putin and Kremlin critics who likened her to Adolf Hitler’s war production minister Albert Speer.

Albert Speer was Hitler’s Armaments Minister from 1942 to 1945. By professional formation he was an architect, not a Nazi ideologue. He came to the regime through technical competence rather than through political fanaticism. His professional contribution to the Third Reich was administrative and operational: he reorganised German industrial production at the height of the Allied bombing campaign and delayed the collapse of the German war economy by - on standard historical estimates - somewhere between twelve and eighteen months. He did not start the war. He did not order the atrocities. He kept the machine running while the war the machine was prosecuting killed millions.

At Nuremberg, Speer was tried as a major war criminal. His defence was that he had not known, in detail, about the Holocaust - a defence Nuremberg substantially rejected. He was found guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity, principally for the use of slave labour in his armaments factories. He received a twenty-year sentence at Spandau Prison. He served the full sentence. The legal principle established was uncompromising: the technocratic enabler of an aggressive war is criminally complicit in the war, regardless of personal ideological commitment, regardless of operational distance from the atrocities, regardless of personal disagreement with the regime’s direction. The comparison to Nabiulina is apposite.

This is the Nuremberg principle. The principle survived the trials. The principle has been applied in every subsequent international war-crimes tribunal - Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Cambodia. The competent technocrat who keeps the aggressive-war machine functioning is criminally complicit in that machine’s atrocities. We must apply the principle to Nabiullina.

She did not order the invasion of Ukraine. She did not authorise Bucha or Mariupol or Izyum or the deportation of Ukrainian children. She did not approve the Iskander on Ria Pizza or the Oreshnik on Bila Tserkva. She kept the macro-financial architecture of the Russian state operational while the Russian state did all those things. She knew what the Russian state was doing - she sits on the Russian Security Council in its enlarged composition, she has had access to the operational picture from the war’s first day, she reportedly tried to resign over the invasion and was overruled by Putin and then continued. Knowing what the war was, she chose to continue running the financial architecture that funded it. For four years and four months at recording time. Through 500,000-plus Russian military deaths. Through the

documented mass killing of Ukrainian civilians. Through the cumulative bill the Russian state has run up against international humanitarian law. The legal principle established at Nuremberg is unambiguous about what that means. Nabiullina, on the Nuremberg standard, is criminally complicit in the war and in its atrocities.

TRAGEDY OF THE COMPETENT TECHNOCRAT

Nabiullina may have done more than any figure other than Putin himself to lengthen and deepen the war. The corollary is brutal: had the Russian Central Bank been run by a competent-but-loyal nationalist in 2022 - let alone by an actual incompetent - the war economy would, on every reasonable economic projection, have collapsed long before now. The macro-financial collapse that the West expected in mid-2022 would have happened. Russia would have come to the negotiating table inside its first eighteen months or faced a catastrophic defeat. The war would have ended somewhere between 100,000 and 300,000 Russian military deaths earlier than the current trajectory. The associated Ukrainian death toll - the cumulative Bucha-Mariupol-Izyum-Kupiansk-Avdiivka-Bakhmut-Pokrovsk-and-on toll - would have been a fraction of what it has become. And of course it’s still not over now.

The technical competence of one Russian central-bank governor has cost, on the conservative analytical estimate, hundreds of thousands of additional lives. Ukrainian. Russian. Nabiullina may have been instrumental in the deaths of more Russians, along with Putin, than anyone since Stalin. This is the case for the prosecution. The case has three components:

Component one - knowledge. Nabiullina, by her institutional position, has had access to the operational picture of the war from day one. She has sat in the Kremlin meetings. She has reportedly tried to resign and been overruled. She knew what she was financing. The mens rea - the knowledge requirement of complicity - is satisfied on the available record.

Component two - material contribution. The Russian Central Bank’s wartime operational performance is the load-bearing wall of the Russian state’s continued capacity to wage the war. Without Nabiullina’s stabilisation of the rouble in March 2022, without the capital controls, without the SWIFT-substitute payment architecture, without the parallel-import macroeconomic management - the war economy collapses. The material contribution - the actus reus - is satisfied on the documented record.

Component three - choice. She tried to resign in March 2022. Putin said no. She continued. The Nuremberg principle is uncompromising on this: continued performance of the technocratic function, after the moral nature of the function is known, is itself the criminal act. Speer made the same choice in 1942. The Nuremberg tribunal held him to account for it. The same standard applies to Elvira Nabiulina in 2026, assuming she survives this war.

WHAT THE DIPLOMATIC ILLNESS MEANS - WHAT COMES AFTER

Nabiullina’s “diplomatic illness” is a calculated decision about the legal architecture of her exit. The Mozhem Obyasnit source disclosure makes this explicit. Under martial law, a Central Bank chair’s resignation becomes treason - a state-security crime. Before martial law, the resignation is a personal-career decision. The window in which she can exit Putin’s regime as a private citizen is closing. She is reading the signal that it might close imminently. She is signalling back that she will leave through the window while it remains open. The idea that she can leave - quit Putin’s service - is likely to be delusional in any case, a one that carries potentially fatal consequences. The withdrawal of her service may be seen as treason anyway.

If Nabiullina succeeds in leaving the Central Bank under the legal architecture that still exists today - orderly resignation, end-of-third-term retirement, public face-saving farewell - the Russian state loses the financial-technocratic competence that has been its principal operational shield against the cumulative pressure of Western sanctions and the war’s economic cost. Her named successors - Maxim Oreshkin, Andrei Kostin, Pyotr Fradkov - are, on the consensus of the Bell and Reuters financial reporting, of substantially lower technical calibre. The Reuters senior financial source: “There is no problem now, the problem lies in 2027 when half of the central bank will leave with her, and there is simply no alternative team.” But the succession crisis is playing out now, a year early. It may well prefigure a succession crisis for the top job itself - boss of the Kremlin and the entire swamp.

The political consequence: Putin loses the second of his two indispensable wartime operational figures. The macro-financial architecture begins, on every plausible projection, to degrade. The rouble destabilises. Inflation re-accelerates. The capital controls become harder to operationally manage without the central-bank chair who designed them. The Russian war economy moves from stabilised under technocratic management to unstable under political management. The crisis the West has been waiting for since 2022 begins to materialise - because the woman who prevented it has, just negotiated her exit, and maybe termination.

Moscow Burns While Ukraine Seizes the Initiative. The Russian State Tries to Censor the Reality on Its Own Streets. Moscow under fire - the attack on the Pechersk Lavra now has a response. Ukraine has reversed Russian momentum on the battlefield through drone-innovation scale, and Zelenskyy says publicly that Ukraine is seizing the initiative. The numbers are unambiguous. The images are specular. Moscow is burning. Everyone can see it, hear it. The evidence of failed air defence, failing security, and the impotence of their demi-god Tsar is not obvious for all to see. Finally, a black rains gonna fall on Moscow.

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Russia’s Defence Ministry today made an astonishing admission. Across the 24 hours leading into the morning of 18 June 2026, Russian air defence systems intercepted 555 Ukrainian drones over multiple regions - Moscow region, occupied Crimea, the Sea of Azov, and across European Russia. Whatever fraction of that figure is propaganda inflation, the residual is still operationally enormous. The Moscow Oil Refinery in Kapotnya has burned twice in 48 hours. The symbolism of plumes of smoke rising just miles from the Kremlin, and the sight of ineffectual Russian air defence is hugely impactful.

The oil depot in Gukovo, Rostov Oblast - near the Ukrainian border, only kilometres from occupied Luhansk - was struck overnight. The bigger picture is the one the Council on Foreign Relations analysts Michael Horowitz and Erin Dumbacher published on 12 June 2026 in a piece titled “How Ukraine’s Drone Innovation Reversed Russia’s Momentum”. The framing is interesting. Ukraine retook seventy-eight square miles in five days during February 2026. Ukrainian drones are now striking at ranges of thirty to one hundred kilometres behind Russian front lines, forcing Russia to divert resources to protect supply lines and infrastructure that, until eighteen months ago, were considered out of reach.

The production numbers behind that reversal are the analytical headline:

- Ukraine produced an estimated four million robotic and autonomous systems in 2025.

- Ukraine is on track to produce five to six million in 2026.

- The Pentagon’s drone dominance initiative - described by its directors as a “challenge to industry to deliver drones at scale for America” - has shipped fewer than 3,000 of the 22,320 systems it has ordered.

- Ukraine holds between $25 billion and $40 billion in defence production capacity that sits underused for lack of Western capital investment.

Ukraine has achieved incredible levels of output and effectiveness, but has the capacity to win this war, because it is sitting on Ukrainian factory floors waiting for Western capital that has been promised but not arrived.

Zelenskyy yesterday, 16 June 2026, on RBC-Ukraine: Ukraine is seizing the initiative in the war with Russia. The same daily update confirmed Russia had lost 1,230 troops and over 2,000 drones in a single 24-hour reporting cycle. Ukraine unveiled the Sea Trident underwater drone - capable of hitting Russian strategic targets - and a long-range AI interceptor drone covered by the New York Times. An assault-rifle-equipped drone for security services. The cumulative innovation tempo is, in the framing of the CFR analysis: precise mass systems at scale, in the air and at sea.

The Ukrainian commander of the Third Army Corps, Brigadier General Andriy Biletsky, told The Independent in late February 2026 that the SpaceX Starlink block on Russian terminals on 1 February 2026 cut the effectiveness of Russia’s drone campaign by 20 to 40 percent within two weeks. Ukrainian forces have retaken territory near Pokrovsk, north of Lyman, and near Hulyaipole since that block.

This is not a story about an isolated refinery hit, but of the capability to repeatedly hit strategic Russian objectives - including oil logistics notes across the country and within the capital. This is a story about structural drone superiority being assembled in real time, and a Russian counter-air architecture that is, as we documented yesterday, running out of missiles, radars, and short-range systems faster than it can replace them. The strike calendar that put Moscow’s refinery on fire twice in 48 hours is a consequence of the structural shift. The strikes will not stop. The strikes will accelerate. And the West’s strategic question - the one not being asked at the G7 - is whether to fund the $25-40 billion in idle Ukrainian production capacity that would compress this war’s timeline by years.

THE RUSSIAN STATE GAGS ITS OWN POPULATION

Yesterday we covered the “don’t look up” phenomenon - Muscovites filming themselves on phones asking why this is happening to them, the cumulative cost of four-and-a-half years of state-media-enforced political infantilisation. Tonight, the next layer of that story has emerged. The Russian state is responding to the strikes not by defending Moscow more effectively, but by trying to prevent Russians from seeing what is happening to Moscow.

The Kyiv Independent reported on 17 May 2026, and the regulation is now in full enforcement: Russia has introduced new restrictions on reporting the aftermath of drone strikes. Banning the publication of photos, videos, or details without official authorisation. The fines, per the published Russian regulatory text: 3,000 to 5,000 rubles for individuals. Up to 50,000 rubles for officials. Up to 200,000 rubles for legal entities. The figures are small enough to be everyday-enforceable and large enough to deter the journalists and bloggers who would otherwise be documenting the strike record on Telegram and YouTube. That has not stopped people from filming the spectacular strikes on Moscow today and sharing them.

The Russian state’s coverage of its own crisis has been calibrated accordingly. Per Euromaidan Press monitoring of Russian state television: the largest Moscow attack of the war was given less than one minute of broadcast time. The 16 June Kapotnya refinery strike - fifteen kilometres from the Kremlin, the burning of a unit responsible for 53% of the plant’s capacity, the closure of all four major Moscow airports - received the kind of perfunctory acknowledgement that the Russian propaganda apparatus reserves for events it cannot conceal but cannot afford to amplify.

The Institute for the Study of War has been documenting the parallel pattern of fabricated victory claims. ISW reported on 16 June 2026 that Russia has been faking the capture of Kostiantynivka - claiming the eastern Donetsk city has fallen, when the documented ground reality is that Ukrainian forces continue to hold. The same ISW analysis exposed Putin’s two goals in the 14-15 June barrage that struck the Pechersk Lavra - the Russian president was simultaneously attempting to inflict cultural-heritage destruction on Ukraine and to project domestic strength through the scale of the attack, on the available Russian media coverage of the strike package.

This is the defining contradiction of the Russian information environment in mid-2026. The Russian state is fabricating Russian victories on Ukrainian soil while criminalising Russian citizens’ ability to report Russian losses on Russian soil. The Levada polling we cited yesterday - 75% support for the war, 50% firm, 25% circumstantial - is being maintained by a propaganda architecture that is now actively gagging the photographic and video record of strikes on Moscow itself.

The question is how long this works. Russia’s Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova called recent Ukrainian strikes a “mass terrorist attack”. The framing requires that ordinary Russians believe the attacks are happening without the documented Russian provocations - without the Lavra strike of 14-15 June, without the Russia-Day fuel-infrastructure raid of 12 June, without the four-year cumulative bombardment of Ukrainian cities. The information firewall is being tightened at the exact moment the underlying reality is becoming most visible. That is not a stable equilibrium. Putin is not a stable genius strategic. That is the signature of a propaganda system running out of containment capacity, and of credible lies.

The Russian state’s strategic position, on the cumulative 17-18 June 2026 evidence, is contradictory in every direction. Losing the kinetic war while attempting to gag its own population’s awareness of the losing. This is what the late phase of a failing authoritarian-imperial project looks like. The West’s strategic question is whether it will recognise the phase in time to shape its outcome - by funding Ukrainian innovation at the $25-40 billion scale that would compress the war and align this with a concept and vision for victory.

The Russian people have, on the available evidence, one of two responses left to them: continue the not-looking-up posture that has held since 2014, or begin the slow, painful re-examination of what their state has been doing in their name. The Russian state has decided which response it prefers and is criminalising the alternative.

Meanwhile, Ukraine is bringing devastating consequences to Russia, to the imperial capital, and in a way that the politically inert, herd population cannot fail to finally notice. What is going on, some of them are asking. Voices raised in dumb horror and bewilderment - why is this happening to us? What have we ever done to anybody? Consequences.

EMPIRE OF SAVAGES: The Pechersk Lavra Burns, Five Kharkiv Rescuers Die in a Double-Tap, the Largest Ukrainian Costume Collection in History Is Incinerated - and the West Watches Russia Cross the Final Threshold of Cultural Erasure in a Single Night. Who dares still invoke Great Russia culture, when it’s whole economy, industry, working population and military is single-mindedly focused on one thing - the attempted erasure of Ukraine and its culture.

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Breaking: 14-15 June 2026 - A 681-weapon Russian barrage; the Dormition Cathedral of the 1,000-year-old Kyiv Pechersk Lavra struck and set ablaze; a deliberate double-tap on the Mystetskyi Arsenal while firefighters were still on the Lavra roof; the Oleksandr Dovzhenko Film Studios incinerated with the largest costume collection in Ukrainian history; five Kharkiv rescuers killed by a second Russian strike while attending the first; the Kharkiv Art Museum, the Dnipro House of Organ and Chamber Music, residential buildings across Kyiv - the cumulative single-night destruction is a war crime catalogue and a doctrinal statement of intent. The intent is not random but sends a signal - Russia is a genocidal empire of barbarians and savages. It is not enough to be neutral in the face of such crimes and barbarisms Russians - it is not enough to be well informed or to deplore the situation. Unless you are active fighting in one way or another to curtail this evil, then you are complicit.

At approximately 1:00 a.m. local time on the morning of Monday 15 June 2026, the first explosions were heard in Kyiv. By 1:30 a.m., the second wave. By 3:40 a.m., the third.

The Russian Federation, on the second night after the Russia Day fuel-infrastructure raid and deepening crisis, launched what Ukrainian Air Force reporting confirms was 70 missiles and 611 long-range drones in a single combined aerial assault - Zircon hypersonic missiles, ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, Shahed-type drones. 681 air-attack weapons in one night. The cumulative scale is among the densest barrages of the entire war.

What those weapons hit, by sunrise:

Kyiv - the Dormition Cathedral of the Kyiv Pechersk Lavra, the 1,000-year-old UNESCO World Heritage monastery founded in 1051, on fire across approximately 800 square metres of roof. Only the second time the Lavra has been struck since the full-scale invasion began. Only the third time since the Second World War. The Mystetskyi Arsenal National Cultural, Arts and Museum Complex - Ukraine’s flagship public cultural institution - struck in a deliberate second strike on the same night, while firefighters were still working on the Lavra roof. A fire of approximately 1,000 square metres. The Oleksandr Dovzhenko National Film Studio - one of the oldest film studios in Ukraine - struck twice, with the costume workshop destroyed and the largest and oldest costume collection in Ukraine - 100,000 costumes and 3 million items of clothing - incinerated. 26 residential buildings damaged. Five strikes on civilian infrastructure in the Shevchenkivskyi district within 30 minutes, including a 25-storey apartment building. A market and a grocery store set on fire. 140,000 households without electricity in northern Kyiv. 26 separate fires burning simultaneously across the capital, totalling approximately 6,000 square metres.

Kharkiv - Russia carried out a double-tap strike on the city. A first wave caused a fire. While the State Emergency Service rescuers were on site fighting the blaze, a second Russian strike hit the same location, deliberately, targeting the rescuers themselves. Five SES rescuers killed. Six more wounded. 13 civilians injured, including a one-month-old baby. The Kharkiv Art Museum also struck.

Dnipro - Russia struck the Dnipro House of Organ and Chamber Music. Total Ukrainian death toll across the single overnight raid: at least nine confirmed dead, 35 injured in Kyiv alone, including a pregnant woman and two children aged five and six. Across the country, the toll continues to rise as recording closes.

Initial Russian propaganda, both internal, and transmitted via useful idiocy sought to portray the strike on the monastery as the result of Ukrainian air defence errors. But based on the available evidence, it seems to me that this strike was entirely intentional, and it fits a pattern of multiple strikes against cultural targets in the same raid against Kyiv and Kharkiv.

Russia’s Defence Ministry framing of the strike, on the morning of 15 June: carried out strikes on defence-industrial targets in Kyiv, Kharkiv, and Dnipropetrovsk. There are no defence-industrial targets inside the 1,000-year-old Pechersk Lavra. There are no defence-industrial targets inside the Mystetskyi Arsenal art museum. There are no defence-industrial targets inside the Dovzhenko film-studio costume workshop. There are no defence-industrial targets inside the Kharkiv Art Museum or the Dnipro House of Organ and Chamber Music. The Russian Defence Ministry’s statement is, on the documented record, a lie at the level of Russia’s aggressive doctrine - a statement of erasure dressed up as a denial.

Tonight: the cumulative single-night catalogue of cultural-heritage destruction; the double-tap doctrine and what it tells you about the Russian Armed Forces’ relationship to the laws of war; the Empire of Savages - why striking the Lavra is the signal Putin meant to send and why the West misreading that signal is dangerous - that the failure to deliver a proportionate kinetic Western response will produce more of this aggression from Putin and his willing minions, against Ukraine, against Europe, then against the cultural and civilisational architecture of the liberal West itself. Noone and nothing are safe from Russian savagery.

WHAT WAS HIT - THE SINGLE-NIGHT CATALOGUE

The Kyiv Pechersk Lavra. Founded in 1051 by the monk Antony of Kyiv. The mother monastery of Eastern Slavic Christianity. The Caves Monastery - labyrinthine catacombs holding some of the most revered Orthodox relics in the world. Listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1990. Added to the List of World Heritage in Danger and the International List of Cultural Property under Enhanced Protection of the Second Protocol to the 1954 Hague Convention in 2023 - the highest level of cultural protection that international humanitarian law provides.

The Dormition Cathedral - the central church of the upper Lavra - was set on fire by the Russian strike. Approximately 800 square metres of roof burning. Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha’s verbatim X post within hours: “By striking the Kyiv Pechersk Lavra, one of the greatest holy sites of Christianity, Putin has forever put his name on the list of history’s worst barbarians. He should be damned for centuries. And he will lose this war.” Metropolitan Epiphanius of Kyiv and All Ukraine called for “prayers for the salvation of the shrine from destruction.” Bishop Avraamiy of the Kyiv Pechersk Lavra of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine was photographed by AP’s Evgeniy Maloletka carrying church inventory out of the burning Dormition Cathedral during the strike.

The Mystetskyi Arsenal. The National Cultural, Arts and Museum Complex on Lavrska Street, directly opposite the Pechersk Lavra. Ukraine’s flagship public cultural institution. Hit in a deliberate second strike on the same night. Interior Minister Ihor Klymenko’s verbatim documentation: “while rescuers were trying to extinguish the flames in the main cathedral church of the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra, the occupiers launched a second strike nearby - on the National Cultural, Arts and Museum Complex ‘Mystetskyi Arsenal’.” Approximately 1,000 square metres on fire. President Zelensky’s framing confirmation of the targeting.

The Oleksandr Dovzhenko National Film Studio. One of the oldest film studios in Ukraine, founded in 1928. Hit twice in the same night, per studio CEO Andrii Donchyk on the Breakfast with 1+1 programme. The costume workshop destroyed. Deputy Prime Minister for Humanitarian Policy Tetyana Berezhna’s documentation: “the largest and oldest costume collection in Ukraine” destroyed - approximately 100,000 costumes and 3 million items of clothing. The cumulative photographic, textile, and theatrical heritage of nearly a century of Ukrainian cinema. Gone in two strikes. Berezhna verbatim: “Russia continues to purposefully attack not only civilian infrastructure and civilians, but also cultural institutions that preserve Ukrainian identity, memory and history.”

The Kharkiv Art Museum. Premises damaged in the same overnight raid. The Dnipro House of Organ and Chamber Music. Struck. The residential infrastructure - 26 residential buildings damaged in Kyiv. A 25-storey apartment block. A nine-storey apartment building. Five strikes on civilian infrastructure in the Shevchenkivskyi district within 30 minutes. 140,000 households without electricity.

The human cost - at least nine confirmed dead nationally as recording closes. Five killed in Kyiv alone (initial reports five; some sources four with continuing recovery operations). 35 injured in Kyiv, including a pregnant woman, two children aged 5 and 6. Five SES rescuers killed in Kharkiv. Six rescuers wounded. 13 civilians injured in Kharkiv, including a one-month-old baby. A woman killed in Shostka, Sumy region. An 11-year-old girl among the four injured in Sumy.

This is the single-night catalogue of 14-15 June 2026. By any standard of contemporary international humanitarian law, the cumulative attack - and each of its individual components - constitutes a documented war crime under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. The Lavra is on the Enhanced Protection list of the Hague Convention. The strike is, in the precise legal sense, a grave breach of the Second Protocol. The double-tap on Kharkiv rescuers is a documented war crime of the most-established category. The destruction of the Dovzhenko costume collection is a documented attack on cultural property. None of this is contested. The legal framework is in place. The documentation is being collected in real time by Ukrainian, European, and international monitors.

THE DOUBLE-TAP - THE DOCTRINE OF DELIBERATE WAR CRIME

The Mystetskyi Arsenal strike was a deliberate second strike on a second cultural-heritage target during the same overnight operation, timed while firefighters were on the Lavra roof. This is operational coordination, not coincidence. Russian targeting cells planned both strikes. Russian strike-cycle command authorised both. The two cultural-heritage hits were programmed to occur sequentially within the same operational window.

The Kharkiv rescuer killings were a textbook double-tap. A first Russian strike caused a fire. State Emergency Service rescuers - unarmed, identifiable, performing humanitarian work under emblem protection - deployed to fight the fire. A second Russian strike then hit the same location, deliberately, targeting the rescuers. Five of them died. Six more were wounded. Interior Minister Klymenko’s verbatim framing in his social media response: “heroes without weapons.”

The double-tap is not a Russian innovation in this war. The Russian Armed Forces have been using the double-tap technique systematically since 2022. The double-tap was extensively documented in Russian operations in Syria from 2015 onward. Russian military doctrine treats the second strike-on-responders as an operational efficiency multiplier - kill the people you would otherwise have to kill in subsequent strikes, demoralise the local response capacity, and impose a tax on every future first-responder deployment. The Russian state has deployed this technique against Ukrainian rescuers, Ukrainian medics, Ukrainian electrical-grid repair teams, and Ukrainian humanitarian workers for four years and four months. The cumulative double-tap death toll on the Ukrainian State Emergency Service alone is, on the documented record, in the hundreds. Klymenko’s “heroes without weapons” framing is the operational verdict: the Russian state systematically kills Ukrainian first responders as a doctrinal practice.

EMPIRE OF SAVAGES - THE DOCTRINAL FRAME

The Russian Armed Forces have, across the four-and-four-month period since 24 February 2022, conducted operations against Ukrainian cultural and religious property at a tempo and against a target catalogue that has no recent military-historical parallel. The Ukrainian Ministry of Culture’s documentation has logged thousands of strikes on cultural sites. Churches across the Russian-Orthodox, Ukrainian-Orthodox, Roman-Catholic, Greek-Catholic, Protestant evangelical, Jewish, and Muslim traditions. Museums of the national-historical, regional-historical, contemporary-art, ethnographic, and decorative-arts categories. Libraries - including the destruction of the Vernadsky National Library reading room in Kharkiv. Theatres - including the documented Mariupol Drama Theatre strike of March 2022 that killed approximately 600 sheltering civilians. Music schools, art schools, conservatories. Statues and memorials. Cemeteries.

This is not the by-product of a kinetic campaign. This is the campaign. The Russian state’s targeting doctrine systematically treats Ukrainian cultural and religious heritage as legitimate military objects - because the doctrine, at its philosophical foundation, denies that Ukrainian culture and Ukrainian religion are separate from the Ukrainian political-civilisational existence the Russian state is attempting to extinguish. The Russian doctrine, as articulated by Russian state media, by Russian political figures, by Russian Orthodox Church hierarchy, and by the cumulative published work of Russian state-aligned intellectuals, is that the Ukrainian nation is not a separate civilisational entity. Therefore, by the doctrine’s own internal logic, destroying Ukrainian cultural and religious heritage is not the destruction of foreign cultural heritage. It is the elimination of false claims to a separate cultural existence that Russia, by its imperial-civilisational framework, does not recognise. It is a declaration of genocide.

This framework has been articulated explicitly by Russian state media commentators across the war. Vladimir Solovyov on Russian state television, repeatedly, has called for the destruction of every Ukrainian institution that maintains a separate Ukrainian identity. Margarita Simonyan has framed Ukrainian cultural-heritage protection as a Western liberal pretence. Dmitry Medvedev has called for the erasure of Ukraine as a state. The Russian Z-propagandist ecosystem - the milblogger Telegram channels, the state-aligned writers, the Russian-Orthodox-Church-of-the-Moscow-Patriarchate hierarchs - all articulate the same framework. Ukraine, in this doctrine, is not a separate nation. Ukrainian culture is not a separate cultural tradition. Ukrainian Orthodox Christianity is not a separate religious tradition. Therefore, the destruction of all three is not war crime. The elimination of a schism, or apostates, rather than violation of sovereign territory. Russia is of course deeply wrong.

This is the doctrine. The doctrine is the Empire of Savages. Savagery in this analytical frame is not the absence of values. Savagery is the active deployment of an alternative value system that treats the protections of international humanitarian law, the heritage of pluralistic civilisation, the existence of the autonomous nation, and the sanctity of religious and cultural sites as enemy property to be destroyed. The Russian state has not failed to understand the laws of war. The Russian state has rejected them - actively, doctrinally, and operationally - in favour of an alternative imperial framework that celebrates the destruction of pluralistic heritage as the restoration of properly-Russian civilisational primacy. It is still a crime.

The vertical mindset- the vertikal, the Russian-imperial framework of centralised authoritarian rule under a single sovereign - is the political-structural correlate of this doctrinal framework. In the vertical mindset, values do not exist as independent constraints on power. Values exist only insofar as they serve the sovereign’s project. Ukrainian democracy, Ukrainian pluralism, Ukrainian European-civilisational orientation are, in this framework, not alternative legitimate value systems. They are contempt-worthy errors that the sovereign’s project is justified in correcting through violence. The Russian state’s contempt for Ukraine - visible in every speech, every targeting decision, every cultural-heritage strike - is operationally informed by the perceived inferiority of pluralistic-democratic values of the West and Ukraine compared to the vertical-imperial framework.

WHY THE LAVRA STRIKE IS THE SIGNAL - TO RUSSIANS, TO ORTHODOXY, TO THE WORLD

The Kyiv Pechersk Lavra is the mother monastery of Eastern Slavic Christianity. It is older than the Russian state by more than five hundred years. Russian Orthodox Christianity traces its doctrinal and institutional lineage back through the Lavra. The relics in the Caves Monastery are venerated by Russian Orthodox believers as the foundational saints of the entire Eastern Slavic Christian tradition. By any internal Russian-Orthodox theological framework, the Lavra is the most sacred Orthodox site under Ukrainian jurisdiction - and the holiest Orthodox site anywhere in the post-Soviet space.

Striking the Lavra is, in the precise theological sense, the most aggressive Russian-state attack on its own religious-civilisational foundation that has ever been recorded. Putin’s regime - which has, since 2012, framed itself as the protector of Russian Orthodox civilisation against secular Western decadence - has just struck the foundation site of the Orthodoxy it claims to defend. The contradiction is not a minor inconsistency. Putin has, on the night of 14-15 June 2026, demonstrated to every Russian Orthodox believer, every Russian-speaker, every Ukrainian Orthodox believer of the Moscow Patriarchate tradition, and every observer of Eastern Slavic religious civilisation, that nothing in the religious-civilisational foundation of the Russian-Orthodox-civilisational claim is exempt from destruction if the Putin regime perceives operational benefit from its destruction. Putin is the devil, and Russia a source of satanism and fascism in its current guise - the very antithesis of Christian values and humanity.

The signal carries multiple messages to multiple audiences. To Russians who still believe the war is about restoring Russian-Orthodox civilisational primacy: the signal is that the regime claiming to defend that civilisation has just attacked it. Will this create dissonance in the mind of average Z-Patriots, or even ordinary Russians? Probably not. The framework on which Russian-Orthodox-civilisational war support rests is, on the documented Lavra strike, internally bankrupt. The signal to this audience is that the dictator can burn down everything - including their own sacred sites - if his operational calculations call for it. He can burn everything down simply out of cruelty, because he can, and no one is prepared to stop him.

To Orthodox Christianity as a global religious tradition: the signal is that the Moscow Patriarchate’s claim to represent the spiritual leadership of Eastern Christianity is entirely falsified by the Russian state’s destruction of the mother monastery of that tradition. Russian is attacking the very symbol of their mythologised history. But they just don’t care anymore - they don’t care what the West thinks, they don’t care to hide their cruelty, and they don’t believe any Western nation will take measures to stop them or inflict consequences. The Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople’s 2018-2019 grant of autocephaly to the Orthodox Church of Ukraine, which the Moscow Patriarchate has spent seven years contesting, is retroactively vindicated by the Russian state’s willingness to burn the cathedrals the Moscow Patriarchate claims jurisdiction over.

To the West: the signal is that no cultural-heritage protection framework - UNESCO, the Hague Convention, the Geneva Conventions, the Rome Statute, the entire architecture of international humanitarian law - nothing constrains the Russian state’s targeting decisions. The West’s cultural-protection diplomacy is, on the documented Lavra strike, useless. The Russian state has read the West’s responses across four-plus years of war and has correctly concluded that cultural-heritage attacks produce statements of condemnation and procedural responses through UNESCO and the ICC, but do not produce kinetic Western military response. UNESCO issued a statement, without naming the aggressor. This is weakness on an incredible scale, and which simply invites more aggression and destruction. The Russian state has been training the West to accept escalating cultural-heritage atrocity as a tolerable cost of strategic stalemate, and rhetorical impotency is always chosen over substance and action.

SCORCHED EARTH - WHEN MUSCOVY CANNOT POSSESS, IT BURNS

For most of 2022 and 2023, Russian operational doctrine treated Ukrainian cultural sites as acquired property - Russian forces in occupied territories systematically looted museums, deported cultural objects to Russia, transferred Ukrainian children to Russian families, and restored Russian-imperial monuments. The strategic theory of action was Russification through possession. Take the territory. Take the objects. Take the children. Take the memory. Anything you can’t take, or appropriate, lay waste to it. Convert Ukrainian cultural existence into Russian cultural existence through forced incorporation.

That strategic theory of action has, on the cumulative 2024-2026 evidence, operationally failed. Russia has not been able to take and hold the Ukrainian territory the strategic theory required. The Crimea siege geometry we have documented at length. The Donbas grinding-offensive that has cost 1.38 million Russian casualties for marginal territorial gains. The May 2026 DeepState data showing Russian territorial gains negative for the first time since 2023. The cumulative deep-strike campaign hitting Russian refineries and pipelines at 1,700-km range. The economic crisis with the central bank governor in diplomatic illness. The elite-defection signals we have documented across the recent series. The Russian state cannot, on any plausible operational trajectory, achieve the possession of Ukrainian cultural territory the original strategic theory required.

The shift, on the documented 2024-2026 strike pattern, has been to the alternative strategic theory: if we cannot possess it, we will destroy it. Scorched earth. Cultural erasure. The Pechersk Lavra strike on 14-15 June 2026 is the most prominent single articulation of the shift. The Russian state has, in operational terms, abandoned the project of incorporating Ukrainian cultural heritage into Russian-imperial culture and adopted the project of destroying Ukrainian cultural heritage so that no alternative cultural existence remains. The Z-propagandist ecosystem - has been articulating this shift for months. The destruction of Ukraine as Ukraine is now the operational war aim. Erasure has become doctrine.

The Russian state has adopted a doctrine of cultural and civilisational erasure as the substitute for battlefield gains. The doctrine is not bounded by the laws of war. Or by any laws at all. This is done on the whims and moods of Putin - when he is feeling vindictive, culture burns and cultural arks are wrecked. The doctrine is not constrained by Russian-internal religious or cultural commitments - the Lavra strike has demonstrated this. The doctrine treats the cultural-heritage destruction of an entire European nation as legitimate retribution for that nation’s refusal to surrender its existence to Russian imperial sovereignty and possession.

The doctrine is not bounded to Ukraine. The doctrinal foundation - the rejection of pluralistic-democratic-civilisational values as inferior to the vertical-imperial framework - applies in the same form to every Western liberal society the Russian state perceives as inferior. Poland, the Baltic states, the Nordic countries, Germany, the UK, France, the United States are all, in the doctrinal framework, legitimate targets of the same erasure project if the Russian state perceives operational benefit and military feasibility.

The Foreign Minister of Ukraine, Andrii Sybiha, has been forced - on the morning of 15 June 2026 - to invoke the Mongol Horde and the Nazis as the historical comparators for Russian behaviour. That is the company Russia is now keeping in its own neighbours’ diplomatic vocabulary. The Ukrainian Ministry of Culture has lost count of the cultural-heritage sites destroyed by Russian strikes; the cumulative number is in the thousands. The Hague Convention’s Enhanced Protection list has been violated in the most prominent possible way. The architecture of international humanitarian law on cultural property is, on the 15 June 2026 evidence, bankrupt against a state that has chosen to ignore it, but still sits within those same international institutions, manipulating and perverting their processes and work.

How much longer can we pretend that Russia is not at war with us, and with all liberal Western civilisation? - on the 14-15 June overnight evidence, there is only one honest answer. We cannot pretend any longer. Russia is at war with Ukraine because Ukraine refuses to surrender its existence to the Russian imperial-civilisational claim. Russia is also at war, in the same doctrinal framework, with the broader liberal democratic civilisation the West represents - because the doctrinal framework treats all pluralistic-democratic civilisations as inferior to the vertical-imperial framework and as legitimate targets whenever Russia perceives operational benefit and military feasibility.

The cumulative Western response to the Russian cultural-heritage destruction campaign - the statements of condemnation, the UNESCO procedures, the symbolic European Parliament resolutions, the slow-walked sanctions enforcement, the Velez-Green Pentagon NATO drawdown - has trained the Russian state to expect that escalating cultural-heritage atrocity will produce procedural-rhetorical responses and not kinetic consequences. The training has been completed. The Russian state has established its certainty that the West will produce no response to their striking the Pechersk Lavra. If Russia believed Western kinetic response was a meaningful operational risk, Russia would not have struck the Lavra.

The Pechersk Lavra burned last night because Putin has read the West correctly. More heritage will burn because the West will not prove him wrong by challenging Russia. The choice the West faces is whether to deliver a proportionate kinetic response now, or accept that the next cultural-heritage destruction will eventually arrive in Vilnius, in Warsaw, in Berlin, in London, in Paris, in Washington - and to pay the much higher cost of the kinetic response that will eventually become operationally unavoidable.

Fifteen kilometres from the Kremlin: thirty-six hours after the Pechersk Lavra burned, Ukraine hits the heart of Moscow’s fuel economy, striking a vast oil refinery that services the imperial capital. Breaking: 16 June 2026 - coordinated Ukrainian strike on Moscow oil refinery in the Kapotnya district damages the ELOU avt-6 primary distillation unit; 500-kilometre range; all four major Moscow airports forced to suspend operations; about 60 drones intercepted in what TASS calls one of the largest barrages on the capital all year; Zelensky confirms the strike on his way to the G7; the response to the Lavra strike was always going to come - and the timing is perfect. Ukraine comes to the international summit with a full deck of cards.

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That is how long it took, between the Russian missile and drone barrage that set the Dormition Cathedral of the Kyiv Pechersk Lavra on fire on the night of 14-15 June 2026 - and the Ukrainian response that, on the morning of Tuesday 16 June 2026, lit a fire inside the Moscow Oil Refinery, fifteen kilometres from the Kremlin. The smoke rising within view of the Tsar-Dictator, just as it had formed a backdrop at the St. Petersburg economic forum too.

The Russian state burned a thousand-year-old monastery. Ukraine answered by setting the heart of Moscow’s fuel supply on fire. The target: the Moscow Oil Refinery in the Kapotnya district in the southeast of the Russian capital, owned by Gazprom Neft, one of Russia’s ten largest refineries.

The damage to what Ukraine’s Security Service called “the heart of the plant”. A large-scale fire. Smoke visible from kilometres away. The range: 500 kilometres from Ukrainian-held territory. The disruption: all four major Moscow airports - Domodedovo, Vnukovo, Sheremetyevo, Zhukovsky - forced to suspend operations.

The operational signature: a coordinated multi-service Ukrainian operation. The Security Service of Ukraine. Defence Intelligence. The Special Operations Forces. The Unmanned Systems Forces. The Missile Forces. Five Ukrainian commands working as one strike package. Tonight: how this strike happened, what it means, and the analytical reality the Russian state has now been forced to confront - that the cultural-heritage destruction doctrine has consequences, that the consequences arrive at the doorstep of the Russian capital, and that the cost of striking the holiest Orthodox site in Eastern Slavic Christianity is the burning heart of the refinery that fuels Moscow. Someone please tell Vlad that he is not winning this war.

WHAT WAS HIT - THE HEART OF THE PLANT

The Moscow Oil Refinery - known by its Russian abbreviation MNPZ - is owned by Gazprom Neft, the oil arm of the Russian state gas giant. Located in the Kapotnya district of southeast Moscow. Fifteen kilometres from the Kremlin. Nine miles. Inside the city limits of the Russian capital. One of Russia’s ten largest refineries.

The numbers tell you why this strike matters:

- Refining capacity: more than 12 million tons of crude oil per year.

- Approximately 38-40% of the Moscow region’s fuel consumption comes through this single plant.

- Around 70% of the gasoline consumed in Moscow and the surrounding region is produced here.

- It supplies aviation fuel to all four of Moscow’s major airports - Domodedovo, Vnukovo, Sheremetyevo, and Zhukovsky.

- And per the Ukrainian General Staff confirmation: the plant is involved in supplying the Russian Armed Forces. Not a civilian-only target. A military-industrial fuel node for the war on Ukraine.

What was hit specifically: the ELOU AVT-6 primary oil distillation unit. Ukrainian targeting selected, on the available open-source evidence, the most operationally consequential single component of the entire facility. The ELOU AVT-6 is the unit that separates crude oil into the basic fractions - gasoline, diesel, jet fuel, fuel oil - that every subsequent processing stage depends on. The Security Service of Ukraine’s framing was precise: “the key primary oil refining unit, which is the heart of the plant.”

Hit the heart, and you do not damage the refinery. You halt it.

THE COORDINATED OPERATION - FIVE COMMANDS, ONE STRIKE

The operational signature is what makes this strike strategically distinct from the cumulative refinery-strike campaign Ukraine has been running across 2024-2026. Zelenskyy’s verbatim statement on his X/Twitter account, mid-morning Kyiv time: > “This time, the Moscow region felt the reach of Ukraine’s long-range capabilities. An oil refinery was hit at a distance of 500 kilometres.” The Ukrainian president named five separate commands in his thanks: the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), the Unmanned Systems Forces (USF), the Special Operations Forces (SOF), the Defence Intelligence of Ukraine (HUR), and the Missile Forces of the Armed Forces of Ukraine.

The airport closures. All four major Moscow airports - Domodedovo, Vnukovo, Sheremetyevo, and Zhukovsky - suspended operations. Travel chaos for hours. This is the same set of airports that the Moscow Oil Refinery supplies aviation fuel to. Strike the refinery, and the aircraft on the closed runways are also being prevented from departing by the fact that the fuel they would have departed with was on fire fifteen kilometres away.

The wider 24-hour campaign. Cross-confirmed across the Ukrainian General Staff and the Kyiv Post:

- A fuel depot in Poltavskaya village, Krasnodar region - struck overnight, fire.

- The JSC Central Design Bureau of Apparatus Building near Tula - a Russian military-industrial enterprise - struck. Building and load-bearing structure of the assembly shop damaged.

- Russian command and observation posts in Bahatyr, Velyka Novosilka, and Siversk in Donetsk Oblast.

- A field artillery depot in Kremenivka.

- Material and technical supply depots in Donetsk and a drone depot in occupied Mariupol.

- And the Tempo plant in Rybinsk, Yaroslavl Oblast - still burning from a Ukrainian strike on Saturday 14 June.

This is not one strike. This is a campaign. The Moscow refinery is the symbolic peak, but the operational picture is a sustained, multi-target, deep-strike interdiction that hit production, transport, command-and-control, and military-industrial nodes simultaneously.

THE RESPONSE FRAMEWORK

Night of 14-15 June: Russian missile and drone barrage of 681 weapons. Dormition Cathedral of the Pechersk Lavra struck. Mystetskyi Arsenal struck in deliberate double-tap. Dovzhenko Film Studio costume archive destroyed. Kharkiv Art Museum damaged. Five rescuers killed in Kharkiv double-tap. One-month-old baby among the injured.

Morning of 16 June: Moscow Oil Refinery struck. 15 km from the Kremlin. ELOU AVT-6 unit on fire. All four Moscow airports closed. Thirty-six hours. The symmetry is the message. Ukraine has been telling Russia, across the cumulative deep-strike campaign of 2024-2026, there is no Russian sanctuary from which atrocities against Ukrainian cultural heritage can be conducted without operational consequence. The Russian state has been receiving the message. The Russian state has chosen, on the available 14-15-16 June evidence, to ignore it. The Moscow refinery strike is the next iteration of the lesson. The next iteration will be harder.

Andriy Kovalenko, head of Ukraine’s Centre for Countering Disinformation at the National Security and Defence Council, captured the analytical point in his X/Twitter response: even though Putin has pulled almost all of Russia’s key air defence and missile defence systems to Moscow to protect the capital, that does not save the Russians. Putin is not a guarantee of safety for Muscovites. Putin is, in operational terms, the cause of the situation in which Muscovites can no longer take their airports’ departure boards for granted.

Zelensky’s framing, posted as he flew to the G7 summit: > “This is a fair response to Russian attacks and proof that the war must be brought to an end. Ukraine’s long-range weapons are among the most important tools for achieving this.” The Ukrainian message to the G7 - to Trump, to the European leaders, to the Western public - is operationally explicit. Ukraine can reach Moscow. Ukraine can hit the refineries that fuel Moscow. Ukraine can close the airports that serve Moscow. The G7 question is not whether Ukraine can fight on. The G7 question is whether the West will continue to refuse the kinetic-Western-response option, to accelerate supplies to Ukraine, that would compress the war’s duration and lower the cumulative cost.

The reporting from the Daily Mail’s coverage adds the diplomatic context: on his way to the G7, Zelensky revealed that Putin had rejected a new Ukrainian overture for peace talks. “We offered Putin to meet anywhere where real decisions could be made to end the war. He doesn’t want that.” Translation: the Russian state’s position is that the war continues until Russia achieves its goals, no matter how pointless and unachievable they are. Whether Western allies realise it or not, diplomatic-engagement channels are operationally bankrupt. The only language the Russian state understands on the evidence of 2022-2026, is the language of kinetic cost. Ukraine has become highly adept at speaking that language of force.

So here is the cumulative picture, on the evening of 16 June 2026. The Russian state has, on the 14-15 June overnight raid, destroyed the largest costume collection in Ukrainian cinematic history, set the Dormition Cathedral roof on fire, double-tapped Kharkiv rescuers, and damaged the flagship cultural institutions of the Ukrainian capital. Thirty-six hours later, the Ukrainian state has, on the 16 June morning raid, set fire to the heart of the refinery that fuels Moscow’s airports, supplies 40% of Moscow’s fuel, and powers the city’s daily life.

The scoreboard is unambiguous. Ukraine is winning the strategic-strike-tempo competition. Russia hits Ukrainian heritage sites that cannot be rebuilt. Ukraine hits Russian fuel infrastructure that takes months to rebuild. The Russian state, by the cultural-heritage-destruction doctrine documented across the past 36 hours, is choosing a war of erasure, but with no clear strategy for either stasis or victory.

The political signal could not be sharper. The Russian state has spent four years trying to convince the Russian population that the war is something happening somewhere else, to other people, in service of an imperial-civilisational project that cannot fail. The choice the Russian state now faces is the choice it has been refusing for four years. Stop hitting Ukrainian cultural heritage and Ukrainian civilians or watch the Ukrainian strike calendar continue to bring the operational cost of the war to the doorstep of the Russian capital. The Russian state, on the available 16 June evidence, has not yet made the choice. Not realised that things will get progressively worse for them. The Russian state will make the choice when the cost of refusing it exceeds the political cost of accepting it. The Ukrainian deep-strike campaign is that cost-accumulation mechanism. Not Western sanctions, but Ukrainian kinetic actions.

OUT OF GAS: Russia Day 2026 Arrived with Empty Pumps, a 230-Drone Raid That Destroyed Samara’s Kuibyshev Refinery, the Worst Crimean Fuel Crisis Since the 2014 Annexation, and a War That Has Stopped Being Something Russians Could Ignore. Happy Russia Day, swamp empire. Your days are numbered, as are those of the killer Putin.

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Breaking: 11-13 June 2026 - The Crimea fuel crisis hits its tourist-season inflection point on Russia Day; Ukraine’s Russia Day raid lands 230 drones on Samara, Tatarstan, and Tolyatti and destroys AVT-4 and AVT-5 at the Kuibyshev refinery; the 13 June Kotovo and Tamanneftegas strikes extend the campaign into the Volgograd pumping network and the southern LPG export terminals; the Institute for the Study of War describes the dual-strike doctrine - and Russia’s army runs out of momentum at the same moment its fuel system runs dry.

Friday 12 June 2026. Russia Day. The Russian national holiday marking the 1990 declaration of sovereignty by the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic. The official start of the Russian summer vacation season. The day the Russian state was supposed to be celebrating itself in its 2026 wartime configuration - flag-waving in Red Square, the choreographed broadcast retrospectives, the regional firework displays, the start of the resort-and-tourism season on the Black Sea coast. Those festivities on Red Square were cancelled for the first time in 23 years. First Russia day festivities are cancelled; next Russia itself will be cancelled.

What happened on Russia Day 2026. Russian oil refining and chemical infrastructure across European Russia is burning. Russia claimed to intercept 231 of them, which would mean Russian air defence achieved a 100%+ interception rate against what was, on the available evidence, a 230-drone raid. Russian air defence did not achieve a 100% interception rate. Evidence suggests that air defence is absent or ineffective in a great many locations. The primary AVT-4 and AVT-5 processing units at Samara’s Kuibyshev refinery were destroyed, completely halting operations. The Taneko and Taif-NK refineries in Tatarstan were damaged. A missile-fuel chemical plant in Tolyatti was struck. The Togliattikauchuk chemical plant in Samara region was hit. Airspace restrictions were imposed across multiple Russian regions. Russia Day celebrations were cancelled across the affected zones. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s evening framing: long-range sanctions applied.

On Saturday 13 June, Ukrainian long-range strike drones penetrated to Kotovo in the Volgograd region and hit an oil preparation and pumping workshop processing crude from the Korobkovskoye and neighbouring fields. NASA satellite tracking systems verified the fire. The Kyiv Post framed it precisely: a vital logistics node, processing crude for export and domestic refining. The same wave struck the Tamanneftegas liquefied petroleum gas terminal in Krasnodar - the largest LPG transshipment complex in southern Russia - and levelled transport hubs at Port Temryuk on the Azov Sea coast. By Sunday 13 June, Russian total combat losses since 24 February 2022 had reached 1,381,430, with 1,310 added in the past 24 hours. The front line had run 193 combat engagements in the same 24 hours, with Russian forces pressuring Pokrovsk and Huliaipole - and not breaking through.

And in Crimea, on the morning of Russia Day, the queues at the petrol stations were already there, snaking for miles in some locations. Russia has run out of gas on every level simultaneously. The Crimea fuel crisis as the inflection point that converts the war from televised distant operation into inconvenience Russians cannot ignore. The Russia Day raid as the densest single-night long-range strike of the war so far. The Institute for the Study of War’s formal doctrine - long-range strikes hit production, midrange strikes hit transport, the combination strangles the war machine. And the front-line consequence: Russian forces, on the documented June 13 evidence, out of momentum at exactly the moment they are running out of fuel.

CRIMEA OUT OF GAS - THE WORST CRISIS SINCE THE 2014 ANNEXATION

The headline framing, in the AP wire reporting carried across US News and Washington Times on 11 June 2026: Kyiv’s forces have targeted supplies to Crimea, triggering the worst fuel crisis on the Black Sea peninsula since it was illegally annexed by Russia in 2014.

- Ukrainian drone strikes on refineries, oil depots, and pipelines feeding the Crimean supply chain;

- Tanker trucks attacked and left ablaze along the land corridor from Russia to Crimea - the M-14 corridor that we documented under sustained interdiction in late May;

- The Chonhar Bridge - one of the principal alternative-to-Kerch crossings linking mainland Ukraine to Crimea over the shallow Sivash strait - repeatedly hit by Ukrainian drones this week. Russian authorities deployed pontoon bridges with limited capacity. Ukrainian Ground Forces commander Oleksandr Nastenko confirmed the strikes;

- The Kerch Bridge under its own sustained pressure as we have documented in earlier episodes.

The consumer reality on the ground:

- Crimea’s largest gas station chain has suspended fuel vouchers entirely, per The Moscow Times’ 1 June 2026 reporting;

- Authorities have introduced fuel vouchers and restricted gasoline sales - coupon-only purchasing for select customer categories, per Kyiv Independent’s late-May reporting;

- Motorists are waiting in long lines at gas stations across the peninsula - verified by Russian-source Telegram channels and by AP photojournalism;

- The crisis hits Russia Day and the start of the summer vacation season, with Crimea’s tourism-and-resort economy already structurally fragile and now operationally crippled.

The Kremlin’s response. In a rare public acknowledgment, per the AP framing, the Kremlin recognised the scope of the problem and promised to address the issue quickly. The Kremlin said “all levels of government” were working to resolve the Crimean fuel shortage. This is the same Kremlin that, in late May, had said it saw “no risks” of nationwide gasoline shortages and that the domestic market remained “stable and under control.” In two weeks, the Kremlin’s position has moved from no risks to all levels of government engaged. The information environment has cracked again. The denial firewall is collapsing on the energy dimension as it has been collapsing across the broader picture.

The macroeconomic picture behind the local crisis:

- A-95 wholesale gasoline prices on the St Petersburg International Mercantile Exchange have surged to record highs, approximately 50% above January 2026 levels;

- A total ban on Russian gasoline exports remains in force through 31 July - extended from earlier ban periods because Russia cannot guarantee its own domestic supply;

- Far East fuel shortages: Primorye region at 78 rubles per litre (approximately $3.58/gallon); online resellers at 220 rubles per litre ($10.12/gallon, in a region where the average monthly wage is $1,200);

- Kuril Islands: A-92 public sales halted entirely;

- Russia’s classified gasoline production statistics: figures have been classified since May 2024 because the public picture became too embarrassing for the regime - a state that classifies its own gasoline production data has, in operational terms, conceded the strategic significance of the strike campaign that produced that classification.

THE RUSSIA DAY RAID - 230 DRONES, AVT-4 AND AVT-5 DESTROYED

12 June 2026, Russia Day. Ukraine launches one of the densest single-night long-range drone raids of the entire war. The Kuibyshev refinery, Samara - the most operationally significant hit. The primary AVT-4 and AVT-5 atmospheric-vacuum distillation units were destroyed. AVT units are the foundational distillation stage of a Russian refinery - crude oil enters, atmospheric and vacuum distillation separates it into fractions, every subsequent processing stage depends on the AVT output. Destroying the primary AVT-4 and AVT-5 units at a major Russian refinery does not damage it. It halts it. Per the Kyiv Post: completely halting its operations. Kuibyshev is one of the major Russian Volga-region refineries. Its halt removes a significant chunk of Russian domestic refining capacity from the operational picture for the months required to rebuild AVT units.

The Taneko refinery, Tatarstan - damaged. Taneko is one of Russia’s newest and most technologically sophisticated refineries, owned by Tatneft. Damage to Taneko, per the General Staff’s confirmation, means another major facility producing below capacity through summer 2026.

The Taif-NK refinery, Tatarstan - damaged. The Taif-NK facility produces high-octane gasoline grades. Damage to Taif-NK directly affects the A-95 wholesale price that has surged 50% above January levels.

The missile-fuel chemical plant, Tolyatti - struck. Russia’s strategic missile fuel infrastructure is, in the precise operational sense, targeted. The implication: the strike campaign is not only targeting civilian gasoline supply. The strike campaign is targeting military propellant production and the military-industrial logistics architecture itself.

The Togliattikauchuk chemical plant, Samara region - struck. Synthetic rubber production for the Russian war economy. Targeted.

Russia Day 2026 produced the most embarrassing single-night air-defence failure of the war. The airspace restrictions and cancelled celebrations: across multiple Russian regions, Russia Day events were cancelled. The flagship national holiday of the Russian state, in its 2026 wartime configuration, was cancelled in pieces by the Ukrainian Armed Forces. The symbolic significance is impossible to ignore. The Russian state can no longer celebrate itself on Russia Day. The Russian state can no longer guarantee its own air space on Russia Day. The Russian state can no longer fill the tanks at its Crimean gas stations on Russia Day. On every dimension that Russia Day was supposed to mark, the Russian state failed in real time.

THE 13 JUNE EXTENSION - KOTOVO, TAMANNEFTEGAS, TEMRYUK

On Saturday 13 June, Ukraine extended the campaign into the next strategic node-set. Kotovo, Volgograd region - an oil preparation and pumping workshop. Per the Kyiv Post and Ukrainska Pravda’s reporting: a vital logistics node that processes crude from the Korobkovskoye and neighbouring oil fields for export and domestic refining. The strike triggered a large-scale industrial fire verified by NASA’s satellite tracking systems - that is the precision of the verification trail. The facility serves the Kuibyshev-Tikhoretsk pipeline directing crude toward the Volgograd refinery and the Sheskharis export terminal in Novorossiysk. Hit the pumping workshop, and you interdict the crude flow toward both the domestic refinery and the export terminal simultaneously.

Tamanneftegas LPG terminal, Krasnodar region - the largest transshipment complex for liquefied hydrocarbons in southern Russia. Levelled, per the Kyiv Post. The LPG export economy is one of the few Russian hydrocarbon export channels that has remained relatively immune to Western sanctions. That immunity has now been operationally neutralised by Ukrainian deep strike.

Port Temryuk, Azov Sea coast - transport hubs levelled. Temryuk is one of the small-port export-logistics nodes that Russia has been using to circumvent the disrupted Novorossiysk and Tuapse export channels. Hitting Temryuk extends the maritime interdiction.

Ukraine is interdicting the entire Russian hydrocarbon supply chain simultaneously - production (refineries), processing (AVT units), pumping (Kotovo), export (Tamanneftegas, Temryuk), and the strategic-military propellant infrastructure (Tolyatti). The strikes are the operational execution of a deep-strike doctrine that targets every component of Russia’s hydrocarbon economy at once. And the doctrine is working superbly and devastatingly.

THE ISW DOCTRINE - DUAL-STRIKE INTERDICTION

The Institute for the Study of War has formalised the analytical framework that explains why the campaign is achieving its current operational tempo. ISW’s June 2026 analysis, as cited by the AP wire reporting: the long-range strike campaign is therefore reducing Russia’s production capacity, while the midrange strike campaign is hurting Russia’s ability to transport the gasoline Russia is still able to produce.

This is what that doctrine means operationally. Long-range strikes - like the 1,500-kilometre reach to Salavat in Bashkortostan, the 1,700-km reach demonstrated against southern Russian targets, the Kotovo and Saratov-region pumping nodes - destroy production capacity. The refinery cannot be quickly rebuilt. The AVT units take months to replace. The destroyed production is gone from the market for the duration of the rebuild.

Midrange strikes - like the tanker-truck attacks along the M-14 corridor, the Chonhar Bridge interdiction, the Tamanneftegas and Temryuk hits, the pumping-station strikes that interdict the crude flow into the rebuild path - destroy transport and distribution capacity. Even the production Russia can still achieve cannot reach the consumer. The supply chain is broken at multiple points simultaneously.

The combined effect: Russia experiences fuel shortage even if the production loss were notionally recoverable. The combination strangles. The combination is what is producing the Crimea fuel crisis, the 50% A-95 price surge on the St Petersburg Mercantile Exchange, the Far East queues, the Kuril Islands sales halt, the classified-statistics architecture, the export ban through July 31. The combination is what is producing the Kremlin’s “all levels of government” acknowledgment of crisis where two weeks ago there was “no risk.” The dual-strike doctrine is producing operational effects the Russian state cannot effectively manage through its existing institutional response capacity.

The scale of the campaign, per BBC Verify’s analytical work and the Reuters / Vot Tak data compilation:

- 21 of Russia’s 38 large refineries hit since January 2026;

- Successful attacks already 48% higher than the whole of 2024;

- At least 10 oil refineries forced to fully or partially suspend operations since August 2025;

- Reuters: on certain days, national gasoline production has declined by as much as a fifth;

- The Moscow Times: facilities accounting for around one-quarter of Russia’s total refining capacity and more than 30% of gasoline output halted or scaled back;

- Vot Tak data compilation: 159 Russian oil refinery strikes since the start of the full-scale war;

- The campaign has produced - on Zelensky’s running 2026 tally cited in earlier episodes of this channel - $7 billion in damage to the Russian oil sector in calendar 2026 alone.

OUT OF MOMENTUM - THE FRONT-LINE REALITY ON 13 JUNE

Russian total combat losses since 24 February 2022: approximately 1,381,430 personnel, with 1,310 added in the past 24 hours. The daily attrition tempo remains at the saturated 1,000-1,500/day rate that has prevailed across the 2025-2026 period. The cumulative figure exceeds, by an order of magnitude, every pre-war Western analytical projection of the war’s maximum Russian casualty load.

Combat engagements in the past 24 hours: 193. Russian forces continuing pressure on the Pokrovsk and Huliaipole sectors, with 55 attacks recorded across both sectors. And not breaking through. Pokrovsk has been the Russian operational priority since the autumn 2024 offensive. The Pokrovsk sector has, on the cumulative DeepState mapping, failed to advance to the city itself across nearly two years of sustained offensive pressure. Huliaipole - in southern Zaporizhzhia oblast - has become a second pressure point that Russian forces are also failing to convert into territorial gain.

The territorial picture in May 2026, as DeepState documented: Russian territorial gains went negative for the first time since 2023. Ukrainian forces are recovering ground across multiple sectors. The Russian offensive economy - the trade of casualties for kilometres - has, on the May 2026 evidence, crossed the threshold beyond which the trade is no longer producing positive returns.

Ukrainian counter-strike depth on 13 June: drone command posts hit near Novobohdanivka and Novoivanivka in Zaporizhzhia Oblast, Voskresenka in Donetsk Oblast, and Cherkaska Konopelka in Kursk Oblast (inside Russian territory). A drone unit workshop near Burchak in Zaporizhzhia Oblast. Logistics depots at Vasylivka in Zaporizhzhia and Zelene Pole in Donetsk. Russian radar station near Kabardinka in Krasnodar Krai. The Krasnoarmeysk oil pumping station in Saratov Oblast - two 50,000 cubic metre oil tanks set on fire.

The composite: Ukrainian forces are operationally interdicting Russian drone-warfare command-and-control on the same day they are interdicting Russian hydrocarbon logistics. Russian forces are failing to convert their offensive pressure into territorial gain on the same day their fuel supply system is collapsing into national crisis. The war is, on the documented 13 June evidence, simultaneously running out of fuel and running out of momentum.

Here is where the Russian war machine stands, on the evening of 13 June 2026. The petrol stations in Crimea are running queues that, on the AP wire reporting, are the worst the peninsula has seen since 2014. The Kremlin has been forced to publicly acknowledge the crisis after two weeks earlier denying any nationwide gasoline-supply risk. The wholesale A-95 price on the St Petersburg Mercantile Exchange is 50% above January 2026 levels. Russia’s gasoline production statistics have been classified since May 2024 because the truth was too embarrassing. The export ban is extended through July 31 because Russia cannot guarantee its own domestic supply. The war that the Russian state has spent four years presenting to its own population as a televised distant operation has, on Russia Day 2026, become the operational inconvenience the Russian population can no longer ignore.

The Russia Day raid destroyed the primary AVT-4 and AVT-5 processing units at Samara’s Kuibyshev refinery in a single night. The follow-up 13 June raids hit the Kotovo pumping workshop, the Tamanneftegas LPG terminal, and Port Temryuk transport hubs - the production, the pumping, and the export chain interdicted simultaneously. 21 of Russia’s 38 large refineries have been struck since January. 48% more successful attacks in five months than in all of 2024. National gasoline production on certain days has declined by a fifth. The Russian state’s strategic hydrocarbon economy - the principal foundation of its wartime fiscal architecture, the macroeconomic shield Nabiullina built and is now in the process of leaving - is, on the cumulative documented evidence, in operational crisis at scale.

The front line is, simultaneously, out of momentum. Russian forces pressuring Pokrovsk and Huliaipole and not breaking through. May 2026 territorial gains negative for the first time since 2023. 1,381,430 cumulative Russian casualties, with 1,310 added in the past 24 hours. Drone command posts being interdicted by Ukrainian counterstrike on the same day the fuel infrastructure is interdicted. The trade of Russian casualties for Russian territorial gain has, on the May-to-13-June 2026 evidence, crossed the threshold beyond which it produces nothing. The war’s military operational picture has converged with the war’s economic operational picture into a single, undeniable strategic reality.

Russia is out of gas. Russia is out of momentum. Russia is out of the strategic narrative shield its information firewall provided across the first three years of the war. The cumulative pressure documented across our recent series - the Strelkov “defeat” post from his prison cell, the Davydov assassination in Balashikha, the Mozdok-Kazimagomed pipeline strike, the Abramovich Kyiv mission, the Putin SPIEF disclosure, the Nabiullina disappearance - is now visible in the queue lengths at the Simferopol petrol pumps. The Russian elite is reading the exit signals. The Russian middle class is reading the fuel prices. The Russian conscript is reading the casualty list. The convergent operational reality the Russian state has spent four years trying to hide from its own population is, on Russia Day 2026, on the streets of Russian-occupied Crimea, in the form of empty pump stations under Russian flags.

Putin’s war is running out of fuel at every level of analysis that matters. Fuel literally - in the AVT units and the LPG terminals and the Crimean tanks. Fuel financially - in the rouble that Nabiullina is no longer there to stabilise. Fuel politically - in the Z-patriot doom-mongering and the elite-defection signals. Fuel strategically - in the negative territorial picture and the failed Pokrovsk and Huliaipole offensives. Fuel narratively - in the cancelled Russia Day celebrations and the classified gasoline-production statistics. Every dimension of the Russian war machine that has carried Putin from 2022 to 2026 is, in operational terms, now running on empty.

The Ukrainian deep-strike campaign is the most cost-effective strategic-economic operation of the modern military era. The Crimean petrol queues are the visible signature of that operation arriving at the consumer end of the Russian wartime supply chain. The signal Russia Day 2026 has sent to the Russian population is unmistakable: the war is no longer somewhere else. The war is at the pump. And when the war arrives at the pump - when ordinary Russians can no longer ignore the cost of the war that has been waged in their name for four-plus years - the political consequences of that ignored war begin, at last, to materialise. The Nabiullina disappearance is not unrelated to the Crimean petrol queues. The Abramovich Kyiv mission is not unrelated to the cancelled Russia Day celebrations. They are the same strategic story, expressed at different points in the Russian state’s operational collapse.

Putin is, on the available 13 June 2026 evidence, presiding over the operational endgame of his own war. The fuel is gone. The momentum is gone. The narrative shield is cracking. The technocrat who shielded the economy is exiting - we’ll do a whole episode on Nabiullina soon. The senior officers of Russian blood-soaked, criminal army are dying in their own residential districts. The strategic infrastructure is burning. And the petrol stations in Crimea are queued back to the road. Russia Day was cancelled, and soon there may be no Russia to celebrate anyway. We can only hope that this is the last holiday of the swamp empire.

DEMENTED AND DANGEROUS: Why the Putin stumbling through May 2026 may be the most lethal Putin of the entire war. As his voice fails - and he can’t even summon the strength to shout ‘Hurrah’, as the footage recently suppressed by the Kremlin attest to, it seems that Putin is becoming less rational, more visibly angry, frustrated, and possibly confused. He is certainly detached from reality to a large degree, because of the skewed information he is receiving from sycophants and lackeys within the vertical of power. No one wants to tell demented grandpa the truth - in case they feel his wrath, as his war failures accelerate.

See the full video episode:

See the full video episode:

26 May 2026 - as the Russian dictator approaches defeat, and believe me, that is coming faster than most realise, as he loses cognitive control, he is increasingly grasping for miracle tactics that can reverse the tide, as he reaches simultaneously for mobilization, threats to the Baltics, and the theatre of performative terror, but none of that is working in the way he expects. Because his model of the world, and of Ukraine does not reflect the reality.

Before we get into the detail, this is the most important point of this episode - Putin will increasingly reach for terror acts to try to reassert control over his elites, his people, over the Western allies and over Ukraine. He will escalate dramatically and catastrophically, because we are in the bunker stage of his downfall - comparable to Hitler’s demise. But and this is important; the scale and viciousness of that terror is entirely dependent on the Western response to it. If we do nothing meaningful, nothing forceful, if we continue to act predictably, as after the most recent terror strikes on Ukraine, then Putin will escalate at will and with impunity. None of this depends on how Ukraine defends itself - because that will not stop, and Putin will lash out regardless. No. It’s the response of our politicians that will determine how bad this escalation gets. They need to wake up, take responsibility, finally understand how Putin’s cowardly mind works, and punch back very, very hard against Russia.

The Ukrainian commentator Yuriy Bogdanov posted to his Telegram channel at 2:31 a.m. on Monday 26 May 2026. The post, in Russian, ran to fewer than three hundred words. It contained an important one-paragraph summary of where the war is. Here is a translation:

Putin’s Russia is now closer to collapse, defeat, and catastrophe than at any point in this war. At the same time, Putin is searching for the kind of escalation that will let him “push it through” - through an attack on the Baltics to break NATO, through dragging the orange clown of America into a war, through mobilization. Why does he hope? Because, alongside the macro-problems he can no longer ignore, he gets daily reports of imagined victories that give him hope. But all of these are risks. So, in the foreground we get the boasting - look how unbeatable we are, lol - and the terror, and the destabilisation of Ukraine from within. They use their voices, their bots and their agents to devalue our victories; with terror and propaganda they try to undermine faith in the army and the state, and they search for any way to squeeze through. And yes, despite all our risks, our imperfect state and our not-best partners, we must read the totality of the information correctly: Russia is closer to defeat than at any time in the war. That’s precisely why they’re raging. That’s precisely why they’ll threaten and terrorise. Yes, Kyiv now must endure what London endured in 1944-45. Yes, we will see more disinformation and more calls to “surrender” against the backdrop of the terror.

Heading towards defeat

This is the analytical frame for tonight’s episode. Putin’s Russia is on the operational trajectory toward defeat. Putin himself is visibly, demonstrably, and increasingly cognitively impaired. And the combination of those two facts - strategic defeat and cognitive decline - makes the Putin of May 2026 the most dangerous Putin of the entire war so far.

Tonight: the evidence of cognitive deterioration. The pattern of erratic, increasingly disconnected public behaviour. The strategic logic of why a failing dictator escalates rather than de-escalates. The Baltic, mobilisation, and nuclear-signalling vectors of that escalation. And the urgent - urgent - case for Western seriousness in the months ahead.

THE COGNITIVE EVIDENCE

Begin with what is observable. Cross-confirmed across the National Security Journal, the Global Security archive of Putin health reporting, multiple Reuters and Newsweek accounts of Putin’s public appearances, and President Zelensky’s own framing of the past 72 hours.

The November 2024 Valdai Club appearance - over four hours long - established the modern baseline of the deterioration. Putin misspoke, stammered, and mispronounced words more than forty times while reading from a piece of paper. He was 72 years old then. He is 73 now. This is well beyond the average male life expectancy in Russia. The Valdai stammering was attributed at the time to fatigue, to a head cold, to the unusual length of the session. The same pattern has reappeared, with increasing frequency, across 2025 and into 2026.

The 21 April 2026 appearance flagged by the National Security Journal: Putin presented what observers described as disjointed parallels between Nazi Germany’s 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union and his own invasion of Ukraine. He then added - and the quote is captured verbatim in the original NSJ piece - that the reason the USSR was victorious in the Great Patriotic War was that “during the hardest months of the Great Patriotic War, children, grandmothers, and women knitted socks and sent parcels and gifts to the front.”

Putin is, in the spring of 2026, framing the strategic logic of Russia’s victory over Nazi Germany in terms of socks knitted by grandmothers. He is the president of a nuclear-armed state. He is explaining to his own population why, by historical analogy, Russia will prevail in Ukraine. And the analogical frame he reaches for is socks. As a piece of public rhetoric this is not the work of a sharp mind. It is the work of a mind reaching, automatically, for sentimental Soviet-nostalgia tropes and myths because the operational arguments have run out.

The Sunday 24 May 2026 statement - President Zelensky’s verdict on Putin in the aftermath of the Oreshnik strike on the Chornobyl Museum, captured by UNITED24 Media and UA.News, that we quoted in last week’s episode: “Putin can’t even pronounce the word ‘hurray’ properly anymore - he mumbles - yet he still destroys residential buildings with his missiles.” This is not Ukrainian propaganda. It is observational reporting on the videotape evidence of recent Putin appearances. The man is physically deteriorating in front of the cameras of his own state media. His strength, the very foundations of a strongman state, is dissolving in real time. Everyone can see it, and he knows they can see it.

The bruised hand observation from November 2025: Anton Gerashchenko, Ukrainian presidential adviser, posted a close-up photo on X. The veins were visibly bulging. The hand looked swollen. Earlier 2022 footage had shown Putin gripping a table during a defence-officials meeting in a way that prompted Parkinson’s-disease speculation from medical commentators. The Danish military intelligence service FE downgraded its prediction in 2022 that Putin would remain in power through the next decade, citing “his health, or someone removing him because of his failing health” as the largest single uncertainty.

The cumulative picture is consistent. Public appearances featuring disjointed historical analogies built on barely credible myths. Mumbling during the most sacred state ritual on the Russian calendar. Gripping tables. Bruised hands. Refused medical tests. Hot-mic conversations about immortality. The man at the top of the Russian state is not the man who started this war. Whether the deterioration is Parkinson’s, advanced cognitive decline, or simply the accumulating cost of four years of decisional failure under stress - the deterioration is real, observable, and accelerating.

WHY DEFEAT-PROXIMITY MAKES A DICTATOR MORE DANGEROUS

Now turn to the strategic question. Why does a dictator approaching defeat become more dangerous, not less? Because Western liberal intuition holds the opposite. A failing leader, we tend to assume, will eventually accept reality, cut his losses, and negotiate. We project our own decisional logic onto authoritarian opponents. The projection is, on historical evidence, almost always wrong. And in the case of Putin doubly so. His tactical instinct is to double down, lash out. With cognitive decline this may happen without heed to consequences.

The dictator’s logic is structurally different from the democratic-leader logic. A democratic leader who loses a war loses an election. A dictator who loses a war loses everything - his power, his fortune, his freedom, his life. The personal cost of defeat is, for the dictator, infinitely greater than the personal cost of escalation. Ironic then, that dictators almost always end up staring wars to prop up their regime and failing popularity numbers, or economic mismanagement. Even if escalation has a 5% chance of producing a face-saving outcome and a 95% chance of producing catastrophe, the expected personal value of escalation can still be higher than the expected personal value of accepting defeat - because accepting defeat is, for the dictator personally, equivalent to catastrophe already. For Putin is likely means death.

The historical examples are exact. Hitler in the Führerbunker, ordering offensives by phantom divisions that no longer existed, while Berlin burned around him. The Nazi escalation pattern in 1944-45 was not the rational response of a leader facing defeat. It was the response of a leader for whom defeat was personally unsurvivable, and who therefore had no decisional incentive to stop short of mutual catastrophe. Stalin, after the German invasion of 1941, retreated into a four-day psychological paralysis at his dacha - the only authentic moment of Stalin acknowledging he might have been wrong. He emerged from it with the determination to escalate the Soviet response to total war, including the deliberate destruction of Soviet civilian assets that would otherwise have fallen into German hands. The pattern repeats. Authoritarian leaders facing defeat escalate, because they have no personal exit from defeat.

Putin’s position in May 2026 fits this pattern with eerie precision. The Royal United Services Institute, in its December 2025 analysis titled “Russia is Losing - Time for Putin’s 2026 Hybrid Escalation,” set out the strategic logic explicitly: Europe must establish credible hybrid deterrence “or watch Putin attempt to fracture Western unity through a thousand cuts.” The analysis was prophetic. “2026 will reveal whether Europe has learned this lesson, or whether Putin’s collapsing window will succeed in breaking what his military invasion could not.”

The “collapsing window” framing is the key. Putin is operating, in May 2026, in a closing window of strategic possibility. The war he started in 2022 was supposed to be over in three days. It is now in its 1,553rd day. Russia has lost approximately 1.2 million combined killed and wounded - nearly 1% of the entire population. Russia’s oil revenue is down ~20% year-on-year. Russia has used three Oreshniks to demonstrate that it still has terror capability, and one of them this weekend destroyed garages in Bila Tserkva. Russia’s $100-billion-per-year fiscal foundation is being eroded by Ukrainian drones at a rate of approximately $7 billion in 2026 alone, per Zelensky’s running tally. Russia’s contract-recruitment numbers are declining even as signing bonuses increase - the Institute for the Study of War flagged this in its 19 May 2026 assessment. Russia’s spring-summer 2026 offensive has, in ISW’s words, “failed to make meaningful gains.” Ukrainian forces have contested the tactical initiative. Russian forces have failed to defend the deep rear against increasingly devastating Ukrainian strikes.

This is the operational landscape of a war Putin is losing. And every authoritarian decisional principle, every historical precedent, every piece of strategic-studies literature on cornered-dictator behaviour says the same thing. When a dictator perceives that the war he started is unsalvageable on his current trajectory, he escalates.

This is why Europe needs to send a clear signal, push back hard and define red lines. A desperate dictator, detached from reality and strategic consequences is dangerous. Now we must contain him, and our response needs to punch back so hard, that he cannot ignore the signal, so that his minions cannot explain it away or hide the truth from him.

THE THREE ESCALATION VECTORS

Putin is losing. Every authoritarian decisional principle, every historical precedent, every piece of strategic-studies literature on cornered-dictator behaviour says the same thing. When a dictator perceives that the war he started is unsalvageable on his current trajectory, he escalates. This is why Europe needs to send a clear signal, push back hard and define red lines. A desperate dictator, detached from reality and strategic consequences is dangerous. Now we must contain him, and our response needs to punch back so hard, that he cannot ignore the signal, so that his minions cannot explain it away or hide the truth from him.

Bogdanov’s Telegram analysis lists three vectors for the Putin escalation. The strategic-studies literature documents each independently. They are convergent.

Vector one: Attack the Baltics to break NATO. This is the scenario the Belfer Center at Harvard, the Atlantic Council, the Royal United Services Institute, and the Foreign Policy war-game simulation of mid-May 2026 have all war-gamed in detail through the first half of 2026. The strategic logic: Russia cannot defeat Ukraine on the battlefield. But Russia might, theoretically, be able to fracture the NATO alliance by forcing an Article 5 invocation under conditions where Trump-administration America declines to honour the commitment. If Article 5 fails the first test, NATO’s deterrent credibility collapses. Russia could then dictate terms across the entire post-Soviet space without needing to fight a war it cannot win conventionally.

The vector is being prepared in observable ways. The ISW 19 May 2026 assessment: “Russia is escalating its efforts to set informational conditions for possible future aggression against the Baltic states.” The Russian unannounced strategic nuclear exercises of 19-21 May 2026 - overlapping with Putin’s visit to Beijing - are read by ISW as “using unannounced strategic nuclear exercises to posture strength against Ukraine’s allies and distract from mounting battlefield weaknesses.” The September 2025 incursion of three Russian MiG-31 fighters into Estonian airspace for 12 minutes is part of the pattern. The German navy’s vice admiral Jan Christian Kaack, in May 2026, warned that NATO faces a “rapid threat” from Russia in the Baltic Sea and that “a possible escalation will occur in the maritime domain.” Belarusian-Russian joint exercises in western Belarus have, throughout 2025-2026, stationed 12,000 additional troops on NATO’s eastern flank.

The Belfer Center’s February 2026 verdict on this scenario was unsparing. Putin’s core strategic objective is to fracture the NATO alliance. The Baltic vector is the most direct mechanism by which a militarily failing Russia could nonetheless achieve that political objective. The danger is that Putin’s failure in Ukraine increases his incentive to attempt the Baltic gambit, not decreases it.

Vector two: Drag Trump into a war Russia controls. Bogdanov’s Russian formulation refers to “the orange clown” - Trump - being dragged in. The mechanism is the inverse of the Baltic scenario. Rather than testing NATO’s willingness to defend a peripheral member, Russia attempts to create a third-party crisis that Trump must respond to and that puts him in a position where Russia controls the escalation ladder. The Iran-Israel-Hormuz triangle is the obvious candidate. Russia’s intelligence-sharing with Iran on Israeli targeting that we documented in March 2026. The Russian-North Korean military integration. The diplomatic, financial, and military scaffolding Russia has been building across the past two years specifically to give itself non-Ukraine escalation options. Putin’s bet is that Trump’s distractibility - TACO on Taiwan, ambiguity on Ukraine, the Hegseth-Colby Pentagon throttling - means American attention can be successfully redirected away from Ukraine through carefully calibrated provocations elsewhere.

Vector three: Mass mobilization. The most domestically dangerous option for Putin. The September 2022 partial mobilization announcement produced the largest spontaneous emigration wave in Russian post-Soviet history - over a million men fled Russia in the weeks following. Putin has been politically desperate to avoid a second mobilization. The current Russian military model has been built around contract recruitment with one-time signing bonuses, currently as high as the equivalent of $30,000 in some regions, plus the use of North Korean troops and convict battalions. The ISW 19 May 2026 assessment confirms this model is failing - contract recruitment continues to decline as battlefield casualties rise, despite recent increases to one-time signing bonuses. If Putin cannot recruit enough contract soldiers and cannot accept defeat, mobilization becomes structurally inevitable. The political cost of mobilization will exceed anything Putin has paid domestically since the start of the war. But the alternative - visible defeat - is, in Putin’s personal cost-benefit calculation, worse.

THE PERFORMATIVE TERROR THAT FILLS THE STRATEGIC VACUUM

While Putin reaches for these three escalation vectors, he simultaneously runs what Bogdanov accurately calls the “ponty” - the boasting, the theatre, the performance of strength he no longer possesses. The Oreshnik on Bila Tserkva over the weekend, destroying garages. The 1,600-weapon, 30-hour record attack on Kyiv. The Victory Day parade gutted of hardware but staged with the maximum available pomp. The strategic nuclear exercises. The state-television footage of Mach-10 missile trajectories played in loops on Solovyov’s prime-time show. None of this is producing operational results in Ukraine. All of it is producing the appearance of producing operational results. The performance is, in Bogdanov’s framing, the substitute for the actual ability.

This is what failing dictators do in the last phase. Hitler ordered offensives by phantom Wehrmacht divisions because the existence of the order created, for the duration of the briefing, the illusion that the offensive was feasible. Putin orders Oreshnik strikes on garages because the announcement of the strike - we have used the unstoppable hypersonic weapon - is, for the duration of the Russian state-TV evening news cycle, more valuable to the regime’s domestic narrative than any conceivable operational target the weapon could have hit. The terror is the substitute for the victory. And it works, domestically, if the Russian public continues to consume the Solovyov framing. The moment Russian state TV cannot keep up the illusion - when the milbloggers begin pointing out the absurdity, when the Z-bloggers like Strelkov and Kalashnikov and Romanov start telling the truth - the performance breaks down.

The performance is also targeted at Ukraine and at the West. The aim, as Bogdanov puts it precisely, is to undermine faith in the army and the state, to amplify Russian narratives through “voices, bots and agents”, to “devalue our victories”, to push Ukraine toward exhaustion through saturation terror. Bogdanov’s London analogy is exact. Kyiv now must endure what London endured in 1944-45. The V-1 and V-2 attacks on London came not at the height of German strength but now of approaching German defeat. Hitler used them because he had nothing else. He used them because the production of terror against British civilians was the only form of strategic action he could still take. They did not stop the Allied advance. They did not break British morale. They did not produce the political collapse Hitler imagined they would produce. They were the futile theatre of an empire that had already lost.

That is what we are watching, in real time, in May 2026. The Oreshnik on Bila Tserkva. The destruction of the Chornobyl Museum. The 600-drone strikes on Kyiv apartment blocks. The Solovyov evening news segments featuring Mach-10 footage. These are not the operational signature of a Russia that is winning. They are the operational signature of a Russia that cannot win - and whose dictator has retreated, mentally and operationally, into the only register of action he still controls: the theatre of cruelty.

WHY THIS IS THE MOST DANGEROUS PUTIN OF THE WAR

The Putin of May 2026 is the most dangerous Putin of the war, and the case rests on three convergent factors.

First: he is approaching strategic defeat in Ukraine. Every available metric - refinery damage, M-14 corridor strikes, Crimea fuel rationing, Z-blogger dooming, Ukrainian air-defence intercepting 94% of his largest assault - points in the same direction. Putin’s theory of the war is being falsified, daily and visibly. The window in which a face-saving exit was possible is narrowing.

Second: his cognitive capacity to manage a controlled de-escalation is visibly degraded. The man stammering forty-one times reading from a paper at Valdai. The man explaining Soviet WWII victory through grandmothers’ socks. The man telling AI conferences about 150-year lifespans. The man mumbling through 9 May parades. This is not the cognitive baseline at which precise strategic calibration is possible. The most dangerous moment of any war is when a senior decision-maker on one side loses the cognitive bandwidth to distinguish escalation from de-escalation, and his subordinates’ careers depend on never being the one to tell him.

Third: he has, in Bogdanov’s accurate framing, daily reports of imagined victories that give him hope. The Russian intelligence services have a long, documented institutional habit of telling the leader what the leader wants to hear. Yevgeny Prigozhin made this point publicly in 2023, in the months before his death - that Russian commanders were lying to Putin about the operational situation because telling the truth was career-terminating. The pattern has not improved since Prigozhin’s elimination. The combination is structurally lethal: a cognitively degraded dictator, approaching defeat he cannot personally survive, receiving daily fabricated reports of victories that aren’t happening. This is the decision-making environment that produced the Führer’s last-month orders in 1945. It is also the decision-making environment that produces nuclear escalation, Baltic gambits, mass mobilization, and the substitution of theatre for strategy.

The Western response to this should be three things and is, on the current evidence, none of them.

One: take the Baltic threat seriously now, before the gambit is attempted, not after. The Atlantic Council’s March 2026 toplines on deterring Russian aggression against NATO called for NATO brigades placed in the Nordic-Baltic region, a comprehensive Svalbard and Åland exercise schedule, and mobilisation of the alliance writ large. The recommendations have been partially implemented. They are not yet at the level required. Putin’s strategic calculation is whether the Baltic-NATO test would result in Article 5 invocation or in Trump-administration hesitation. We need to make the answer to that question unambiguous, in advance, in ways no Russian decision-maker can read as anything other than a hard no.

Two: continue and accelerate the Ukrainian war-winning campaign on its current trajectory. The 94% air-defence intercept rate. The $7-billion 2026 refinery damage. The M-14 corridor strikes. The siege geometry around Crimea. The deep-strike campaign extending to 2,000 km. These are working. Continuing them is the single most important thing the West can do. Every month that Putin’s strategic position worsens through battlefield-and-logistics attrition is a month closer to the moment at which the Russian elite around him calculates that his removal is less risky than his continuation.

Three: take the dementia seriously. Not as a partisan-political talking point, but as an operational intelligence priority. If the Russian decision-making apparatus is being run by a cognitively degraded leader receiving fabricated reports, the probability of catastrophic Russian miscalculation is the highest it has been at any point in the war. Western intelligence services should be treating this as a first-priority assessment problem, and Western governments should be developing contingency frameworks for the scenarios that arise from a Russian leader making decisions that no rational actor in his position would make. Because we are increasingly not dealing with a rational actor in his position.

Russia is closer to defeat than at any point in the war. Putin is searching for the kind of escalation that lets him push through to a face-saving outcome. The cognitive baseline of the man holding the launch codes is visibly degrading. The Russian elite around him is partly in denial, partly in pre-emptive positioning, partly - and increasingly visibly - in the long, careful work of preparing for what comes after.

Kyiv now must now endure what London endured in 1944-45. That is the Bogdanov line. The terror weapons of a losing empire are not the signature of impending victory. They are the signature of an empire that has spent its conventional options and is now reaching for the only register of action it still controls. London endured the V-1s and V-2s. London did not break. The terror weapons did not change the outcome of the war. They only added to the cost of the victory and to the human cost of the defeat.

The shame of the USSR, an ecological and political disaster that precipitated its end. How a Soviet lie at reactor four killed tens of thousands - and then killed the USSR.

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There was a sentence spoken by a Ukrainian liquidator at the Chornobyl memorial ceremony that resonated. The man who said it is one of the dwindling number of survivors of the 600,000-strong liquidator force the Soviet Union mobilised between 1986 and 1990 to clean up after the worst civilian nuclear disaster in human history. He worked at the plant. He saw friends die. He retired early from disability. He returned this week, at his own expense, to honour the dead. And speaking to Al Jazeera at the foot of the liquidators’ monument inside the exclusion zone, he said this:

“In many ways, the independence of Ukraine was born on April 26, 1986, in Chornobyl. Without their heroism, an independent Ukraine might not even exist today.”

The explosion at Reactor Four was not just a technological catastrophe. It was the moment a colonial system finally exposed its rot to the people it ruled - and they decided they would never live under it again. Or at least that thought process started.

This is the story of how a lie at a Soviet nuclear plant in the spring of 1986 multiplied a death toll, accelerated the demise of a superpower, and helped to give birth to a nation. Forty years on this weekend, Ukraine is still defending the country the disaster delivered from erasure.

THE NIGHT - THE SYSTEM

It is 1:23 in the morning on the 26th of April 1986. A botched safety test on Reactor Four of the V.I. Lenin Nuclear Power Plant near Pripyat, in Soviet Ukraine, triggers a catastrophic power surge. In approximately three seconds, output jumps to between ten- and thirty-times maximum capacity. Steam explosions blow the 1,000-tonne reactor lid off the building. The graphite core - three million kilograms of it - is now exposed to open air, and it is burning.

What was the cause? Officially, in the version Soviet chemist Valery Legasov delivered to the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna in August 1986, it was human error. The operators, the Soviet narrative said, had violated procedures.

That was a lie. As The Conversation’s anniversary analysis confirms this week, drawing on declassified Soviet archives and four decades of subsequent technical investigation, the truth is far more damning. The RBMK-1000 reactor design - the Soviet design, used in no other country - had over thirty known engineering flaws that Soviet authorities had identified, classified, and concealed from the operators charged with running it. South Carolina ETV’s anniversary special this week catalogued the specific defects: instability at low power. A dangerous positive void coefficient. And - most fatal of all - graphite control rod tips that, when inserted to reduce reactivity, briefly increased it before slowing it down.

The operators on the night of 26 April did exactly what their training told them to do. The flaw built into the reactor turned their corrective action into a detonation.

This is the precise architecture of the Soviet system reduced to a single technical failure. A regime so concerned with its image that it classified its own engineers’ safety findings. A regime so paranoid about ideological retreat that admitting its technology was flawed was unthinkable. A regime so structurally addicted to lying upward that the people whose lives depended on the truth were never told it.

The reactor that exploded at 1:23am on 26 April 1986 was not just a piece of bad engineering. It was the Soviet system itself, condensed into a single technical artefact, with a deadly fuse attached.

THE COVER-UP

What happened in the hours and days after the explosion is the part of the story that should never be allowed to fade. Because the cover-up did not just protect Soviet face. It killed people. Thousands of people. And those deaths are, four decades on, the precise measure of what the Soviet regime was prepared to do to its own citizens.

The first response on the roof of Reactor Four came from the firefighters of Pripyat. They were told they were dealing with a roof fire. They were not warned that they were walking into radiation levels lethal within minutes. They climbed up in their standard protective gear. Within three months, twenty-eight of them were dead from Acute Radiation Syndrome.

The city of Pripyat - 48,000 to 55,000 residents, depending on the count, three kilometres from the burning reactor - was not evacuated for forty hours. Children played outside in the spring sunshine on April 26th, breathing radioactive air, while Soviet officials in Moscow argued about how to manage the news. As The Conversation’s anniversary analysis confirms, evacuation only began in the afternoon of April 27th. Residents were told to bring a few days’ belongings. They never came home.

While Pripyat was being silently exposed, more than 70 senior officials of the Soviet Communist Party - the people with full access to dosimetry and threat assessment - quietly fled the area. The party leadership saved itself first. The population it ruled was left to inhale. Self-servicing corruption became a hallmark of the regime and a cause of it failure.

Kyiv, sixty miles to the south, with a population of three million, was told nothing for ten days. Nothing. Local radio and television only warned residents to close their windows and wash vegetables on May 6th. By that point, the wind had been blowing radioactive dust over the capital for over a week. On May 1st - five days after the explosion, with the reactor still burning, with the wind still carrying caesium-137 across northern Ukraine - the May Day parade went ahead in Kyiv. Children marched. The party would not admit failure. So, the children marched in the contaminated air.

The cover-up went international. As The Conversation documents, it was Sweden that detected the radiation first - when a chemist at the Forsmark nuclear plant noticed his radiation detectors going off and traced the contamination to his own shoe. The Soviets denied everything to Swedish diplomats. Only when the Swedes threatened to go public, and the IAEA was alerted, did Moscow finally - on April 28th, two days after the explosion - admit that “an accident” had taken place. Two people had died, the official statement said. A government commission had been set up.

The truth, which the Soviet state knew, was that the death toll had already begun and would run into thousands. The Conversation’s analysis cites the upper estimate of approximately 10,000 cumulative deaths from the disaster across affected populations. The Ukrainian Institute of National Memory, in its own assessment, places the total at up to 500,000 - with the wide range reflecting the very fact that the Soviet state, and later the Russian state, refused to release the cancer registry data and refused to acknowledge the link between liquidator deployments and subsequent disease.

Liquidator Serhii Balashov, returning to the site this weekend, told Reuters at the memorial: Soviet authorities sought to cover up the consequences even from the people who had been on the ground. “They didn’t even acknowledge the link between our illnesses and being in Chernobyl for the clean-up,” he said.

A National Security Archive analysis, drawing on KGB documents, identified a classified internal memo from 28 July 1986 - three months after the explosion - that formally listed the categories of information forbidden from publication in the Soviet Union. The list included: the radiation situation. The contamination. The scale of decontamination work. Radioactive contamination of natural environment, food products, and feed exceeding permissible concentrations. Not restricted by accident. Classified by design.

This is the architecture of how the death toll was inflated. By policy. The lies determined how many more it killed by stopping evacuation, suppressing precaution, denying treatment, and refusing to acknowledge the cause when survivors and their children fell sick.

THE LIQUIDATORS - THE HUMAN PRICE OF SOVIET INDIFFERENCE

Let us name the human dimension precisely. Because what the Soviet system asked of its people during the cleanup of Chornobyl is the most extraordinary act of state coercion against its own citizens in late Soviet history.

Six hundred thousand people. Mobilised from across the Soviet Union over four years. Soldiers from the Baltic republics, miners from the Donbas, firefighters from the Caucasus, engineers from Russia, medics from Central Asia. They were sent to climb on the roof of the reactor and shovel graphite chunks back into the burning core. They were sent to wash radioactive dust from buildings with brooms. They were sent to bury entire forests of contaminated trees. They were sent to hunt domestic animals to stop them from escaping the exclusion zone and spreading contamination. They were sent to fly above the open core in helicopters, dropping sand and lead.

Many were given improvised gear. Some were given dosimeters that did not work, or that read out only a tiny fraction of their actual exposure. Many were told nothing at all about what they were facing.

Anatolii Krutik, 63, who was deployed as part of an army battalion to designate exclusion zones, told Al Jazeera at the memorial this week: “No one really thought about it. We didn’t know what it was, this invisible enemy.” The invisible enemy. That phrase - used by liquidator after liquidator at the anniversary - is the precise and terrible truth of what the Soviet state asked of them. They went because they were ordered to. They believed it was their duty. And the state that sent them refused, both at the time and afterwards, to tell them what it had cost.

Oleksii Harbuz, 72, who treated patients and worked on decontamination from May to September 1986, returned to Chornobyl this week for the first time in 40 years. “Being back here for the first time in 40 years is overwhelming,” he told Al Jazeera. “I feel a deep sense of pain, and it brings tears to my eyes. So many of our colleagues have passed away over the years.”

Anatolii Prylipko, who drove a fire truck to the site nine days after the explosion, working in two-hour shifts to limit his exposure, suffered a health crisis in 1990 and could not work for a year. He never fully understood what had happened to him until decades later.

Oleksii Lebedynets, 65, who built fences in contaminated areas from 1986 to 1991 and has lived with chronic headaches ever since, returned to Pripyat this week. “It’s heartbreaking to see Pripyat now,” he told Al Jazeera. “I remember those houses when they were full of life, and now everything is overgrown and in ruins. It was such a beautiful city.”

The Soviet state asked these men and women to save Europe from the catastrophe Soviet engineering had caused, denied them the information they needed to protect themselves, refused to acknowledge their illnesses afterwards, and now - through its successor state - bombs the very protective dome the international community has spent four decades building to contain what they could not.

The liquidators stood between the reactor and the rest of Europe. They paid the price. The Soviet state pretended they had not paid it. The Russian state today pretends it did not happen at all. And now Ukraine is protecting Europe from new contagion - Ruscism.

THE BIRTH OF UKRAINE - HOW CHORNOBYL CRACKED THE EMPIRE

Chornobyl did not just kill thousands of Ukrainians. It politically radicalised millions more. In November 1988 - two and a half years after the explosion, in the era of Gorbachev’s glasnost - the first major anti-nuclear protests took place in Kyiv. The slogan was “The Environment and Us.” The Conversation’s anniversary analysis identifies the lead figure: Dr Yuriy Shcherbak, who later became Ukraine’s first ambassador to Canada. Shcherbak founded the Green World Association, which evolved into Ukraine’s Green Party.

In 1989, the popular movement Rukh - meaning “Movement” - was founded. Its three explicit pillars: Ukrainian sovereignty. The Ukrainian language. And telling the truth about Chornobyl. Sovereignty - meaning Ukrainians, not Moscow, must decide what happens to Ukrainian land. Language - meaning the cultural distinctness Russia had spent centuries trying to erase must be restored. And the truth about Chornobyl - meaning that the most catastrophic event in modern Ukrainian history was something Moscow had lied about, and that Ukrainians would never again let Moscow tell them lies about Ukrainian deaths.

The historian Serhii Plokhy, in his definitive book Chernobyl: The History of a Nuclear Catastrophe, documents the chain of consequences. The cover-up exposed the limits of Gorbachev’s glasnost. The deaths, finally acknowledged, exposed the limits of Soviet competence. The lies exposed the limits of Soviet legitimacy. And in Ukraine - where the contamination, the deaths, the displaced families, and the buried villages were concentrated - the lesson the population drew was simple. Moscow does not care about Ukrainian lives. It will lie to protect itself, even if Ukrainians die.

Mikhail Gorbachev himself, writing in 2006 in an essay titled “Turning Point at Chernobyl,” acknowledged the truth. “The nuclear meltdown at Chornobyl was perhaps the real cause of the collapse of the Soviet Union five years later. There was the era before the disaster, and there is the very different era that has followed.”

And in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, the trajectory was clear. From the Environment protests of 1988, to the founding of Rukh in 1989, to the declaration of state sovereignty in July 1990, to the August 1991 declaration of independence in the immediate aftermath of the failed Moscow coup, to the December 1991 referendum in which over 90 percent of Ukrainians - including in every region of the country, including Crimea, including the Donbas - voted to leave the Soviet Union. The path from the burning reactor to the independent Ukrainian state runs through five years and is, as the liquidator told Al Jazeera this weekend, the path that gave Ukraine its existence.

What Chornobyl did was force every Ukrainian to confront a truth that decades of Soviet propaganda had concealed: that the system ruling them was not a partnership of equal Soviet republics, but a colonial structure in which Ukrainian land, Ukrainian bodies, and Ukrainian futures were considered expendable in service of Moscow’s image.

THE PRESENT - THE DOME AND THE UNFINISHED WAR

Forty years on, the Russian Federation - the Soviet Union’s legal successor and political heir - has demonstrated that nothing fundamental about Moscow’s relationship with Ukrainian land has changed.

In February 2022, Russian forces seized the Chornobyl exclusion zone in the opening days of the full-scale invasion. They dug trenches in the contaminated soil. They looted the atomic monitoring equipment. They held Ukrainian plant workers as hostages for over a month. According to the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, which has financed much of the Chornobyl cleanup work since 1986, the Russian army’s destructive occupation left behind some 100 million euros in damage. Reports of Russian troops developing radiation sickness from digging in the contaminated Red Forest were widely documented.

The Russian Federation handed the plant back in late March 2022 in what The Moscow Times this week called “a bizarrely official ceremony.” Nothing about the occupation suggested a regime that had learned anything from the disaster of 1986.

In February 2025, a Russian drone struck the New Safe Confinement - the 1.5-billion-euro steel arc, completed in 2016, designed to contain Reactor Four’s radioactive core for at least one hundred years. The drone punctured the dome’s hermetic seal. Bellona, the Norwegian environmental organisation, reports that none of the planned reactor dismantlement work can proceed until full repairs are completed - not expected until 2030. The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development now estimate the repair cost at 500 million euros.

Ukrainian state prosecutors have confirmed that at least 92 Russian drones have flown within five kilometres of the Chornobyl shield since June 2024. Russia is now flying drones over a site containing some of the most concentrated radioactive material in the world. This is not recklessness. It is policy. And it is not the only nuclear threat. The Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant - Europe’s largest, with six reactors - has now suffered fifteen separate temporary power blackouts since Russian troops took control in March 2022. Each blackout puts the plant’s cooling systems at risk. Each blackout is a controlled experiment in how close the world can come to a second Chornobyl contamination release.

Volodymyr Zelenskyy at the anniversary ceremony this week was direct. Russia, he said, was “once again bringing the world to the brink of a man-made disaster.” His demand: “The world must not allow this nuclear terrorism to continue, and the best way is to force Russia to stop its reckless attacks.”

He also called for sanctions on Russia’s nuclear sector - a sector that, as he noted, remains largely unsanctioned, while Russia itself uses nuclear infrastructure as a weapon of war. We’ll be covering this topic in more detail in a future episode.

Four decades ago tonight, the Soviet Union looked at a burning nuclear reactor in northern Ukraine and decided that its political image mattered more than the lives of the people breathing its toxic contaminants. It maintained that lie for ten days against its own population, for two days against the international community, and - through the cancer registries it never released and the liquidators’ illnesses it never acknowledged.

The decision had a measurable price. Tens of thousands of additional cancers among Ukrainian and Belarusian populations who were not warned, not evacuated, and not protected. Liquidators who developed disease and were told their conditions were unrelated. Children born with thyroid cancer in the years that followed. Communities scattered, families broken, villages buried. The price of the lie is paid, even now, in the bodies of Ukrainians whose grandparents marched in the May Day parade in 1986 because the party would not admit its technology had failed, that its system was corrupt, hollow and degenerate.

The Russian state would prefer that none of this be remembered. It would prefer that the cleanup workers’ cancers go unnamed. That the cover-up be reframed as bureaucratic confusion rather than systematic deception. That the protests of 1988 and the foundation of Rukh in 1989 be treated as historical footnotes rather than the political fuse that lit the end of the Soviet empire. But the liquidators are still alive. They are returning to the site. They are placing flowers at the monument. They are telling the world what was done to them and what they prevented from happening.

We have a habit of creating weapons, figurative and literal, that can be turned to beat us, manipulate us, and shape our cognitive space, in ways that betray our own interests. Social media is one - now the playground of grifters, tyrants, kleptocrats and tech fascists. Another is the concept of ‘Good Russians’. There are no good Russians - not because there are not some Russians resisting their regime, or others that take on personal responsibility for their regime’s crimes. There are some. I know many of them, and do not want to malign their efforts. There are no good Russians, because this is a horrible concept that cannot clearly be defined, and means different things to different people. It is subjective, emotive, vague and open to massive manipulation. I propose an alternative, useful versus useless Russians. Also, through brainwashing, learned helplessness, and the empathy bypass they have undergone over decade, no centuries even, there are very, very few Russians that can be called useful.

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But by asking the question we must ask what useful means - and in the service of what objectives. For me, the only objective that matter right now - and which should matter to Russians, is the victory of Ukraine over the invaders, and expulsion of the Russian army from the sovereign territory of Ukraine. Nothing will improve in Russia until they lose this war - all else is secondary.

This scoring system is a far more concrete and objective measurement framework. It’s the one I use when deciding to invite people with Russian nationality, heritage or identity onto the channel. For the first time I’ll share this methodology here - because I believe that our politicians, policy makers, businesspeople, cultural figures and journalists need such a framework for understanding Russians ‘usefulness’ and gauging their toxicity. We must ditch the dangerous concept of ‘good Russians’ and this is a worthy replacement, I believe.

This familiar Western framing of good Russians versus the rest - but good Russian is a moral category, a sliding emotional scale, a subjective value judgment with no objective referent. Good compared to what? Good in whose eyes? Calibrated against which scale? Everyone has their own conception of what this means, and the ambiguity is allowing Russians to be rehabilitated in culture, sport and the arts, and even politics. Many very bad Russians are having their reputations laundered, because of the lack of rigour in our strategic thinking.

This episode proposes a different framing. Not good versus bad. Useful versus useless. Not because Russians should be reduced to instruments - but because usefulness is a concept you can specify, measure, calibrate, and apply consistently. A useful Russian is one who, by their actions, accelerates the defeat of the Russian imperial project, contributes materially to Ukrainian victory, and helps build the post-war architecture in which Russia can no longer threaten its neighbours. A useless Russian is one who does none of those things - regardless of how charming their dinner-party conversation may be, or how much they claim to hate Putin, and just want to ‘stop all wars’.

Tonight: a ten-test framework for distinguishing them. Use it on the next Russian who walks into your inbox, your conference, your editorial meeting, your university seminar, your dating app. Use it on yourself if you happen to be Russian. The tests are designed to be applied without favour and prejudice to help you decide who to interact with, and with whom not to.

This requirement becomes ever more pertinent as endgame scenarios draw near in Ukraine, whether that be outright victory, and a frozen conflict. Russia will continue to attack in the information space, in sport and culture. More Russians will cross your path in Europe and around the world. We need a framework for figuring out when to cancel them, and when not.

A 10-test framework for deciding which Russians to engage with as Russian defeat draw close. The question every western government, journalist, and activist will soon have to answer. Russia, defeated, will not vanish. There will be 140 million Russians. There will be Russian writers, Russian dissidents, Russian musicians, Russian scientists, Russian businesspeople, Russian so-called opposition figures, Russian veterans, Russian propagandists all wanting to launder their reputations and money in the West. They will all want, at some point in the next two to ten years, to be back in the room. To be invited to conferences. To be published in magazines. To be platformed on the channels. Seen in theatres and on screens. To be heard.

The question is: which of them deserve it? The answer I would give, is very, very few of the.

WHY ‘GOOD RUSSIAN’ IS THE WRONG FRAME - AND WHY ‘USEFUL’ IS THE RIGHT ONE

Before the tests, the framing. Because the framing decides everything that follows. The phrase good Russian is, in the words of one of the sharpest Ukrainian commentators on this question, a category error. It treats Russianness as a stable identity to which moral qualifications can be appended - good Russian, bad Russian, complicated Russian - and then debates the qualifications. The trap embedded in the phrase is the inheritance of the imperial frame itself. Russian culture has, for three hundred years, presented its own moral consciousness - Dostoevsky’s tortured conscience, Tolstoy’s ethical wrestling, Solzhenitsyn’s witness, the Russian intelligentsia’s self-image as the conscience of the nation - as evidence that Russianness contains the moral seeds of its own redemption. The good Russian frame assumes that what we are looking for is the seed already inside the culture, the dissident already inside the system, the conscience already inside the empire. Reality suggests other.

That frame has produced four years of failure. It has produced a Western policy apparatus that takes Russian opposition figures at face value when they say they oppose the war but balks when they refuse to recognise Crimea as Ukrainian, or support sanctions against Russia. It has produced a literary culture that platforms exiled Russian writers who decry Putin but cannot bring themselves to say Russia must lose this war. It has produced a humanitarian discourse that asks how we should help Russian draft-dodgers while Russian shells fall on Ukrainian kindergartens. It asks us to feel sorry for the aggressor as well as the victim.

The useful Russian frame replaces the question. Not are you in your heart a good person? - a question only their God and their therapist can answer - but are your visible, verifiable, demonstrable actions accelerating Ukrainian victory and Russian imperial defeat? The first question is unanswerable from outside. The second is a checklist.

The checklist is what this episode provides.

Ten tests. Pass all ten, and you are a useful Russian - engage, platform, support. Pass eight to nine and engage with caution. Pass five to seven and they are contested ground: engage with caution, scrutinise constantly, test repeatedly. Pass fewer than five, and they are useless - at best a distraction, at worst an active component of Russia’s continuing information war.

TEST ONE: Crimea is Ukraine. And not in any way a sandwich.

The phrase requires explanation because it is the central rhetorical device of this framework. Crimea is Ukraine, and not in any way a sandwich originates in the Ukrainian information-warfare ecosystem of 2022-2023 and is a reaction to Navalny’s infamous response about whether Crimea should be given back to Ukraine. The sandwich image captures, with deliberate absurdity, the non-divisibility of the territorial claim. A sandwich can be cut in half. A sandwich can be shared. A sandwich can be cut into thirds, into quarters, into trade-offs. Ukraine’s territorial integrity cannot. You either accept it whole or you have not accepted it. Navalny originally was suggesting that once conquered it could not be easily handed back.

This is the foundational test because every other Russian position depends on it. The useful Russian says, without caveat, without conditional clauses, without “of course Crimea is Ukraine, but we have to recognise the realities on the ground” - Crimea is Ukraine. Sevastopol is Ukrainian. The 2014 annexation was a war crime. The 2022 invasion was its continuation. There is no autonomous-republic-with-special-status compromise position. There is no Crimea-as-bridge-between-East-and-West compromise position. There is no let-the-people-decide-in-a-new-referendum compromise position. Crimea is Ukraine. It is not a sandwich. It cannot be sliced or shared. If they fail this test, don’t bother asking any more.

TEST TWO: Ukrainian victory is the first and greatest priority. Above internal Russian politics.

This test divides the useful Russian opposition from the self-absorbed Russian opposition. Because there is, in the Russian opposition diaspora, a powerful tendency to recast the war in Ukraine as primarily a Russian problem - a story about Putin’s authoritarianism, the suffering of Russian draftees, the diminishment of Russian society. The Russian liberal opposition, in significant part, treats the war as evidence for arguments it was already making about Russian internal politics. The useful Russian inverts the priority. Ukrainian victory comes first. Russian political reform is a second-order consequence of that victory. The discussion of how Russia should be governed after Putin is downstream of Russia losing this war on Ukrainian terms.

If a Russian opposition figure cannot say plainly that Ukrainian victory is the precondition for any meaningful Russian political renewal - that the Ukrainian Armed Forces are doing the work that no Russian opposition movement has been able to do in 20 years - that test fails.

TEST THREE: Do you donate or fundraise for the Armed Forces of Ukraine? Regularly. Consistently.

This is the materialist test. Money is moral position made measurable. A Russian commentator who tweets sympathy for Ukraine and donates nothing is performing solidarity. A Russian writer who publishes an essay on the war and gives 10 percent of the royalties to Come Back Alive, to United24, to the Serhiy Prytula Charity Foundation, to specific Ukrainian brigades - is doing solidarity.

The test is specific. Donations to humanitarian organisations are good but not sufficient - humanitarian aid is given by neutral parties. Donations to the armed forces, to drone manufacturers, to brigade-level crowdfunding - these are donations to Ukrainian victory.

TEST FOUR: Incursions into Russian territory are necessary. Strikes on Russian oil and military infrastructure are necessary.

The useful Russian understands that bringing the war to Russia is the operational corollary of Ukrainian victory. The Kursk incursion of August 2024. The deep-strike campaign across 2025-2026 - Tuapse five times in seventeen days, Pulkovo airport closed repeatedly, the Lukoil- refinery 1,500 kilometres inside Russia in late April. These are not provocations. They are not escalations. They are Ukraine doing to Russia what Russia has been doing to Ukraine, with a fraction of the violence, in defensive proportion.

A Russian who says Ukraine should not strike Russian oil refineries because civilians work there fails this test. The civilians in Russian oil refineries are not the civilians in Kharkiv’s residential blocks. The proportionality argument runs only one way. The useful Russian understands that - and supports the strikes, including when they kill Russian workers, including when they damage Russian regional economies, including when they push the war into the Russian heartland, because that is the only mechanism by which the war can be ended on Ukrainian terms.

TEST FIVE: Do you support sanctions?

This is one that gets to the heart of the so-called Russian opposition. If, like Navalny, Kara Murza and Illya Yashin they try to absolve themselves of culpability. By claiming this is a war ‘of the regime’, and so the people should not suffer for the crimes of their rulers, then this is a big failure. Such people are systemic opposition, that are supporting the Putin regime, whether they realise it or not. These people don’t care for Ukrainian victory, are deeply deluded or disingenuous, and such people are incapable of brining about transformational changes in Russia. Cancel them and move on. They will only suck your time and energy.

TEST SIX: You can name the enemy. You can identify the evil. No caveats, no relativism, no provocation framework.

This test eliminates a bunch of Western and Russian commentators in a single stroke. Because the test is whether the person, when asked, can say without hesitation: Russia is the aggressor in this war. The aggression is total. The aggression is not a response to NATO expansion. The aggression is not a response to Western provocation. The aggression is not a response to Ukrainian neo-Nazis. The aggression is a sovereign Russian decision to invade a sovereign neighbour, conduct mass war crimes against its civilian population, and seek to extinguish its existence as an independent state.

If the person - Russian or otherwise - adds but... the test is failed. Russia is the aggressor, but NATO expansion was unwise. Failed. Russia is the aggressor, but the West did provoke things in 2014. Failed. Russia is the aggressor, but Ukraine has its own corruption problems. Failed. Russia is the aggressor, but a negotiated settlement now would save lives. Failed - because whose lives is the question, and the implicit answer is Russian and Western, not Ukrainian.

The Tucker Carlson canon fails this test entirely. So does Iuliia Mendel’s 96-minute interview from last Monday. So does much of the American Conservative, the Quincy Institute, the Trump-aligned foreign policy ecosystem. So do significant fragments of the European far-right and significant fragments of the European far-left. The useful Russian names the enemy without caveats - and is willing to say so on the record, on hostile platforms, in the face of pushback. Don’t flinch when pronouncing the name of the aggressor, and don’t just say the name of Putin - this is RUSSIA’S war!

TEST SEVEN: Will you talk about - will you consider - decolonisation? Will you examine Russia’s imperial culture? What have you done to de-Russify yourself? Examine Russia’s imperial past, narratives, and historical mythology.

This is the cultural-political test that most Russian liberals fail. Because decolonisation is the word that exposes the deepest fault line in Russian opposition thinking. Russian liberals will denounce Putin. They will denounce the war. They will denounce the FSB, the propaganda apparatus, the corruption. What they will not, in most cases, do, is examine the imperial cultural inheritance that produced Putin. The Pushkin canon as instrument of Russification. The treatment of non-Russian peoples in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union - the Crimean Tatars deported in 1944, the Chechens, the Volga Germans, the Kalmyks. The prison of peoples the Tsarist empire was openly called. The continued treatment of Buryats, Tuvans, Yakuts, Chechens, Tatars, Bashkirs, Sakha as expendable manpower in Putin’s wars.

A useful Russian engages seriously with the question of whether ethnic minorities within the Russian Federation should have autonomy, federal devolution, or full independence. The answer can be debated. The willingness to debate it is the test. A Russian who treats Russia’s current borders as eternal, sacred, non-negotiable, the natural map of the Russian ethnic people for all time - is reproducing the imperial frame and whitewashing the imperial crimes of the past. That Russian fails this test, regardless of what they think of Putin

This is the personal-cultural test. Because Russianness, as it has been transmitted across generations of Russian-speakers, carries inside it a set of imperial cultural assumptions that must be actively disassembled, not passively inherited. Examples: the assumption that Russian literature is the centre of the East Slavic cultural universe. The assumption that Ukrainian is a dialect of Russian. The assumption that Kyiv is the cradle of Russian civilisation - when historically it was the cradle of Rus, which became Ukraine, and Moscow was a 13th-century afterthought built in a swamp. The assumption that Russian is the universal language of the post-Soviet space and that minorities should be expected to speak it.

A useful Russian has engaged with this work. Has read Timothy Snyder. Has read Serhii Plokhy. Has read the decolonial Ukrainian and Belarusian scholars writing in the 2020s - Botakoz Kassymbekova, Volodymyr Kulyk, Mykola Riabchuk. Has examined their own cultural assumptions about Pushkin, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and asked: what did these writers say about Ukrainians? What did they say about the Crimean Tatars? What did they say about the Caucasus? (The answers are not flattering.)

The test is whether the Russian has done the work. Not whether they got every conclusion right. Whether they have visibly, demonstrably done the work. Good luck, because we are down to 0.001% of all Russians by now.

TEST EIGHT: Are you a ‘little person,’ or are you a responsible one? Nameless nobodies need not apply.

This is the accountability test. Because there is a Russian rhetorical move - deeply embedded in Soviet and post-Soviet Russian culture - called ????????? ???????, the little person. The little person did not vote for Putin. The little person did not start the war. The little person is a victim of forces beyond their control. The little person has, in Russian moral discourse, a permanent moral exit ramp: I am too small to be responsible, please leave me alone.

The useful Russian refuses the exit ramp. They have a name. They have a public position. They have a stated and defended view. They are willing to be quoted. They are willing to be tagged. They are willing to take credit and blame. They understand that the privilege of personhood comes with the obligation of accountability - and they choose, knowingly, to bear that obligation. They need to unlearn the helplessness the system has imposed upon them.

TEST NINE: How magical is your thinking? Attitude to Maidan, and the need for political revolution.

This is the political-realism test. Because there is, in much Russian opposition discourse, a magical theory of political change - the theory that Russian transformation will happen through patient civic engagement, through educational work, through gradual liberalisation, through the natural progress of history. The theory is false. It has been false for a century. Russian political change, when it has happened, has happened through revolution - 1905, 1917, 1991 - or through external defeat - Crimean War, Russo-Japanese War, World War I, Afghanistan, Cold War.

The useful Russian understands this. The useful Russian admires Maidan - Ukraine’s Revolution of Dignity of 2013-2014 - as the model of legitimate civic uprising against an oligarchic-authoritarian regime. The useful Russian believes that Russia is capable of democracy but understands that Russian democracy will require Russian revolution, and that revolution will be enabled by Russian military defeat in Ukraine. The useful Russian is not nostalgic for the fragile civic society the Kremlin spent twenty years dismantling - because that civic society was always going to be dismantled until the underlying autocratic structure was broken.

A Russian who tells you Russia is not ready for democracy, who tells you Russian revolution would produce something worse than Putin, who tells you the Russian people need stability above all - is performing magical thinking. Their position is, at its root, Russian autocracy is permanent because we cannot imagine an alternative. The useful Russian rejects that frame and locates Russian political renewal in the necessity, not the impossibility, of revolutionary change.

TEST TEN: Humility and equality of cultures - including the stolen glory of Russian imperial culture, its theft, appropriation, and genocide.

The final test is the cultural-historical test. Russian high culture - the Pushkin canon, the Tchaikovsky canon, the Tolstoy-Dostoevsky-Chekhov canon - is, in significant part, stolen glory. Stolen in the sense that it was built on the cultural production of the empire’s subject peoples, then claimed as exclusively Russian. Mykola Hohol (Nikolai Gogol) was a Ukrainian writer claimed by Russian letters. The Crimean Khanate’s architectural and poetic traditions were appropriated. Belarusian, Lithuanian, Polish, Georgian, Armenian, Caucasian, Central Asian traditions were absorbed, re-attributed, or suppressed.

And then there are the genocides. The Holodomor of 1932-1933 - Stalin’s deliberate starvation of millions of Ukrainian peasants, described by Raphael Lemkin, the man who coined the word genocide, as “the classic example of Soviet genocide.” The Executed Renaissance - the systematic extermination of Ukrainian writers, artists, and intellectuals between 1934 and 1940, culminating in the November 1937 mass execution at Sandarmokh in Karelia, where in a single eight-day operation between 27 October and 4 November 1937, approximately three hundred Ukrainian intellectuals were shot. Of the 259 Ukrainian writers published in 1930, only 36 remained by 1938. The rest were executed, exiled, disappeared, or driven to suicide.

The useful Russian knows this history. Acknowledges it. Names it as the cultural genocide it was. Recognises that the Russian imperial-cultural project rested on the systematic erasure of competing East Slavic cultures. And accepts, without resentment, that the post-imperial settlement requires the rebalancing of the cultural map of Eastern Europe - including the elevation of Ukrainian, Belarusian, Lithuanian, Polish, and Caucasian literatures to their proper place in the Western canon, and the demotion of Russian imperial culture from its assumed centrality.

A Russian who clings to the universal status of Russian high culture - who flinches at the cancellation of Tchaikovsky concerts in 2022, who treats the rebranding of Russian literature courses in Western universities as Russophobia - fails this test. The useful Russian accepts that the imperial inheritance must be unbundled - and helps with the unbundling. A Russian who gains vicarious status from association with this culture, that ethnicity, but does nothing to help Ukraine to win, is frankly complicit in the imperial project. They are part of the problem, and we have to see them as an unwitting component in a toxic imperial project.

So, you have the ten tests. Now what? Use them as a filter for editorial decisions. When a Russian author, commentator, or activist is proposed for a podcast, a panel, an op-ed page, a book deal - apply the ten tests. Score honestly. Use them as a filter for personal relationships. If you have a Russian friend who has not engaged with these questions in the four years since February 2022, ask them directly: Crimea is Ukraine - yes or no? Was Russia the aggressor - yes or no? Have you donated to the Ukrainian armed forces - yes or no?

Use them as a filter for institutional engagement. Universities considering Russian visiting scholars. Foundations considering Russian grant applications. NGOs considering Russian partnerships. Western governments considering Russian opposition figures for amplification, support, or political backing. The same ten tests apply. The framework scales.

Use them as a filter for self-examination. If you are Russian - score yourself. Honestly. Where do you fall? On which tests do you fail? What would you have to change to pass them? The framework is meant to be applied to oneself first. Are you prepared to change?

Do not apply them as a moral purity test. The point is not that Russians who fail are bad people. The point is that Russians who fail are not useful for the work of accelerating Russian defeat and rebuilding the post-imperial European architecture. That is a different kind of judgment from moral worth.

A final word on why this framework matters in May 2026 specifically. Because we are within sight of the moment when the West will face the engagement question at scale. The Atlantic Council’s spring 2026 analysis documented the visible collapse of the myth of inevitable Russian victory. February 2026 was the first month in more than two years when Ukraine regained more territory than it lost. Russian casualties in March and April 2026 each exceeded 35,000 - figures that are, by the Royal United Services Institute’s February 2026 analysis, exceeding Moscow’s capacity to replenish its forces. The Atlantic Council notes Putin is “deeply reluctant to risk another mobilization drive inside Russia”. The Centre for European Policy Analysis observed in April 2026 that the structural Russian advantages of the 2022-2024 period - manpower depth, industrial capacity, sanctions evasion through China - are all visibly degrading.

We are not at Russian defeat. We are at the threshold of the possibility of Russian defeat. Which means we are at the threshold of the Russian re-engagement question. Who do we let back into the room? Who gets the book deal? Who gets the European visa? Who gets the consulting contract? Who gets to teach? Who gets to publish? Who gets to be heard on the BBC, on Channel 4, on the PBS NewsHour, on Substack, on Twitter?

If we apply good versus bad, we will get this wrong - every single time. We will be charmed. We will be manipulated. We will let in figures whose deeper political positions reproduce the imperial assumptions that produced the war - many wars, genocides and conquests in fact.

The ten-test framework is the corrective. Not an inquisition. Not a purge. A consistent, applicable, defensible checklist for the decisions every Western journalist, editor, academic, activist, foundation officer, government adviser, and curator needs to be making in the next few years - until the decolonisation of Russian minds begins in earnest. Useful or useless. The question is operational, not moral. The framework is replicable, not subjective. The application is consistent, not selective. Ten tests. Apply them.

This is not Russophobia. It is the opposite. Russophobia is the assumption that all Russians are alike - that Russianness is a fixed essence that determines political behaviour. The ten-test framework treats Russians as individuals capable of moral and political agency, judged by their visible actions rather than by their passport. It is the framework that makes the genuine Russian dissident, the genuine Russian ally, the genuine Russian friend of Ukraine recognisable as such - and distinguishable from the imperial-frame-with-a-friendly-face Russian who has, in significant numbers, been wasting Western platform space for four years.

Useful or useless. Not good or bad. The distinction matters. It will matter more every month from now until the end of the war and for years after that. We need to develop resilience to Russian imperialism, and these ten tests are a useful way to do that, I believe.

How a $30 million Russian terror weapon destroyed a row garages. This is absolutely symbolic of Putin senseless war, that has no strategic purpose, beyond control and cruelty, and has singularly failed to meet even its own pointless objectives. But apart from the performative terror, the array of drones and missiles Russia flung at the capital Kyiv, did inflict widespread damage, and loss of property, including Kyiv’s Chornobyl Museum, and a historic market that has resonance for many people that live in, or who grew up in Kyiv.

See the full video episode:

See the full video episode:

23-24 May 2026 - 600 drones, 90 missiles, the largest cultural destruction in Kyiv since 2022 - and the visible operational failure of Russian performative terror. It is shortly after 1 a.m., Sunday 24 May 2026. I see from messages shared by friends, that it has begun. Intelligence chatter earlier in the day suggested a large strike was being prepared. My sources alerted me to activity at Kapustin Yar, the home of Russia’s Oreshnik terror weapon. Then Zelenskyy made a statement suggesting they were being prepared by the ‘arseholes in Moscow’ for a large-scale terror raid. Get to the shelters, if you can, he advised.

The air-raid sirens over Kyiv that Ukrainians have learned to sleep through have just changed register. Ukraine’s Air Force has issued a specific alert on its Telegram channel - Russia may launch an Oreshnik intermediate-range ballistic missile. Within minutes, explosions begin reverberating through the city. The Shevchenko, Dnipro, and Podil districts hit. A school building struck while people shelter inside it. Apartment blocks burning. Supermarkets and warehouses ablaze. Government offices damaged. A Metro damaged for the first time.

By dawn, Russia has launched 600 strike drones and 90 air-, sea-, and ground-launched missiles at Ukraine. Ukrainian Air Force final tally: 549 drones and 55 missiles destroyed or jammed; 19 missiles failed to reach targets. Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha describes it as “one of the largest” attacks on the capital of the entire war. President Volodymyr Zelensky confirms - and Russia’s Defence Ministry has not contradicted - that an Oreshnik hypersonic ballistic missile, only the third combat use of this weapon in the entire war, has struck Bila Tserkva, a city in the Kyiv region. The weapon Putin himself has described as travelling “like a meteorite” at Mach 10, “immune to any missile defence system,” capable of destroying underground bunkers “three, four or more floors down.”

But this Oreshnik had dummy warheads - no nuclear munitions loaded, so their impact is more performative than dangerous. And indeed, the Oreshnik apparently levelled some empty garage units. A missile that cost millions caused just 1,000s in damage.

By Sunday morning, the toll: four killed - two in Kyiv itself, two in the surrounding region. Casualties in Kyiv climbing to at least 62 injured, including two children, with the wounded count revised upward throughout the day as rescue workers reach more sites. A 62-year-old financier named Nataliia Zvarych, taking refuge in a metro station, tells Reuters it was “horror” - “we have been sitting here for more than three hours now, listening to the explosions up there.”

And in Podil, the historic Kyiv district that has stood since the founding of the city in the fifth century, the National “Chornobyl” Museum - housed in the early-20th-century Fire Watchtower, monument of national significance, restored and reopened only weeks ago for the 40th anniversary of the Chornobyl disaster - is almost entirely destroyed, the building a burnt out shell and the unique exhibits gone. One of Kyiv’s oldest markets has burned to the ground. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs building damaged. A rehabilitation centre for children with disabilities hit. Architectural landmarks across the “Ancient Kyiv” State Historical and Architectural Reserve in ruins. Ukraine’s culture minister Tetyana Berezhna confirms this single strike has damaged the largest number of cultural institutions in Kyiv since Russia’s 2022 invasion. We must conclude this was the intention, and these were likely the targets.

Anyone who talks to me about the neutrality of art and culture, and how we shouldn’t cancel Russians and Russian culture, all the while the country that claims these adornments of civilisation as its own, continues to commit cultural and ethnic genocide. I swear, I will tear you a new arsehole, figurately speaking. I have zero tolerance for soft appeasement of Russia.

This was the second of the two largest strikes on Kyiv in two weeks. The first - eleven days earlier, on the night of 13-14 May - was the 1,600-weapon, 30-hour record assault we covered at the time: 753 drones in daylight, 731 more drones and missiles overnight, 7 hours 52 minutes of continuous sirens, the largest aerial assault of the entire four-year war.

And the Oreshnik - Putin’s hypersonic terror weapon, the missile he has personally boasted streaks at Mach 10 “like a meteorite” and can destroy bunkers “three, four or more floors down” - landed in Bila Tserkva and, according to the Kyiv regional governor, struck “residential buildings, homes, garages and utility buildings, and a warehouse.” A multi-tens-of-millions-of-dollars nuclear-capable ballistic missile, deployed for only the third time in the entire war, used to destroy garages. We will come back to that.

Two record-breaking strikes on the capital, eleven days apart. The latest one announced through Ukrainian Air Force Telegram with the words Oreshnik incoming. Tonight: what these two attacks were, why they were on a different scale - an edge of real terrorism here - why Putin is targeting Kyiv’s irreplaceable cultural heritage, why Putin is doing all of this now, and why the Western response - feeble, distracted, almost invisible - may be the worst part of the entire story.

THE TWO STRIKES - WHAT MADE THEM DIFFERENT

The first, 13-14 May 2026. Cross-confirmed across UNITED24 Media, NPR, AP, Kyiv Independent, Kyiv Post, Ukrainian Air Force official tally. 753 drones launched during daylight on 13 May. 731 air-attack assets in the night wave - 675 Shahed-type UAVs, 35 Kh-101 cruise missiles, 18 Iskander-M ballistics, 3 Kh-47M2 Kinzhal hypersonics. 1,600+ weapons in 30 hours. Ukrainian Air Force destroyed or suppressed approximately 1,500. Kyiv air-raid sirens 7 hours 52 minutes continuous in the final wave. 15 killed across Ukraine, 100+ wounded, six districts of Kyiv hit, a residential block in Darnytskyi collapsing onto sleeping families. Launched 72 hours after the expiry of Trump’s three-day Victory Day ceasefire, using munitions Russia had stockpiled during the truce window Zelensky’s Decree 374 had granted.

The second, 23-24 May 2026. Cross-confirmed across CNN, AP/Boston Globe, NBC, Reuters, Euronews, Japan Times, CBS, Kyiv Independent. 600 strike drones plus 90 air-, sea-, and ground-launched missiles overnight. 549 drones plus 55 missiles destroyed or jammed; 19 missiles failed to reach targets. Sybiha: “one of the largest” attacks on the capital. Four killed. 83 injured nationally, 56 in Kyiv, 30 hospitalised. A school building hit while people sheltered inside. Critical: the Oreshnik - Russia’s nuclear-capable intermediate-range ballistic missile - used for only the third time in the entire war, after the November 2024 Dnipro use and the January 2026 Lviv use.

These two strikes share a property that distinguishes them from the dozens of “ordinary” attacks Russia has launched on Kyiv across four years. Ukrainians could not sleep. That sounds banal. It is not. These attacks could not be missed - snoozed through, because they were loud and relentless. Explosions rent the skyline, doors, windows and walls shook. And the duration of the attack is another feature. For the attack 11 days ago, the air alarms went off all day as a precursor to the main feature, the 8-9 hours of nighttime assault on the capital.

The 13-14 May strike broke that filter through sheer volume. Seven hours and 52 minutes of continuous sirens. And the spatial saturation - six districts of Kyiv simultaneously, drone after drone after missile after drone, every direction at once. People did not sleep through that strike because the strike was engineered to defeat the protective filter - it was everywhere.

The 23-24 May strike broke the filter differently. It used the Oreshnik. And the Oreshnik is, in the precise sense and as I will argue in a moment, a performative weapon. The Ukrainian Air Force did something with this strike that they have rarely done. They put out an alert naming the weapon in advance. Oreshnik incoming. Imagine you live in Kyiv. Imagine your phone vibrates at 1 a.m. with that alert. The Oreshnik is the missile Putin has personally televised, personally boasted is unstoppable, personally said can destroy bunkers four floors down.

There is no rational response to that warning. The alert itself is the terror. Sleep is not available to a population that has just been told, by its own air force, that Putin’s signature horror weapon is currently inbound. That is what made these two strikes different. The 13-14 attack overwhelmed the protective filter through volume. The 23-24 attack pierced it through the calculated theatre of the Oreshnik. Both were engineered, deliberately, to deny Ukrainian civilians the one thing four years of war had not yet taken from them - the capacity to rest.

This is, in the precise technical sense, terrorism. The use of violence and the calculated theatre of violence against a civilian population to produce political effect through psychological exhaustion. Strip away the diplomatic language. That is what we are watching. Russian is a terror state, run by a terrorist regime in Moscow. How their reputation can be laundered knowingly by sports and cultural bodies is beyond my comprehension. But it makes me angry - livid - that anyone should seek to rehabilitate such a monstrous country, when the murderous regime is still in place, and the chief murderer is still giving the command to kill with impunity, destroy without consequences. If you are in any way involved with Russia, I will not spare you my anger if we get into conversation.

THE OFFER OF PERFORMATIVE TERROR - THE ORESHNIK AS THEATRE

The Oreshnik deserves its own focused analysis, because the weapon system itself encodes the strategic logic. The technical specifications, cross-confirmed across PBS, Reuters, Al Jazeera, the Boston Globe, Pentagon assessment summaries: The Oreshnik is an experimental intermediate-range ballistic missile derived from Russia’s RS-26 Rubezh ICBM design. Range between 500 and 5,500 kilometres. Reported Mach 10 velocity. Multiple-warhead architecture - Ukrainian intelligence has documented six warheads, each carrying six submunitions. Capable of carrying conventional or nuclear warheads. Putin himself: “like a meteorite,” “immune to any missile defence system,” “several such missiles, even fitted with conventional warheads, could be as devastating as a nuclear strike.” It’s not that though.

Now here is the critical analytical point most coverage misses. The Oreshnik, in operational reality, is not primarily a destructive weapon. It is a signalling weapon.

Pavel Podvig, director of the Russian Nuclear Forces Project, captured this precisely to Reuters in January 2026 when Russia used the Oreshnik against Lviv: “It does appear that at this point Russia is using Oreshnik for signalling purposes, so destruction is not necessarily the goal.” He added: “It’s probably a general signal of resolve to escalate. My guess is that it will be read this way by the West.”

The Oreshnik’s three combat uses - November 2024 against a Dnipro military factory (using dummy warheads, Ukrainian sources confirmed), January 2026 against Lviv (60 km from the Polish border), May 24 2026 against Bila Tserkva - have produced minimal physical destruction relative to the Russian arsenal. The weapon is too valuable, too few in terms of stocks, too strategically scarce to use as a workhorse. Russia probably has at most a single-digit handful of operational Oreshniks and using them up against Ukrainian apartment blocks would be operationally pointless - Russia destroys apartment blocks with $40,000 Iskander missiles every night.

What the Oreshnik does is signal. Each use is a public-relations event. Putin appears on Russian state TV. The footage of meteoritic streaks across Ukrainian skies plays on Solovyov’s prime-time show. Ukrainian Air Force issues the Oreshnik incoming alert. Western newsrooms pick up the word hypersonic, nuclear-capable, immune to defence. The terror is not produced in the explosion. The terror is produced in the announcement. The Oreshnik is, in the precise sense, performative terror - a weapon whose strategic value lies almost entirely in the theatre of its existence, not in its kinetic effect. People assume that if Russia is prepared to use an Oreshnik without nuclear capable warheads, they would use one that is armed and primed. But this is an unreasonable leap of logic, that undermines the performative and psychological purpose of the weapons. It’s a sign to Ukraine, but more importantly, a signal to the West, and internally to the Russian elite. It says that the Tsar is still cruel and capricious.

EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas named this dynamic exactly in January after the Lviv strike: “Putin doesn’t want peace. Russia’s reply to diplomacy is more missiles and destruction.” And from PBS analysis at the time: “Analysts say it gives Russia a new element of psychological warfare, unnerving Ukrainians and intimidating Western countries that aid Ukraine.”

The 23-24 May use of the Oreshnik against Bila Tserkva fits the signalling pattern exactly. It came after a week in which Ukraine’s Caspian Sea patrol-boat strike, the 16-17 May 500-drone Moscow strike, the Tamanneftegaz and Yaroslavl and Astrakhan refinery hits, had all combined to deepen the public impression of Russian strategic weakness. The Oreshnik on Bila Tserkva was Putin’s televised response. We are still terrifying. We can still reach you. We can still escalate. The destruction in Bila Tserkva is, in this reading, almost beside the point. The announcement of the destruction is the point.

The attacks on Kyiv, the largest of the war over a week ago, and the most culturally destructive just days ago. Let us walk through what Russia destroyed in the 23-24 May strike. Because the target list is the moral indictment of the entire operation.

THE TARGETS - CHORNOBYL’S MEMORY,

The National “Chornobyl” Museum, in Kyiv’s historic Podil district, is almost entirely destroyed, along with its unique and irreplaceable collection. The museum is - was - housed in the early-20th-century Fire Watchtower, a monument of architecture, history, and monumental art of national significance. It stood in Podil since the founding of the modern city. The Fire Watchtower’s significance was multi-layered: in the 1980s, the fire department operating from this building was one of the first units to deploy to the Chornobyl nuclear disaster cleanup. The men who worked from that watchtower walked into the radioactive zone in April and May 1986 and a significant number of them did not return. The museum that housed their memory, their uniforms, their dosimeters, their letters home, and the artefacts of the worst nuclear disaster in human history was destroyed in a single Russian strike - five weeks after reopening following extensive restoration timed to the 40th anniversary of the Chornobyl tragedy.

Russia, the legal successor state to the Soviet Union, and whose negligence produced the disaster, used drones and missiles to destroy the museum commemorating the Ukrainian first responders who died cleaning up the catastrophe Russia’s predecessor state caused. What more proof does the West need that Russia is a terrorist state, governed by a psychotic thug, with the full acquiescence of the docile population. Not all Russians are indifferent to the horrors their country is committing, but few do anything to stop it. And a substantial minority revel in the cruel death and wanton destruction inflicted by their Tsar god. There is no military justification. There is no operational rationale. There is only the symbolic act - and the symbolic act is the deliberate erasure of Ukrainian memory of a disaster Russia inflicted.

Ukraine’s culture minister Tetyana Berezhna confirmed: this single strike damaged the largest number of cultural institutions in Kyiv since Russia’s 2022 invasion. The Ukrainian government has documented additional damage to museums, churches, a university, and architectural landmarks across the “Ancient Kyiv” State Historical and Architectural Reserve. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs building was hit. A rehabilitation centre for children with disabilities was hit.

One of Kyiv’s oldest markets burned to the ground. The market structure - like the watchtower, like the Reserve - was part of the visible history of Ukrainian Kyiv as a city older than Moscow. It is rubble now. The vendors who worked there, the apartments that fed off its trade, the small economy that orbited it - all gone in a single night.

Dozens of residential apartment buildings damaged across every district of the city. Every district. Klitschko’s own words to Telegram: damage in “every district of the city.” Three Russian missiles struck a water-supply facility, in Zelensky’s documentation of the strike. The Lukyanivka district recorded the most extensive damage. Casualties have climbed by Sunday afternoon to at least 62 injured in Kyiv alone, including two children, with rescue workers still reaching sites.

The target list is a kind of Baedeker raid of Ukraine’s cultural treasures - Chornobyl Museum, historic market, residential apartments, school sheltering people, rehabilitation centre, MFA building, water-supply facility, churches, university, architectural landmarks - and then ask the question that defines the entire operation. What military objective does any of this serve? The honest answer, even by the most generous interpretation, is none. The targets are not military. The targets are Ukrainian civic, cultural, and human existence. The aim is to inflict cruelty and fear, performative violence, and wanton destruction of identity and memory.

And then there is the Oreshnik.

The Oreshnik, deployed for only the third time in the entire war, hit the city of Bila Tserkva south of Kyiv. The Kyiv regional governor Mykola Kalashnyk documented what it struck across the affected communities of Fastiv, Bucha, Brovary, Bila Tserkva, Vyshhorod, and Boryspil: “residential buildings, homes, garages and utility buildings, and a warehouse.” I must repeat this slowly for it to register fully. Russia’s most prestigious experimental nuclear-capable intermediate-range ballistic missile - the weapon Putin has personally televised, personally claimed is unstoppable, the weapon costing somewhere between 30 and 50 million dollars per unit depending on which Western intelligence estimate you credit, the weapon Russia possesses in single-digit operational numbers, the weapon the Pentagon assesses as an experimental IRBM based on the RS-26 Rubezh ICBM platform - was used to destroy garages. Outbuildings. Sheds. Storage units. Some Ukrainian residential garages on the outskirts of Bila Tserkva. No casualties. Minimal material and financial loss inflicted.

This is the operational signature of performative terror divorced from any military logic. Russia did not use the Oreshnik against a Ukrainian command bunker, against a strategic ammunition depot, against an F-16 base, against a critical infrastructure node. Russia used the Oreshnik against garages to be able to tell Russian state television that Russia had used the Oreshnik. The weapon’s strategic value is the headline. The destruction is incidental - and, on this occasion, almost comically pathetic. It is a weapon of the impotent dictator.

And here is the deepest analytical paradox of the entire 23-24 May strike. Russia mobilised 690 aerial weapons. Russia destroyed a museum, a historic market, dozens of apartment blocks, a school, a rehabilitation centre, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs building, water infrastructure, and 40+ documented sites across the capital. And killed four people across all of Ukraine. Two in Kyiv, two in the surrounding region. Four.

That casualty figure is, by any honest assessment, remarkably low relative to the scale of the attack. It is testimony to the layered air defence architecture we documented in the earlier 30-hour-assault episode - the 94 percent interception rate, the FPV interceptor drones, the Patriot batteries protecting Kyiv, the Telegram civilian alert network, the metro stations where many sheltered through the night. The Russian Federation deployed at least one Oreshnik missile costing somewhere north of 30 million dollars to destroy a Ukrainian garage. Russia destroyed 40+ sites in Kyiv and killed four civilians. This is not strength. This is the operational signature of an enemy spending vast strategic capital to inflict diminishing strategic returns.

Zelensky’s verdict on Putin in his Sunday statement, captured by UNITED24 Media and Ukraine.News: “Putin can’t even pronounce the word ‘hurray’ properly anymore - he mumbles - yet he still destroys residential buildings with his missiles. Three Russian missiles struck a water supply facility, burned down a market, damaged dozens of residential buildings, and several regular schools. He launched his ‘Oreshnik’ against Bila Tserkva. He’s truly out of his mind.”

A leader spending Oreshniks on garages. A nuclear-capable missile system reduced to demolishing utility buildings to keep the Solovyov evening-news segment going. That is what Russian “strategic terror” looks like in May 2026.

THE FIGHT AT THE PYRAMIDS

There is one more story from the night of 23-24 May 2026 that the Western press has, in the same way it has buried the cultural destruction, largely missed. It happened simultaneously. It is part of the same evening. And it is, in some ways, the human counterpoint that completes the meaning of everything else.

While Russia loaded its 600 drones and 90 missiles for the assault on Kyiv, Oleksandr Usyk - 39 years old, Crimean-born, undisputed heavyweight champion of the world, unbeaten across 24 professional fights - was preparing to enter a ring in the desert of Egypt. The venue: a temporary outdoor arena built directly at the foot of the Great Pyramid of Khufu, in Giza. The event title: Glory in Giza. The bout: a voluntary defence of his WBC title against Rico Verhoeven - 37 years old, Dutch, the most decorated kickboxer of his generation, returner-after-twelve-years to professional boxing. The bookmakers had Usyk a 25-to-1 favourite.

The fight, captured across ESPN, CBS Sports, MMA Mania, Yahoo Sports, BoxingInsider, and the Ukrainian outlets UNN and Kyiv Independent, went almost catastrophically wrong for the Ukrainian champion. For ten full rounds, Verhoeven - using the timing, range, and counter-striking discipline of a kickboxer who had defended the Glory heavyweight title for over a decade - kept Usyk away from clean exchanges. By the end of round ten, two judges had the fight even at 95-95. The third judge had it 95-94 for Verhoeven. Oleksandr Usyk, the man Lennox Lewis has called the most technically gifted heavyweight of the era, was losing on points to a kickboxer making his second professional boxing appearance in twelve years. The fight was slipping. The unbeaten record was 180 seconds from gone.

And then - somewhere on the eastern Mediterranean, somewhere in the Kyiv suburbs, somewhere in Bila Tserkva - Russia began launching the Oreshnik. By the time the fight reached round eleven, Ukraine’s Air Force was issuing the Oreshnik incoming alert. Kyiv air-raid sirens were active. In a bomb shelter in central Kyiv, Usyk’s own teenage daughter took out her phone and sent her father a text message. The text, which Usyk would read out in the ring within the hour, captured by BoxingInsider and Nasha Niva: “Papa, I love you. You win.”

The boxer afterward described what happened in round eleven as a turn of the tide. The technical reality: Usyk landed a short right hook that finally cracked through Verhoeven’s defensive shell, then followed with a sustained flurry that put the Dutchman to the canvas with one second left on the round-eleven clock. The referee stopped the fight with that single second to go. 11th round TKO. The fight had been, by the scorecards, dramatically close. The result was, by the scorecards, dramatically conclusive. Oleksandr Usyk had pulled out of the fire what every analyst on the night had thought was a coming loss with the same single explosive moment he had used against Anthony Joshua, Tyson Fury, and Daniel Dubois.

In the ring, before anyone could ask him about Verhoeven or the controversial late stoppage or his retirement plans, Usyk spoke. The first words out of his mouth, captured by the Kyiv Independent, Nasha Niva, UNN, and BoxingInsider in slightly varying translations but identical substance:

“For me, this victory is very important. But right now, my people in Ukraine are in bomb shelters. My daughter is in a bomb shelter, and she texted me - Papa, I love you, you win. She was scared but happy. This win is for all Ukrainian people.”

And now picture the scene in Kyiv at the same moment. It is just after 1 a.m. local time. The Oreshnik alert is active. Explosions reverberate through the Shevchenko, Dnipro, and Podil districts. The horizon, viewed from any apartment block on the heights above the Dnipro River, is a series of orange-red flares. The sky is striped with the trajectories of FPV interceptor drones chasing Shaheds. The apartment windows of those who have not gone underground, who have stayed up, who have followed the boxing through whatever data signal still works - the streaming feed shows Usyk standing in the ring with his arms raised.

And the city shouts. The Ukrainian sports reporters covering the diaspora reaction documented it on social media in real time, and Ukrainian Telegram channels were full of clips by morning. From apartment windows across Kyiv, while the Oreshnik flares were still visible on the horizon, residents shouted the name Usyk into the night. Usyk! Usyk! Usyk! A heavyweight champion’s name, called out over the rooftops of a capital under aerial bombardment, by a population that had just watched its compatriot pull a championship win out of a 95-94 deficit while Russian missiles destroyed a museum dedicated to the Ukrainian dead of Chornobyl. The contrast between Ukrainian heroism and Russian criminality could not be starker. One is a country of fighters, the other a territory of terrorists and cowards.

The performative-terror operation Russia engineered to break Ukrainian morale collided, in the same news cycle, with a televised demonstration of Ukrainian resilience nobody in Moscow could have predicted and nobody in Russian state media could spin away.

Usyk himself made the point explicit, captured by the Kyiv Independent the following morning: he dedicated the fight to Ukrainian people and to Ukrainian soldiers - “For me, this victory is very important, but right now my people in Ukraine are in bomb shelters.” That is what Ukrainian leadership looks like under fire. That is the man Putin’s regime has tried, for twelve years since Russia annexed Usyk’s native Crimea in 2014, to turn into either an irrelevance or a propaganda asset. He has remained, throughout, the most visible Ukrainian sportsman on earth, the most public Ukrainian patriot, the man who refused to fight under a neutral flag, who refused to renounce his Ukrainian identity, who refused to be Russian.

That is the answer to the desperation hypothesis. Putin’s performative terror does not work, because Ukrainian society has produced figures like Usyk - and millions of Ukrainians like the ones shouting from the windows - for whom terror is not capitulation but clarification.

WHY NOW? - THE DESPERATION HYPOTHESIS

The deeper question: why these two record strikes, in this two-week window? Putin is doing this out of desperation - out of internal and external weakness, regime stress, and the delusional frustration of a man whose four-year theory of the war has been comprehensively falsified. The Victory Day humiliation (9 May). A 45-minute parade, the first hardware-free Victory Day since 2008. No tanks. North Korean troops as the most visible foreign delegation. Five or six foreign leaders. International press largely banned. Xi Jinping not present. Putin saluting pre-recorded videos of military equipment because he could not safely roll the real equipment down Red Square. The most public, visible humiliation of the Russian state’s most sacred ritual in the post-Soviet era.

The deep-strike war on the Russian oil sector. Tamanneftegaz, Yaroslavl, Astrakhan struck simultaneously on 12-13 May. Perm refinery completely halted from 7 May. The fifth Tuapse strike in seventeen days. Zelensky’s running total: $7 billion in damage to the Russian oil sector in 2026 alone, roughly 7% of Russia’s annual oil revenue eliminated in four and a half months.

The 30-hour record assault and the 500-drone Moscow strike. Russia’s largest aerial assault of the war on 13-14 May. Ukraine’s 500-drone reply over the Moscow region on 16-17 May, with messages addressed by name to elite districts. The escalation ladder is no longer a Russian monopoly. And they no longer control the escalation dominance, at least against Ukraine.

The Z-blogger dooming chorus. Kalashnikov, Kartavyy, Strelkov, Golman - every major pro-war Russian commentator has, across 2026, publicly admitted Russian weakness in language no Kremlin propagandist of 2022 could have imagined using. Even Malofeev’s Tsargrad ecosystem is now publicly asking why Russia can’t win.

The Trump-Putin axis fraying. Trump’s Beijing summit produced no usable concessions for Putin on Ukraine. The Hegseth-Colby Pentagon throttling track has been publicly named “rogue actors” by senate Republicans. And critically - Putin came back from Beijing with no Chinese guarantee of expanded oil purchases, no Chinese commitment to absorb the sanctions impact, no Chinese promise to backfill the Russian war economy as it bleeds.

In every single dimension that mattered to Putin’s theory of the war, May 2026 has been a documented and visible disaster. Putin’s response to a comprehensively losing position is not to negotiate from weakness. His response is to escalate the theatre of terror. It is the playbook of every cornered authoritarian - when reality refuses to confirm your narrative, intensify the spectacle of your remaining power. The Oreshnik streak across Kyiv skies on Sunday morning is the visible signature of that escalation.

But here is the deepest analytical point, and the Usyk moment has just clarified it. The escalation is not strategically rational. It will not produce Ukrainian capitulation. Ukraine has demonstrated, across four years, that it does not capitulate under bombardment. The strikes inflict suffering. They do not produce political outcome. Putin is reading the situation wrong. He continues to believe - against four years of evidence - that one more wave of terror will break Ukrainian resolve. It has not. It will not. The continued bombardment of Ukrainian cities is, in this sense, the operational signature of a leader trapped in a strategic delusion that four years of nightly drone attacks, four years of Ukrainian air-defence innovation, and one night’s worth of Kyiv apartment-window shouting the name of Usyk have already refuted.

Did Usyk pull back from defeat because of the news from Kyiv? The boxer himself has not said so directly. But the timeline is suggestive. The Oreshnik alert went up in Kyiv during round nine or ten. The daughter’s text - Papa, I love you. You win - went out from a bomb shelter surrounded by air raid sirens she could not escape.

THE WEST’S SILENCE - THE WORST PART OF THE STORY

The worst aspect of these two record strikes may not be the strikes themselves. It may be the West’s almost total failure to respond.

The 13-14 May 1,600-drone record assault on Kyiv received one news cycle of coverage. By the weekend the story had largely faded from front pages. The 23-24 May Oreshnik strike on Bila Tserkva - the third combat use of Putin’s signature performative-terror weapon, the same night that destroyed the Chornobyl Museum - is, as I record this script, struggling to break onto major Western news sites, or stay longer than one brief news cycle. Most other Western outlets buried it on world-news pages, often beneath the boxing result. The destruction of the museum dedicated to the worst nuclear disaster in human history, has received less Western coverage than the controversial referee call in the eleventh round of Usyk-Verhoeven.

The Western governmental response is even thinner. In January 2026 - when Russia used the Oreshnik against Lviv, 60 km from NATO airspace - the leaders of Britain, France and Germany jointly described the use as “escalatory and unacceptable.” Kaja Kallas in January named the strike as “meant as a warning to Europe and to the U.S.” and called Putin’s reply to diplomacy “more missiles and destruction.”

What has the equivalent reaction been to the 24 May use? At the time of this recording: Ursula von der Leyen posted a brief statement on social media noting that the European Union would send more support to help Ukraine reinforce its air defence systems. That is the most that has been heard from a major Western government on the destruction of the Chornobyl Museum and the third combat use of Russia’s signature nuclear-capable terror weapon. No joint UK-France-Germany statement. No European Commission emergency response. No Trump administration condemnation - Trump has not so far commented publicly. But Witless Witkoff the Kremin go-between is once more in Moscow, and for what?

No imposition of additional sanctions. No expedited weapons deliveries beyond token measures. As I said at the start of the episode, out response needs to be categorical, unambiguous and extremely robust to deter Putin from further acts of terror and psychopathy. I see no sufficient Western response - and that makes us culpable in what happens next. And what happens next could be very back for Europe, as well as Ukraine.

And Western publics, exhausted, distracted, captured by the populist information ecosystems we have documented across this series, are not pushing back. Trump-aligned American media is actively amplifying Russian framing. European centre-right and far-right media are increasingly treating Ukraine as an expensive problem, not as a democracy under genocidal assault. The civic muscles required to translate moral horror into political pressure - sustained outrage, sustained press coverage, sustained legislative response - have weakened across the four years of war. And we have a lamentable, dangerous lack of leadership.

Russia understands this perfectly. Russia is exploiting it. The 13-14 May 1,600-weapon assault and the 23-24 May Oreshnik attack were both designed in part for the Western information environment. The 13-14 strike was timed to coincide with Trump’s Beijing visit, deliberately overshadowed by other geopolitical theatre. The 23-24 strike was timed to coincide with the Usyk-Verhoeven fight at the Pyramids - a Saturday-night global pay-per-view event that Russia surely knew would dominate sports-and-news bandwidth across the same weekend. Russia is calibrating its attacks to land in the gaps in Western attention.

That is the worst part of the 23-24 May Oreshnik strike. The fact that, as I record this, the strike is already fading from Western consciousness - that the West has, in effect, granted Russia the political space to escalate its performative terror relying on our weariness, indifference, learned helplessness, lack of moral courage, leadership and will to act decisively.

Z-patriots are losing their minds, telling Russia that 1917 is coming again. But history does not repeat in such convenient ways – but it may well rhyme. Moscow and St Petersburg cut off again from mobile internet, forty regions blacked out, and the pro-war cheerleaders crack.

See the full video episode:

See the full video episode:

It is the morning of 5 May 2026. A woman in Moscow wakes up, picks up her phone, and stares at the screen. No notifications. No SMS. No app pings. Nothing. She opens the camera and starts filming herself, in the kitchen, in real time, narrating the moment her capital city has been disconnected from the world.

“I wake up — empty phone. Not a single message,” she says. “Usually, you wake up and you spend half an hour clearing — who messaged what, what news. Today: zero. Moscow has been cut off. Completely. Probably what they wanted. Or rather — what we feared. They are isolating us totally from the world. But what worries me more is the feeling that something is happening, somewhere — and I have no idea. Maybe Moscow is gone.”

This is what the morning of 5 May 2026 looked like for thirteen million people in Moscow, five million in Saint Petersburg, plus residents of the Moscow region, plus the entire week-long planned shutdown spanning more than forty Russian regions, from Kamchatka to Kaliningrad, from Yakutia to Krasnodar, including Sakhalin — an island in the Pacific that no Ukrainian drone has ever reached or could reach.

The internet was not just throttled. The whitelist — Russia’s pre-approved emergency catalogue of services the state had publicly committed to keeping accessible during shutdowns — failed too. State services. Banks. Taxis. Marketplaces. The supposed bedrock of “the most comfortable banking in the world,” to quote Russia’s official propaganda. None of it worked.

Tonight: what just happened in two of the largest cities on earth, why Russia’s most loyal pro-war Telegram operators are now publicly forecasting civil war, and why the woman on a kitchen floor in Moscow filming her own disconnection is the single most accurate piece of citizen journalism produced this year.

THE MORNING OF 5 MAY — ABSURDITY BECOMES POLICY

Let us walk through what happened, with a description the Russian-language outlet Astra, the St Petersburg paper Fontanka, the Russian-language Msk1, and the cross-confirmation by Meduza all documented on Tuesday morning.

By dawn on 5 May, mobile internet had collapsed across Moscow, the Moscow Oblast, and Saint Petersburg. Customers of MTS, T2, Beeline, Yota, and Gazprombank Mobile all reported total failure. SMS messaging stopped. Some users could still make voice calls. Most could not. The chaos that followed has been documented in such detail by Russian independent journalist Michael Naki, whose latest video provides the most complete account, that the surreal becomes routine.

In Moscow, taxi drivers entered the public Wi-Fi at Vkusno i Tochka — Russia’s domestic replacement for McDonald’s — just to receive ride-hailing orders. The taxi drivers of the capital of the Russian Federation, in 2026, were piling into the Wi-Fi of fast-food restaurants to do their jobs, because the state had cut their data connection.

ATMs failed. Card payments failed at Moscow cafés, restaurants, fitness clubs, car washes, manicure studios, swimming pools. Small and medium businesses across the city posted notices on social media — “please pay in cash, terminals are not working, card and QR-code payments unavailable.” Tour operators could not pay for booked tours. The Russian Tour Operators’ Association issued an official advisory: if your third payment date is ending, withdraw cash, pay in person at the office. The Pushkin Museum and the Chekhov Moscow Art Theatre asked patrons to print their electronic tickets on paper. Parking payments in central Moscow stopped working — and Muscovites began mass-cancelling their gym appointments because they could not pay to park their cars.

The state-owned mobile operator MTS issued the most surreal customer notice of the day. The cause of the outage, the company explained, was “force majeure circumstances and external radio-frequency interference.” Sberbank, more delicately, told its customers about “features of communication in the moment.” As Naki observed in his analysis: “sometimes it feels as if the Russian language, in the hands of press services, has crossed into a separate dimension where it does not describe reality but specifically hides it under strange constructions.” External radio-frequency interference is the FSO, having pressed the button. Force majeure circumstances are Putin’s paranoia, in the Kremlin, and his telecom operators cannot overcome a force that cannot be reached or defined in plain language.

By midday, the Ministry of Digital Development — MinTsifry in Russian — issued a statement. It said, in officialese, that it was negotiating with law enforcement and special services to permit the whitelist to be opened. Translated: the ministry that built the whitelist, the ministry that is officially responsible for the whitelist, is publicly admitting that it cannot define what is on the whitelist. It is waiting for permission. The FSO — Russia’s Federal Protective Service, the elite bodyguard of the President — decides which sites in Moscow work. Not the Ministry. Not even the FSB. The FSO. The president’s personal security.

WHY NOW — THE EU INTELLIGENCE DOSSIER AND THE BUNKER-TSAR

The reason all of this is happening, with this intensity, in this specific week, is documented now beyond serious dispute. On 4 May 2026 — the day before the shutdown began — the Russian investigative outlet Important Stories / iStories published the full text of an intelligence dossier compiled by an unnamed European Union country’s foreign intelligence service. The same dossier was distributed to CNN, Financial Times, OCCRP, and Meduza. Cross-referenced and partially independently verified by iStories’ own sources.

The findings, as we covered in our previous episode and as Naki summarised in his latest video, are the operating context for the May 5 blackout. Vladimir Putin, since the beginning of March 2026, has been in a state of heightened fear of a coup attempt or a drone-borne assassination by his own elites. He is hiding for weeks in modernised bunkers in the Krasnodar region. State media broadcasts pre-recorded video of his activities. Staff working close to him are banned from mobile phones and may use only devices without internet access. Surveillance has been installed in the homes of his cooks, photographers, and bodyguards. Visitors to the Presidential Administration undergo two stages of screening, including a full body search.

And — critically — iStories confirmed that the FSO, not the FSB, is behind Moscow’s internet shutdowns. FSO officers conduct mass sweeps with canine units. FSO units patrol the Moscow River, ready to respond to drone attacks. And it is the FSO that decides, on any given morning, which neighbourhoods of which Russian cities can connect to the outside world.

Naki’s translation of this into plain Russian is the cleanest summary anyone has produced: “When you, a Muscovite, could not order a taxi, pay for parking, check your email, or watch this video on your phone — that probably did not happen because a Ukrainian drone was approaching Moscow at that second. It happened because Putin is afraid that his own elites will kill him with a drone launched from a nearby suburb. So, your district was disconnected — to prevent the quadcopter launched from a neighbouring building from finding GPS reception and finding the road to the bunker.”

SCALE — FORTY REGIONS, NOT JUST MOSCOW

The 5 May shutdown is part of a five-day plan. Operators sent advance SMS notifications on 4 May — uniquely in Russian history, planned mobile internet restrictions announced like scheduled hot-water shutdowns in summer. The difference: without hot water, you can boil water on the stove. Without mobile internet, you can’t make a card payment, can’t order medicine for a sick child, can’t call a taxi, can’t transfer your wages.

As per the Russian outlet 7×7, more than 40 federal subjects were officially warned of restrictions between 5 and 9 May. The list, as Naki catalogued: Bashkortostan, Tatarstan, Karelia, Zabaykalsky Krai, Primorsky Krai, Perm Krai, Irkutsk, Sverdlovsk, Chelyabinsk, Tyumen, Samara, Rostov, Volgograd, Kemerovo Oblasts. Plus, annexed Ukrainian territories. Plus, absurdly, Sakhalin — across nine time zones from Ukraine. The official reason cited: “In connection with the preparations for mass events, mobile internet restrictions are possible.”

A “mass event,” in this formulation, means the Victory Day parade in Moscow.

The previous wave of shutdowns is the precedent. In March 2026, Moscow’s mobile internet was severed from 6 March until 24 March — three full weeks, beginning in the southern administrative district, expanding through central Moscow, eventually covering most of the city. Saint Petersburg joined on 9 March. As the Russian internet protection NGO calculated, one day of Moscow blackout costs the city approximately 4.5 billion rubles. Three weeks: tens of billions of rubles in losses. Naki’s video adds the broader figure: 300 billion rubles in March 2026 alone in commercial losses to the Moscow economy. The Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov was asked about the duration. His response: the restrictions will last as long as necessary. No apology. No compensation. No timeline.

This is the precedent. May 2026 is the operationalisation of what March 2026 piloted.

THE Z-PATRIOTS BREAK — KARTAVYY’S 1.5 MONTHS

Now to the part of the story that may cause troubled dreams in the Kremin. Because the people now publicly forecasting that the regime is about to collapse are not opposition figures, not Western analysts, not Ukrainian intelligence officers. They are the regime’s own most loyal pro-war commentators.

Aleksandr Kartavyy — a Russian Z-blogger with 150,000 subscribers, organiser of one of the most respected drone-operator schools, a man who personally delivers drones and components to the Russian front — published a Telegram post on 1 May 2026 that Naki argues is more revealing than any Levada Centre poll. The full architecture of his message:

He says his audience is, in his own words, gradually building a powerful demand for radicalism — people are looking for someone to beat. If I, Kartavyy, do not give them an answer, others will. He addresses the Russian authorities directly: “do something. From February it has been increasingly unacceptable, in April you guys completely lost it. Even Solovyov has lost his former zeal and is mumbling something incoherent under his breath.” And then the killer diagnosis: “In this regime of collective psychosis, the stamina reserve in society is one and a half to two months, after which changes will start. By September it will all end if we go on the current course.”

A Russian Z-blogger, a man who runs a drone-operator school for the Russian Armed Forces, is publicly forecasting that — on the regime’s current course — Russia has six to eight weeks left. Kartavyy then turns directly to the Russian elite. His warning, in his own carefully chosen words: “If global state, owners of factories, newspapers, ships still have aces — now is the time to play them. Because in ‘17, those who lost everything were liquidated by class principle.”

1917. A Russian patriotic Z-blogger publicly invoking the Bolshevik liquidation of the bourgeoisie as the immediate analogy for what awaits the Russian elites if they do not act.

Z-patriots are losing their minds, telling Russia that 1917 is coming again. But history does not repeat in such convenient ways – but it may well rhyme. Moscow and St Petersburg cut off again from mobile internet, forty regions blacked out, and the pro-war cheer-leaders crack.

Now to the part of the story that may cause troubled dreams in the Kremin. Because the people now publicly forecasting that the regime is about to collapse are not opposition figures, not Western analysts, not Ukrainian intelligence officers. They are the regime’s own most loyal pro-war commentators.

Naki’s framing of why it matters: “This is not satirist Viktor Shenderovich – the famous satirist. This is a man who literally builds drone schools, factories, supplies troops. If he publicly says society has one and a half to two months — the thermometer is showing a seriously high temperature.”

Add to Kartavyy the broader cascade we have been tracking. Maxim Kalashnikov — co-founder of the Club of Angry Patriots with Igor Girkin, the most prominent surviving Russian-nationalist commentator — has been arguing for months that Russia is at risk of civil war, that Putin has become a toxic figure who no longer suits the Russian elites, that the war is in a dead end from which he cannot get out, and that the elites will see throwing him out of power as the only way to maintain their position. Kalashnikov has framed it explicitly: a Western-engineered scenario in which Russia, defeated, descends into civil conflict between competing factions — with Moscow’s elites as either the architects or the victims of the breakdown.

Igor Girkin / Strelkov, from his Russian penal colony, has stated: “Unfortunately, we are heading toward military defeat. That is a fact.” And: “In the current state of affairs, victory is impossible.”

Major General Alexander Khodakovsky, deputy head of the National Guard’s Donetsk Directorate, has invoked the 1914 to 1917 trajectory.

Yury Kotenok: the President is being systematically lied to about the operational state of his army on the fifth year of the war.

Mikhail Zvinchuk of Rybar — Russia’s largest pro-Kremlin Telegram channel, funded by Rostec, $10 million US bounty on his head — admitted on air the front is at a tupik, a dead end.

Aleksandr Sladkov, senior state war correspondent: “We are short of everything. Everywhere — there is a shortage.”

Yevgeny Golman, Wagner PMC veteran: telling Russians, in viral video, “Guys, we need to change — everything needs changing! Otherwise, we’re fucking screwed.” His social recommendation for surviving the impending carnage: plant potatoes.

The consistent forecast, across the entire Russian pro-war commentariat, in the first week of May 2026, is that the system Putin has built is breaking. The collective term Naki and others now use for this collective Russian-language phenomenon is “dooming” — Russian Z-bloggers, in their own platforms, in their own voices, telling their own audience that the future they have spent four years promising is not coming.

THE NUMBERS BEHIND THE PANIC

Are the Z-bloggers right? Let us check the data Naki cites — and that Bloomberg, citing the Central Bank of Russia, has now confirmed.

In April 2026, Russian bank customers withdrew 600 billion roubles in cash — approximately $7.5 billion — the largest single-month outflow since September 2022, when Putin announced partial mobilisation. That comparison is precise and devastating: the population’s behaviour with their own money in May 2026 is equivalent to the moment when Russians realised their men were about to be taken to the front. Over the three months that the rolling shutdowns have hit major Russian cities, cash in circulation has grown by 1.1 trillion rubles — more than in the entire previous year. Since May 2025, when blackouts began in Russian regions, the banking system has lost 2.5 trillion rubles to physical cash. The translation: “we don’t trust you, we are preparing for emergency situations, we understand that at any moment our banking app will lose internet and our money will become air.”

Trust in government, on the regime-loyal FOM pollster, fell to 45% in April 2026 — the wartime minimum. Negative assessment of the government: 33% — wartime maximum. Putin’s rating fell from 82% to 73% over the year. And — for the first time in the entire war — anxiety in society now exceeds calm: 53% of FOM respondents say anxious moods predominate among their family and friends, only 40% say calm. Naki’s note: this is on a pro-government pollster, where roughly half of respondents are afraid to give an honest answer. The real figures are almost certainly worse.

The war that for four years served as the Kremlin’s universal cement has stopped serving. The internet shutdowns, layered on top of the mobilisation fears, on top of the inflation, on top of the receivables crisis the Economy Minister has admitted, are pushing Russian society toward a level of generalised distrust the regime has not previously faced.

Even the Russian Orthodox Church got involved. On 5 May, while Moscow was disconnected, Vakhtang Kikabidze — deputy head of the Synodal Department for Church-Society Relations — issued a statement to the Moskva news agency that, the internet shutdowns should lead Russians to think about the fragility of technological civilisation, which promises almost everything in this life — even digital immortality. Whereas in fact the omnipotence of technology is transient, fades before eternity, the goal of saving the soul, the deeds of love and mercy. Classic Russian thought – smash everything and then rely on a capricious fate.

Translation: thirteen million Muscovites without internet are being told, by the Orthodox Church, that the outage is an opportunity to think about their souls. Naki’s commentary: “this is not propaganda anymore — this is a postmodern spectacle... I used to read this only in Pelevin.”

NAKI’S DIAGNOSIS — THE INTERNET WILL NOT COME BACK WHILE PUTIN IS IN POWER

The internet shutdowns in Moscow and Saint Petersburg are not, Naki argues, a temporary measure that will end after the parade on 9 May. They are the operationalisation of the new system. The illusion that Moscow and Saint Petersburg were a privileged enclave — protected from the kinds of restrictions that have already governed Belgorod, Kursk, Bryansk, Rostov, Voronezh, and Krasnodar for nine months with internet off more than 70% of days; protected from the indefinite Ulyanovsk regime where mobile internet has been switched off until the end of the special military operation — that illusion has been formally extinguished.

Moscow has joined the queue. Moscow is now, in Naki’s brutal phrasing, the next region waiting for Ulyanovsk treatment.

The structural logic: since March 2026, Russian law has formally permitted the FSB to demand telecommunications shutdowns by presidential decree, with operators bearing no further liability. The FSO, which controls the actual on-the-ground decisions, answers only to Putin. Forty-five percent of Putin’s 2023 decrees were classified. In April 2026, twenty-four Volgograd residents tried to file a collective lawsuit against the FSB, Roskomnadzor, MTS, Beeline, and Megafon. The court refused to hear it. It instructed the residents to file written complaints with the operators first.

Naki’s bottom line: “The internet in Russia has become a privilege granted to the population at the discretion of the FSO. This privilege can be withdrawn at any moment, without warning, without explanation. While Putin is in power, there will be no internet in Russia.”

The system can only exist while the current regime exists. Any successor government — of any political orientation — would have no reason to keep cutting the internet to thirteen million people, because they would not have a man in the Kremlin who fears his own elites might launch a drone at him from the apartment block next door. They would not have an FSO that decides which Moscow districts can connect to a card payment. They would not have an FSB that requires operators to switch off cell towers without explanation. They would not have whitelists requiring negotiation with security services every morning.

The internet shutdowns are not a regulatory issue. They are not a procurement issue. They are not a technical issue. They are a political issue. And the political solution is the only solution. Regime change is the only thing that turns the lights back on. A few Russians are starting to understand this truth – but will they act on that realisation? Probably not.