Smoke rises from Gazprom Neft’s Moscow oil refinery after a deep Ukrainian drone strike on June 18. | AFP-JIJI
Jul 17, 2026
MOSCOW – Karl Marx once wrote that theory becomes a material force the moment it grips the masses. Soviet leaders took that line and ran with it — straight into catastrophe — again and again. Vladimir Lenin turned it into a rationale for revolution, while Josef Stalin used it as a license to starve and work millions of people to death in pursuit of rapid industrialization and a “bright future” that never arrived. Nikita Khrushchev, for his part, invoked it to legitimize de-Stalinization in 1956, as though history could simply be ordered onto a different path.
While the objectives changed, the governing logic remained the same. The Kremlin first decides what reality ought to be, then forces people to conform to its vision, no matter the cost. Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine is the latest chapter in that story, and this summer, the costs are becoming impossible to ignore.
Over the past four years, Ukraine has become remarkably adept at making Russians feel the impact of a war they were never supposed to experience. When Putin launched his “special military operation” in February 2022, Russians were promised a short, victorious campaign that would leave their daily lives untouched. Instead, Ukrainian drones now reach deep into Russian territory, striking oil refineries, factories and energy infrastructure with increasing regularity.
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