黑烟笼罩克里姆林宫上空：当无人机把战火，烧进莫斯科的心脏

Today we'll talk about something

that is redefining this war.

In the early hours of this Thursday, June 18th,

Russia's capital, Moscow,

woke to a morning

shrouded in black smoke.

Ukraine,

against this city,

launched the largest drone attack

since the war began over four years ago.

Let's first use a number

to feel its weight.

According to the Russian side,

merely on the approach to Moscow,

nearly two hundred drones

were intercepted.

Nearly two hundred.

Which means

the number that actually pierced layer upon layer of air defense

and reached their targets

was far more than that.

And the core target of it all

was, inside the city of Moscow,

a large oil refinery.

It belongs to Russia's state gas-and-oil corporation,

set in Moscow's southeastern outskirts,

in a district called Kapotnya.

It's worth noting

that this was already, within a single week,

the second time this refinery

had come under attack.

That dawn,

drone after drone

dove toward the refinery.

Within the plant,

at least five large fires erupted in an instant,

and dense black smoke

all but blanketed half of Moscow's sky.

In footage circulating from the scene,

after one violent explosion,

the enormous roof of the plant building

was hurled whole into the air by the blast wave.

From the sky,

there even drifted down, mixed with black ash,

a 'black rain'.

Seeing this,

you might ask a question:

with the fires of war dragging on,

why does Ukraine

fixate so doggedly on the refinery?

The answer

lies in fact in war's plainest logic.

Modern war,

fought to its very end,

is a war over energy.

Tanks run on fuel,

warplanes take off on fuel,

the supply trucks stretching hundreds of kilometers

likewise cannot do without oil.

And an oil refinery

is precisely where crude oil

is turned into all this fuel.

So,

Ukraine's strategic aim is very clear:

since it cannot, on the open battlefield,

crush the enemy's vast army,

it turns instead to strike its 'lifeblood' —

energy.

To sever the fuel

is, at the root,

to weaken the enemy's ability to keep fighting.

It is a kind

aimed straight at the foe's 'fuel tank' and 'purse' —

a war of attrition.

Of course,

the price paid for this attack

was by no means only one factory.

According to the Russian side,

this strike

left a total of seventeen people injured,

including two children.

Some residential buildings

were struck and damaged by falling drone debris.

And the order of the whole city

was utterly upended that day.

The many airports around Moscow

urgently imposed controls,

suspending all takeoffs and landings.

One airline alone

cancelled more than a hundred and seventy flights,

with over a hundred more

forced into delay.

Countless travelers

were stranded in the terminals,

unable to return home.

At the same time,

a fuel shortage began in some areas;

queuing to fill up,

even with money you might not manage it.

Ukraine, which launched this attack,

struck an unusually hard posture.

Just hours before the strike,

Ukraine's president

had just held, with the leaders of the US and France,

an important coordination call,

and at this week's G7 summit

had secured further pledges of support.

Afterward,

he delivered a line of immense weight:

if Ukraine is to be burned to ashes,

then your Moscow,

all the same, will burn.

The subtext of that line

is cold and blunt:

an eye for an eye,

fire for fire.

Speaking of this,

I want to talk with you about

a deeper layer of this matter.

This war

has dragged on for over four years.

For those of us far away,

all too often

it is only, recurring in the news,

a somewhat numbing background hum.

But when nearly two hundred drones

swoop toward a nation's capital,

when rolling black smoke

shrouds the skies above the Kremlin,

when ordinary citizens

are stuck at airports, unable to fuel up,

and look up to a sky charred black,

war

is no longer, on a map,

those cold little arrows.

It has become

the explosions and flames that slam, solid and real, into the daily lives of millions,

the blasts, the firelight,

and that one

black rain falling on their heads.

At the end of the show,

I want to leave you

with two questions.

First,

this attrition warfare — striking at energy,

striking at the rear —

will it truly speed a war's end,

or will it only make the hatred

burn longer, and deeper?

Second,

when the fires of war,

again and again,

charge into the heart of a great city,

whether they fall on Kyiv,

or fall on Moscow,

in the end,

who truly bears all of it —

which

ordinary, everyday people?

These two questions

have no standard answer.

But they

are worth thinking about slowly.