近两百架无人机扑向莫斯科：乌克兰为什么死磕俄罗斯的炼油厂？

Today we'll talk about a big event that just happened.

This Thursday,

that is, June 18th,

Ukraine,

against Russia's capital Moscow,

launched an especially large drone attack.

How large?

Let me give you a number first.

Russia itself said

that this time,

the drones they shot down

numbered nearly two hundred.

This was, in the four-plus years of this war,

the hardest Moscow has been hit —

the most ferocious single strike.

So,

all these drones —

what was their main target?

It was, inside the city of Moscow,

a large oil refinery.

This refinery

is run by Russia's gas-and-oil company,

on the southeastern edge of Moscow,

in a place called Kapotnya.

What's more,

this was already, within this one week,

the second time it had been hit.

That morning,

drone after drone

swooped toward the refinery.

Inside the plant,

at least five big fires broke out at once.

Thick black smoke

covered most of Moscow's sky.

Footage from the scene showed

that after a huge blast,

the roof of the plant building

was blown straight up into the air.

From the sky,

a 'black rain' mixed with soot even fell.

Here you might ask:

amid all this back-and-forth fighting,

why does Ukraine

insist on targeting the refinery?

The logic, in fact, isn't complicated.

Modern war,

in the end, is a war over oil.

Tanks burn oil,

warplanes burn oil,

the trucks hauling supplies

all rely on oil too.

An oil refinery

is the place that turns crude oil

into all this fuel.

So Ukraine's calculation is:

I can't take out your whole army,

so I'll hit your oil.

Once you have no oil,

the war can't go on.

It's a way of fighting

aimed straight at the enemy's 'wallet' and 'fuel tank'.

Of course,

what got hit this time

was not only the refinery.

According to the Russian side,

a total of seventeen people were injured,

two of them children.

Some apartment buildings

were damaged by falling debris.

And the whole city

was thrown into disorder that day.

Several airports around Moscow

all suspended takeoffs and landings.

One airline alone

cancelled more than a hundred and seventy flights,

and over a hundred more flights

were delayed.

Many travelers

were stranded at the airports,

unable to get home.

And in some places,

a fuel crunch began;

even with money, you couldn't be sure of filling up.

Ukraine, which did this,

also took a hard line.

Just before the attack,

Ukraine's president

had just spoken with the leaders of the US and France

by phone,

and at this week's G7 summit

had won more support.

He delivered a fierce line:

if Ukraine is to burn,

then your Moscow

will burn just the same.

Speaking of this,

I want to say one more thing to you.

This war

has gone on for four-plus years.

For many of us,

it has always been, in the news,

a somewhat distant word.

But when nearly two hundred drones

swoop toward a country's capital,

when black smoke covers an entire city,

when ordinary people are stuck at airports,

unable to fill their tanks,

war

is no longer an arrow on a map,

but something that, solidly and concretely,

slams into the daily lives of millions.

Finally,

I want to leave you with two questions.

First,

do you think

this way of fighting — striking refineries, striking energy —

can really make a war

end any faster?

Second,

when the fires of war,

again and again,

burn into the heart of a big city,

who, in the end,

truly bears all of it?

These two questions

have no standard answer.

But they're worth our

thinking about slowly.