In February 2022, Russian President Vladimir Putin told Russians that invading Ukraine was an act of self-defense. If NATO were left unchecked, he warned, Western missiles would soon be able to reach deep into Russia — past Volgograd, Kazan, Samara, even beyond the Ural Mountains. To prevent that nightmare, he launched what the Kremlin euphemistically calls a “special military operation.”
On June 20, a Ukrainian drone struck an oil refinery in Tyumen, in western Siberia — beyond the Urals, nearly 1,900 kilometers, roughly 1,200 miles, from the Ukrainian border. No NATO basing was required. Just Ukrainian drones, Ukrainian engineers, and four years of Putin insisting this could never happen. It was the deepest confirmed Ukrainian strike of the war, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky acknowledged it that evening.
Putin launched this war to keep danger away from Russia. Four years later, the danger is arriving in places Russians once believed were untouchable.
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For centuries, distance was Russia’s best general. It defeated Napoleon and exhausted Hitler. Today, that distance is measured in drone flight times — and it is shrinking.
The home front is the real front now. Tyumen was no fluke. Days earlier, drones set the Moscow refinery on fire and shut down a Rosneft plant in Samara. They torched an oil terminal in St. Petersburg during Putin’s own showcase economic forum. Putin had already quietly shrunk the May 9 Victory Day parade, his most sacred annual ritual, for fear of exactly this. And in his hometown, beside the gilded domes of the Naval Cathedral, city workers now park concrete bomb shelters on the street, each stenciled with a single Russian word: Укрытие, meaning “shelter.”
The official response is to look away. When drones reached Moscow, Russian state newscasts gave the explosions less than a minute of airtime, then pivoted to a heartwarming segment about a mother of twelve. In Putin’s Russia, the strikes are not happening. Only the debris is real.
The money is running out, too. Gazprom, once the crown jewel of the Russian state, is now worth roughly $34 billion — about 29 times less than the $1 trillion its chief executive promised investors in 2008, and a fraction of its prewar value. The company built to make Europe dependent on Russian gas is now valued like a mid-size European grocery chain.
The pain has reached the gas pump. Ukraine’s methodical campaign against Russian refineries has accomplished what sanctions alone could not: The world’s third-largest oil producer has begun importing gasoline by sea. Stations across Moscow and northern Russia are rationing fuel, banning sales into portable containers, and taking cash only. The Kremlin has even authorized refineries to produce dirtier, lower-grade fuel just to keep the pumps flowing. Russian farmers film the price of diesel climbing week by week, and lawmakers have proposed blocking VPNs so that fewer citizens can watch. A government that must ration fuel and censor the gas station is not winning the economic war.
Then there is the problem of men. Putin still refuses to say the word that frightens him most: mobilization. The partial draft of 2022 sent hundreds of thousands of Russians fleeing across the border, and he wants no sequel. So the Kremlin does it quietly and lets others take the blame. Governors order businesses to “select” employees to sign military contracts. On June 17, officials from a half-dozen regions gathered in the city of Volzhsky to rehearse the machinery of mass mobilization, filmed the exercise, and then deleted the video once Russians began asking questions.
Russia continues to raise signing bonuses and financial incentives to attract recruits, a sign that manpower shortages remain a growing concern despite the Kremlin’s efforts to avoid another formal mobilization. The arithmetic the Kremlin keeps off television, ordinary Russians are doing on their phones, which is why a growing number now keep a go-bag, what Russians call an “anxiety suitcase,” packed by the front door. Every mobilization drill is also a political test. The Kremlin is not only measuring how many men it can summon. It is measuring how many are still willing to come.
Watch Russia’s allies, because they hedge first. For four years, Belarusian strongman Alexander Lukashenko cheered the invasion and predicted Ukraine’s collapse. This month, he apologized to Zelensky, conceded that Belarus is exposed to Ukrainian strikes, and swore that Minsk threatens no one. That is the reflex of self-preservation, not a change of heart. Authoritarian allies rarely abandon a leader because they discover principles. They abandon him when they discover risk.
The lesson extends beyond Belarus. Across the former Soviet space, political and business elites who tied their fortunes to Moscow are beginning to reassess their bets. Consider Georgia, whose informal ruler — the billionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili, who made his fortune in Russia — sits under U.S. Treasury sanctions imposed under the same executive authority Washington uses against the Kremlin’s war economy. Georgia controls one of the few corridors carrying Caspian oil and gas to Europe without crossing Russian soil, which is precisely why Moscow has fought so hard to preserve its backdoor influence there.
That the de facto leader of an aspiring NATO and European Union partner now shares a sanctions authority with the Kremlin’s war financiers shows both how deep Russian influence runs and how exposed it becomes the moment Washington decides to contest it. The significance is not one man but the message it sends to elites across the former Soviet space: betting on the Kremlin is becoming expensive. And men who staked everything on a falling asset rarely wait politely for it to hit the floor.
None of this should require reinventing American strategy. Ronald Reagan never had to defeat the Soviet Union on a battlefield. He understood that economic exhaustion, military overreach, and elite doubt could accomplish what armies often could not. Russia is now supplying all three on its own.
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This is not a forecast of imminent collapse — such predictions have a long and embarrassing record. But the assumptions beneath Putin’s strategy are eroding in plain view. The war was supposed to create security — it has produced vulnerability. It was supposed to push danger away from Russia — it has pulled danger beyond the Urals.
History does not repeat itself, but it rhymes. In 1917, the war the Tsar could not win came home, and the army raised to defend him turned around and marched on the capital. Putin promised Russians that the war would remain someone else’s problem. Four years later, it has reached Moscow, St. Petersburg, Samara, and now Siberia. Once a government loses control of where a war can go, it rarely keeps control of where history goes next.
Emzari Gelashvili is a former member of the Georgian Parliament (2008–2012) and a former senior official in Georgia’s Ministry of State Security, Ministry of Defense, and Ministry of Internal Affairs, with a counterintelligence background focused on Russian and Iranian operations. He is a geopolitical analyst based in San Francisco.