# EDITORIAL: Striking Moscow is not escalation — it is coercion, and Ukraine is right to use it

> On June 16 and 18, 2026, Ukrainian drones struck the Kapotnya refinery in Moscow — one of the largest refining facilities in Russia and a direct supplier of fuel to the capital's civilian and military infrastructure. On June 25 and 26, Ukrainian drones struck the cable-laying ships Volga and Vyatka in the Kerch Strait — the narrow waterway connecting the Black Sea to the Sea of

- Author: Maxime Marquette
- Publisher: MadMax (https://mad-max.co)
- Section: Editorial
- Published: 2026-06-27
- Canonical URL: https://mad-max.co/en/article/editorial-frapper-moscou-n-est-pas-de-l-escalade-c-est-de-la-negociation

## Introduction: The drone campaign that is changing the logic of this war

### Kapotnya, Kerch, and the architecture of coercion

On **June 16** and **18, 2026**, **Ukrainian** drones struck the **Kapotnya refinery** in **Moscow** — one of the largest refining facilities in **Russia** and a direct supplier of fuel to the capital's civilian and military infrastructure. On **June 25** and **26**, **Ukrainian** drones struck the cable-laying ships **Volga** and **Vyatka** in the **Kerch Strait** — the narrow waterway connecting the **Black Sea** to the **Sea of Azov**, and the logistical lifeline of **Russia's** occupation of the **Crimean Peninsula**. These were not random acts of desperation. They were carefully selected strikes against infrastructure whose damage imposes real economic and military costs on **Russia** — costs that accumulate, compounding each other with each successful operation. This is the architecture of coercion, and **Ukraine** is executing it with increasing precision and scale.

**President Volodymyr Zelenskyy** has approved a **40-day deep-strike operation** against **Russian** infrastructure. The operation is explicit in its logic: to bring the costs of the war inside **Russia's** borders, to force a recalculation among the **Russian** decision-making class about whether the war's continuation serves their interests, and to degrade the energy and logistics infrastructure that sustains **Russia's** war economy. According to **Ukrainian** and Western analysts, approximately **one third of Russia's refining capacity** is now offline or operating at reduced capacity as a result of cumulative drone strikes. **Russia** intercepted over **660 drones** in the same period — a number that testifies to the scale of **Ukraine's** drone campaign as much as to **Russia's** air defense efforts.

### The narrative battle: escalation or legitimate strategy?

Every major **Ukrainian** strike on **Russian** territory triggers the same reflexive response from certain Western commentators and officials: the language of escalation, of "provoking" **Russia**, of "crossing lines" that will produce unpredictable consequences. This framing needs to be examined critically rather than accepted as the default analytical starting point. **Russia** initiated a war of aggression against a sovereign state. It has systematically targeted **Ukrainian** civilian infrastructure — power grids, water systems, hospitals, residential areas — throughout the conflict. It occupied foreign territory and annexed it in violation of international law. In this context, asking whether **Ukraine's** strikes on **Russian** military and economic infrastructure constitute "escalation" is a question that deserves a more careful answer than the reflexive warning usually given.

The concept of escalation in wartime is not simply about which side fires the largest weapon or conducts the most dramatic strike. It is about the logic and trajectory of the conflict. A **Ukrainian** strike on a **Moscow** oil refinery that serves the **Russian** war economy is, in the logic of armed conflict, a legitimate military action against an economic target that contributes to the enemy's capacity to make war. Calling it escalation implies a symmetry of responsibility that does not exist when one party is the victim of an illegal invasion and the other is the aggressor. The language of escalation, applied without this context, functions as a form of moral equalization that serves **Russia's** interests more than Ukraine's.

*I have been writing about this war since it began. And every time **Ukraine** makes a major strike on **Russian** territory, I read the same anxious commentary from Western capitals about escalation, about provoking **Putin**, about the nuclear threat. I understand the anxiety. I do not understand the asymmetry. **Russia** has been striking **Ukrainian** civilian infrastructure for years. Every thermal power plant, every dam, every hospital that has been hit — those were also escalations. Where was the concern then? The double standard in the escalation discourse is not accidental. It needs to be named.*

## The Kapotnya strikes: what was hit and why it matters

### The strategic logic of targeting energy infrastructure

The **Kapotnya** oil refinery processes approximately **12 million tonnes** of crude oil annually — making it one of the primary suppliers of refined petroleum products to **Moscow** and the surrounding region. Its products include fuel for military vehicles, aviation fuel, and heating oil for civilian use. The refinery's output is directly relevant to **Russia's** military logistics: military fuel supply chains for operations in **Ukraine** include refined products from facilities like **Kapotnya**. Degrading this facility does not just impose economic costs — it creates logistical friction in the supply chains that keep **Russian** forces in the field.

The choice of a **Moscow** refinery — rather than a more geographically remote facility — is also psychologically significant. The war has been, from **Russia's** perspective, something that happens in **Ukraine** and at a safe distance from the capital. Strikes on **Moscow** change that perception. They make the war visible to the **Russian** population in a way that state media cannot entirely suppress, and they impose costs on the metropolitan elite whose support — or at minimum, passive acceptance — sustains **Putin's** political position. The fires at **Kapotnya**, visible from residential areas of the capital, carry a political message as well as a military one.

### The damage assessment and its significance

According to reporting by **Militarnyi** and confirmed by satellite imagery analysis, the **Moscow Kapotnya** refinery is **unlikely to resume operations before 2027**. The damage to key processing units — the primary distillation column and associated cracking units — is assessed as severe enough to require reconstruction, not simply repair. The **Reuters** assessment, cited by military analysts, is that the facility will require at minimum six to twelve months of reconstruction work before it can resume meaningful production. Applied across the multiple facilities that have been struck in the cumulative drone campaign, the aggregate impact on **Russia's** refining capacity represents a significant degradation of its energy infrastructure — the same infrastructure that provides the state revenue that funds the war and the supply chains that sustain the military's operational tempo.

The **Institute for the Study of War** (**ISW**) has documented in its daily assessments how the cumulative impact of **Ukrainian** infrastructure strikes is beginning to impose measurable constraints on **Russian** military operations — not dramatic collapses, but the kind of incremental friction that, over months, reduces operational capacity and forces resource allocation decisions that have their own cascading effects. This is the logic of a sustained coercive campaign: not a single decisive blow, but a systematic degradation that compounds over time and eventually forces the adversary to choose between catastrophic battlefield costs and negotiated terms. **Ukraine's** deep-strike campaign is executing this logic.

*The refinery fire visible from **Moscow**'s apartment windows is not a humanitarian catastrophe. It is a fuel processing facility that contributes to the logistics of a military machine that has killed tens of thousands of **Ukrainians**. The framing that treats its destruction as a comparable moral event to the bombing of **Ukrainian** residential areas is analytically incoherent. I say this not to celebrate destruction, but to insist on the moral clarity that accurate framing requires. The fires at **Kapotnya** are the consequence of the war that **Russia** chose to start. They should be understood as such.*

## The Kerch Strait strikes: cutting the logistical lifeline of Crimea

### Why the Kerch Strait matters strategically

The **Kerch Strait**, which separates the **Crimean Peninsula** from the **Russian mainland**, is the primary logistical corridor for **Russia's** occupation and administration of **Crimea**. The **Kerch Bridge** — already struck and damaged multiple times by **Ukraine** — and the maritime routes through the strait are the main supply lines for fuel, ammunition, food, and military equipment to **Russian** forces stationed in **Crimea**. **Crimea**'s strategic importance to **Russia's** war effort extends beyond its role as an occupied territory: the **Black Sea Fleet's** operational base at **Sevastopol** — already significantly degraded by **Ukrainian** attacks — and the military airfields in **Crimea** have been central to **Russia's** ability to threaten **Ukraine's** southern coast and project naval power in the **Black Sea**.

The cable-laying ships **Volga** and **Vyatka**, struck on **June 25** and **26**, represent a specific category of naval asset with dual-use characteristics: they can lay undersea cables for civilian telecommunications but also for military communications and sensor networks. Their presence in the **Kerch Strait** at this stage of the conflict suggests they were involved in military infrastructure work related to **Russia's** communications and sensor networks in the region — making them legitimate military targets under the laws of armed conflict. The precision of the strikes — targeting specific vessels in a narrow waterway — demonstrates the increasing capability of **Ukrainian** long-range drone and maritime drone operations.

### The progressive degradation of the Crimean logistics system

The strikes on the **Volga** and **Vyatka** are part of a sustained campaign to degrade the military and logistical infrastructure that sustains **Russia's** hold on **Crimea**. **Ukraine** has struck the **Kerch Bridge** multiple times, reducing its vehicle capacity. It has attacked fuel depots, ammunition storage facilities, and military airfields across the peninsula. The **Black Sea Fleet** has lost multiple vessels — including the flagship **Moskva** — and has been forced to relocate significant portions of its remaining assets to ports in **Novorossiysk** on the **Russian** mainland, effectively ceding operational control of large portions of the **Black Sea** to **Ukrainian** naval forces that, at the beginning of the war, had virtually no surface fleet to speak of.

The cumulative effect of this campaign on **Russia's** ability to sustain its forces in **Crimea** and to use the peninsula as a staging area for operations in southern **Ukraine** is one of the more significant strategic developments of the war's middle phase. The degradation of **Crimean** military infrastructure does not eliminate **Russia's** hold on the peninsula — that would require a ground offensive that **Ukraine** is not currently positioned to conduct at the scale required. But it significantly increases the cost and difficulty of maintaining that hold, and it creates conditions that could, under different political circumstances, make a negotiated resolution of **Crimea's** status more conceivable. Strategy works in long timelines. **Ukraine** is playing the long game.

*The progressive degradation of **Crimean** military infrastructure is one of the most strategically significant achievements of the war that receives the least attention in Western commentary. The seizure of **Crimea** in **2014** was treated by many Western analysts as essentially irreversible. The systematic destruction of the military infrastructure that makes **Crimea** a war asset for **Russia** — airfields, naval bases, logistics corridors — suggests that **Ukraine** is not accepting that assessment. And the results, so far, support the **Ukrainian** strategic judgment. The **Black Sea Fleet** has been effectively driven from its home port. That is not a small thing.*

## The 660 drones: what the interception numbers reveal

### Russian air defense under sustained pressure

**Russia's** air defense forces intercepted over **660 Ukrainian drones** in the period covering the strikes described above. This number is frequently cited as evidence of **Russia's** effective air defense capability — and it is, in part, evidence of exactly that. **Russia's** layered air defense system — combining long-range **S-400** and **S-300** systems with medium-range **Buk** variants and short-range **Pantsir** systems — has genuine capability against the drone types that **Ukraine** has been deploying. The high interception rate reflects this investment and the sustained attention that **Russia's** military has devoted to improving its air defense performance as the drone campaign has scaled.

But the same number — **660 drones intercepted** — reveals something equally important about **Ukrainian** strategy. A campaign that requires the interception of **660 drones** is a campaign that is imposing significant costs on **Russia's** air defense resources: the missiles used for interception are expensive and finite; the radar systems and operators are under sustained stress; the command and control resources required to manage such a volume of simultaneous or near-simultaneous threats are being continuously stretched. And in a campaign calibrated for persistence rather than for a single decisive strike, the attrition of **Russia's** air defense resources is itself a strategic objective — creating progressively more permissive conditions for the strikes that get through. The fact that some did get through — the **Kapotnya** fire and the **Kerch** strikes are evidence of this — demonstrates that the strategy is working.

### The drone production race and Ukraine's industrial capacity

**Ukraine's** ability to conduct drone campaigns at this scale reflects a rapid and remarkable development of domestic drone production capacity, supported by Western technology transfers and a domestic defense industry that has adapted with extraordinary speed to the demands of modern warfare. By mid-**2026**, **Ukraine** was producing tens of thousands of drones per month across a distributed network of manufacturing facilities that have been designed for resilience against Russian strikes. The decentralization of production — across hundreds of small facilities rather than a small number of large, vulnerable factories — has made it difficult for **Russia** to significantly degrade **Ukraine's** drone production capacity through its own strikes.

This industrial development is one of the war's most important structural changes. At the beginning of the conflict, **Ukraine's** ability to conduct long-range strikes was entirely dependent on Western-supplied missiles — **HIMARS**, **Storm Shadow**, **ATACMS** — whose delivery was controlled by political decisions in **Washington**, **London**, and **Paris**. The domestic drone capability that **Ukraine** has built over three years has substantially reduced this dependence — giving it a long-range strike capacity that does not require constant political authorization from allied capitals. This strategic autonomy is not only militarily significant. It also changes the political calculus in Western capitals about the risks of continued support, by reducing the risk that any single political decision will decisively affect the campaign's scale or sustainability.

***Ukraine** building its own domestic drone industry in the middle of a war, under constant bombardment, with severe economic constraints, is one of the more remarkable industrial achievements of the past decade. It is an expression of national will that deserves recognition beyond the headlines. Every drone that a Ukrainian engineer designs in a basement workshop and a Ukrainian factory worker assembles under threat of air strikes is a small act of national resistance. When those drones reach **Moscow**'s refineries, they carry the weight of that resistance with them. That context matters.*

## The nuclear bluff: why Putin will not escalate to nuclear weapons

### The structure of nuclear deterrence and its limits

The single most common argument against **Ukraine's** deep-strike campaign — and against Western support for it — is the nuclear argument: that strikes on **Russian** territory risk provoking a nuclear response. This argument requires careful unpacking, because it rests on assumptions about **Putin's** rationality and risk tolerance that deserve scrutiny. The use of nuclear weapons — even tactical nuclear weapons — against **Ukraine** or **NATO** countries would trigger a response that would be catastrophic for **Russia**: isolation, potential military retaliation, the destruction of the economic and political relationships that Russian elites depend on for their own interests. The threshold for nuclear use is therefore genuinely high, not because of ethical constraints, but because of the rational calculation of costs and benefits for the decision-makers involved.

The history of **Putin's** nuclear rhetoric over the four years of the war supports this analysis. Nuclear threats have been made repeatedly, and repeatedly not followed through on — most clearly during the provision of successive categories of Western weapons that **Russia** had previously claimed would constitute a red line provoking nuclear response. Long-range missiles. **F-16s**. **ATACMS**. Each provision was accompanied by Russian warnings; none produced the threatened escalation. The pattern is consistent with a regime that uses nuclear rhetoric as an instrument of psychological warfare against Western decision-makers — exploiting escalation anxiety in allied capitals to slow the provision of military support to **Ukraine** — rather than as a sincere declaration of intent. Recognizing this pattern is not recklessness. It is the accurate analysis that effective policy requires.

### The real risks of not striking: strategic passivity as a form of defeat

The debate about the risks of **Ukraine's** deep-strike campaign tends to focus exclusively on the risks of action. The risks of inaction — of a war strategy confined to the territory of **Ukraine**, that allows **Russia** to conduct its war effort from the safety of its own territory without meaningful cost — are less discussed but equally real. A **Ukraine** that cannot strike **Russian** military and economic infrastructure is a **Ukraine** fighting at a permanent asymmetric disadvantage: absorbing the full cost of the war on its own territory, against an adversary whose homeland is a sanctuary.

Sustained coercive pressure on **Russia's** energy and logistics infrastructure is not a strategy for a quick victory. It is a strategy for altering the cost-benefit calculation of the **Russian** leadership and the Russian economic elite over a longer time horizon. The evidence that it is working — the degradation of refining capacity, the disruption to **Kerch** logistics, the forced relocation of the **Black Sea Fleet**, the measurable increases in **Russian** military fuel costs — is accumulating. The strategy requires patience and Western political will to sustain. What it does not require is the abandonment of the only leverage that can change **Russia's** calculations: the ability to make the war costly inside its own borders.

*The nuclear bluff argument is the most powerful tool in **Russia's** psychological warfare arsenal, and it has been remarkably effective. It has slowed or blocked weapons deliveries to **Ukraine** at multiple critical moments. It has generated endless hand-wringing in Western commentaries that, whatever their other merits, have the practical effect of adding political friction to decisions that would help **Ukraine**. I am not dismissing the nuclear risk. I am saying that the risk needs to be assessed honestly, against the evidence of how **Putin** has actually behaved when threats were not heeded — which is: he has not used nuclear weapons. The bluff has been called, repeatedly. It has not been followed through. That matters.*

## Zelenskyy as war leader: the 40-day operation and its strategic logic

### The decision and its significance

**Zelenskyy's** approval of a **40-day deep-strike operation** reflects the maturation of **Ukraine's** strategic conception of the war. In the early phases, **Ukraine's** strategy was necessarily reactive — responding to **Russian** advances, defending territory, and seeking Western weapons to close the most urgent capability gaps. As the war has evolved, **Ukraine's** strategic leadership has developed a more sophisticated offensive doctrine — one that recognizes that tactical defense on the front lines is insufficient to produce a favorable outcome and that pressuring **Russia's** war economy and decision-making through deep strikes is an essential complement to the ground campaign.

The **40-day** timeline is not arbitrary. It represents a period of concentrated, sustained pressure on a specific set of targets — primarily energy and logistics infrastructure — designed to produce measurable degradation before a natural pause for assessment and adjustment. This kind of phased, purposeful campaign design is a significant departure from the improvised, resource-constrained operations of the war's earlier phases. It reflects the development of a genuine strategic culture in **Ukraine's** military leadership — one that thinks in terms of campaigns, not just battles, and that understands coercive strategy as a complement to ground warfare rather than a substitute for it.

### Zelenskyy's moral authority and the weight of his decisions

**Volodymyr Zelenskyy** has spent four years making decisions that carry consequences he lives with directly — the deaths of **Ukrainian** soldiers, the suffering of civilians, the impossible trade-offs of a war fought against an adversary with vastly greater resources. His authority as a war leader is not only political. It is moral — built on the decision to remain in **Kyiv** when every intelligence assessment told him to leave, on the personal exposure to risk that he has maintained throughout the conflict, and on the consistent clarity of his public communication about the nature of the war and **Ukraine's** objectives. That moral authority matters when he makes decisions like the approval of the **40-day operation** — because it comes from a leader who is accountable for the consequences in a way that no external commentator is.

The decision to authorize deep strikes on **Russian** territory is not taken lightly by **Zelenskyy** or by his military commanders. It is taken after careful calculation of military utility, risk of escalation, and impact on Western political support. The fact that the campaign is being conducted — and being conducted at scale — reflects their judgment that the calculation favors action. Western commentators and officials who second-guess this judgment from a position of safety, without bearing the consequences of the alternative, deserve less deference on this question than they typically assume. **Ukraine's** leaders are accountable. Their judgment, tested by four years of wartime decision-making, has earned a level of trust that reflexive escalation anxiety too often displaces.

***Zelenskyy** did not choose this war. He did not choose to be a wartime president. He did not choose to live in a city that has been struck by missiles dozens of times. But having had this reality imposed on him, he has responded with a clarity of purpose and a quality of leadership that is, by any historical standard, remarkable. When he approves a strike campaign on **Russian** infrastructure, he does so having thought about the consequences in ways that most of those criticizing the decision will never have to think about anything. I find his judgment, in the aggregate, more trustworthy than that of those who offer commentary from the comfort of distance.*

## The West must hold: the conditions for strategic success

### The political prerequisites for Ukraine's strategy to work

**Ukraine's** deep-strike strategy can only produce the coercive effects it is designed for if it is sustained over a sufficiently long period to accumulate the damage that changes **Russia's** cost-benefit calculation. Sustaining it requires two things from **Ukraine's** Western allies: continued weapons supply, including the precision munitions and drone components that make the strikes effective, and continued political will to maintain economic pressure on **Russia** through sanctions and other instruments. Neither is guaranteed. Both are being contested in the political environments of key allied states.

The risk is not that **Ukraine's** strategy is wrong — the evidence of its tactical effectiveness is accumulating. The risk is that Western political will deteriorates before the strategy produces the strategic effects it is designed for. **Putin's** political strategy for the war — exhausting Western support through the grinding patience of a larger economy and population — has been remarkably consistent and has achieved real effects in the political dynamics of several key allied countries. Managing this risk requires Western political leaders to be honest with their publics about what is at stake, about what the costs of **Russian** victory would be, and about why the support for **Ukraine** is a strategic investment, not a charitable impulse.

### The sanctions architecture and its untapped potential

The economic pressure on **Russia** through Western sanctions has been significant but not yet decisive. **Russia's** economy has adapted — through trade rerouting via **China**, **India**, and Central Asian intermediaries, through the development of parallel financial systems, and through the mobilization of domestic resources for war production. The sanctions regime has imposed real costs — the **Russian ruble** has depreciated significantly, inflation is elevated, and the forced military mobilization of the economy has crowded out civilian investment. But the costs have not yet been severe enough to force a recalculation at the highest levels of the **Russian** state.

The most significant gap in the sanctions architecture is the continued purchase of **Russian** energy by non-Western buyers — primarily **China** and **India** — at discounted prices that provide **Moscow** with the hard currency revenues that fund the war. Closing this gap would require secondary sanctions on the purchasers — a step that the **US** and **EU** have been reluctant to take because of its implications for bilateral relationships with major economies. The reluctance is understandable. It is also a choice with consequences: every barrel of **Russian** oil sold to **China** or **India** at a discount is revenue that sustains the war effort. The completeness of economic pressure is, like the completeness of weapons supply, a political choice that Western governments have not yet made fully.

*I am aware that what I am saying requires things of Western governments and publics that are costly, uncomfortable, and politically difficult. I am saying it anyway, because the alternative — a **Russian** victory, or a frozen conflict that allows **Russia** to reconstitute and try again — would be more costly, more uncomfortable, and more politically devastating in the long run. The short-term pain of sustained support for **Ukraine** is real. The long-term cost of abandoning it is larger. That calculation is not always easy to communicate, but it is the honest one.*

## The ISW assessment: what the daily data tells us

### The intelligence value of systematic daily analysis

The **Institute for the Study of War** (**ISW**), which publishes daily battlefield assessments of the **Russia-Ukraine** war, represents one of the most valuable analytical resources in the public domain for understanding the conflict's evolution. Its June **26, 2026** assessment documented the tactical and operational effects of the drone campaign in terms of specific infrastructure damage, the redeployment of **Russian** air defense assets in response to the drone campaign, and the measurable effects on **Russian** fuel supply chains. The granularity of this analysis — drawing on satellite imagery, Ukrainian military communications, Russian operational reporting, and open-source intelligence — provides a level of battlefield transparency that was not available in previous major conflicts.

The **ISW's** assessment consistently shows two things simultaneously: that the drone campaign is imposing real and cumulative costs on **Russian** military and economic infrastructure, and that the overall strategic situation remains contested — that the damage is significant but not yet decisive. This honest double-entry accounting — acknowledging both the effectiveness of **Ukrainian** operations and the resilience and adaptation of **Russian** forces — is a model for the kind of analytical rigor that public debate about the war too rarely achieves. Policy decisions should be based on evidence of this quality, not on the motivated reasoning of those who want the war to end quickly on any terms or those who want to believe **Russia's** defeat is imminent.

### The operational picture: what matters beyond the headline strikes

Beyond the headline strikes at **Kapotnya** and in the **Kerch Strait**, the cumulative operational picture documented by **ISW** and other analytical organizations shows a war that is imposing increasingly severe costs on **Russia's** military capacity. Ammunition consumption rates that exceed production; personnel losses that require drawing on reserve populations with decreasing military experience; logistics chains that are increasingly strained by the combination of battlefield consumption and infrastructure degradation from drone strikes; equipment losses that have required the deployment of decades-old armored vehicles that were designed for a different era of warfare. These pressures do not guarantee **Ukraine's** success — wars are not decided purely by logistics — but they accumulate in ways that create the conditions for the kind of strategic pressure that changes political calculations.

The **Russian** military's demonstrated capacity for adaptation and endurance should not be underestimated — it has survived and adapted to pressures that most Western analysts did not expect it to sustain. But adaptation has costs. The **Russian** military of mid-**2026** is not the same instrument it was in **February 2022**, and not only because it has suffered casualties. Its quality — the technical proficiency, the doctrine, the leadership at operational levels — has degraded under the sustained pressure of a war it did not expect to last this long or cost this much. **Ukraine's** strategy is designed to exploit and deepen this degradation. The evidence suggests it is working.

*I want to be clear about something that is sometimes lost in the analysis of this war: **Ukraine** is winning in the sense that matters most strategically, which is that it has denied **Russia** the victory it sought. The conquest of **Ukraine**, the installation of a compliant regime, the absorption of the country into a **Russian** sphere of dominance — none of this has happened. Against an adversary with vastly greater resources and no concern for human cost, **Ukraine** has made that scenario unachievable. That is a form of victory that deserves to be recognized even as the war continues. The question now is not whether **Ukraine** will be conquered, but under what terms the conflict will eventually end.*

## The international law dimension: targeting and legitimacy

### Military targets and the laws of armed conflict

The legal framework applicable to **Ukraine's** strikes on **Russian** territory is clear in its principles, if not always in its application to specific cases. The **laws of armed conflict** — embodied in the **Geneva Conventions** and their additional protocols — permit attacks on military objectives, defined as those objects whose partial or total destruction offers a definite military advantage. Economic infrastructure that directly contributes to an adversary's war-fighting capacity — fuel refineries, logistics hubs, military communication systems — falls within this definition. The **Kapotnya** refinery, which supplies fuel to military logistics chains, and the cable-laying ships **Volga** and **Vyatka**, which were conducting work related to military communications infrastructure, are legitimate military targets under this framework.

The principle of proportionality — requiring that the expected civilian harm of an attack not be excessive in relation to the anticipated military advantage — applies to all strikes, including those by **Ukraine**. The available evidence from the described strikes suggests that they were directed at specific military and economic infrastructure rather than civilian populations, and that the strikes were calibrated to maximize military effect while minimizing civilian harm. This is consistent with the standards that international humanitarian law requires and that **Ukraine's** military has, on the whole, sought to apply. The contrast with **Russia's** consistent targeting of **Ukrainian** civilian infrastructure — hospitals, schools, power grids, residential areas — is stark and legally significant.

### The sovereignty argument and the right of self-defense

**Ukraine's** right to conduct military operations against the state that is conducting an ongoing armed attack against it is firmly established in international law. **Article 51** of the **UN Charter** recognizes the inherent right of individual and collective self-defense against armed attack — a right that the **UN Security Council** has been unable to vindicate through collective action because of **Russia's** veto power. A state exercising its right of self-defense is legally entitled to strike the military and military-economic assets of its attacker, including on the attacker's own territory, provided that the strikes comply with the laws of armed conflict. **Ukraine's** deep-strike campaign is legally grounded in exactly this framework.

Critics who argue that striking **Russian** territory is an illegal or illegitimate escalation need to engage with this legal framework rather than bypassing it. The alternative framing — that **Ukraine** is obliged to confine its military operations to its own territory, allowing **Russia** to conduct its war from a territorial sanctuary — has no basis in international law and would represent a fundamental inversion of the self-defense principle. A victim of aggression does not forfeit its right to self-defense at the aggressor's border. This is not a controversial legal position — it is the unambiguous reading of the applicable framework. The discomfort it causes for those who prefer a different policy outcome does not alter its legal validity.

*The people who argue that **Ukraine** should not strike **Russian** territory rarely argue from international law. They argue from strategic caution — from concern about escalation. I have tried to engage with that concern honestly in this editorial. But I want to be equally clear about what the international law actually says: **Ukraine** has the right to defend itself, including by striking the military and military-economic assets of the state attacking it, on that state's territory. Those who argue otherwise bear the burden of explaining how their position is consistent with the right of self-defense. I have not heard a convincing version of that explanation.*

## The energy war: Russia's oil revenue and Ukraine's counterstrategy

### Oil revenue as the lifeblood of Russia's war economy

The **Russian** state's ability to fund its war in **Ukraine** depends fundamentally on energy revenue — oil and gas exports that, even at the discounted prices imposed by Western sanctions and the price cap mechanism, provide the bulk of the federal budget resources allocated to military spending. The **International Energy Agency** has documented that **Russia's** energy revenues, while lower than the pre-war peak, have remained sufficient to sustain the military campaign at its current scale. Degrading the refining infrastructure that processes this crude oil — both for export and for domestic military logistics — directly attacks this revenue base and the logistical system it sustains.

The strategy of targeting oil refineries is therefore doubly effective: it degrades military logistics in the short term and reduces export revenue in the medium term. The **Kapotnya** refinery's offline status not only tightens fuel supply chains for **Russian** military operations — it also reduces the volume of refined petroleum products available for export, and the domestic civilian market must be supplied from other sources at higher cost, generating inflation and popular discontent. The economic feedback loops from a sustained campaign against refining infrastructure are more complex and more far-reaching than the physical damage to a single facility. This is the full-spectrum logic of the energy war that **Ukraine** is conducting.

### The oil price cap mechanism and its enforcement

The **G7 oil price cap** — established in late **2022** to limit the price that **Russia** can receive for its crude oil sold to Western and third-party buyers using **G7** financial and shipping services — has been partially effective but is widely acknowledged to be imperfectly enforced. A shadow fleet of vessels operating outside **G7** jurisdiction has allowed **Russia** to sell oil at prices above the cap to buyers willing to accept the reputational and legal risks of operating outside the mechanism. The enforcement of the cap — through designations of shadow fleet vessels, secondary sanctions threats, and diplomatic pressure on third-party buyers — has been inconsistent and has left significant leakage in the mechanism.

Closing the enforcement gaps in the price cap mechanism would do more to reduce **Russia's** war revenue than most other economic policy options currently on the table. It would require secondary sanctions against financial institutions that facilitate above-cap transactions and against third countries that serve as transit hubs for shadow fleet operations. The political cost of this enforcement — primarily in terms of bilateral relationships with **India**, **China**, and several Central Asian states — is real but manageable. The alternative — a price cap that is formally in place but systematically circumvented — is both economically ineffective and diplomatically damaging, signaling that Western resolve can be overcome through creative compliance evasion. The enforcement of the cap is not a technical matter. It is a political decision.

*There is a direct line from the oil price cap leakage to the fires at **Kapotnya**. If the cap were fully enforced, **Russia's** oil revenues would be substantially lower and its ability to sustain the war at current intensity would be reduced. Because it is not fully enforced, **Russia** continues to earn enough to fund the campaign. **Ukraine's** deep strikes on refining infrastructure are, in a real sense, doing with drones what Western governments could be doing with sanctions and secondary measures. The distinction is worth noting. Not to criticize **Ukraine's** approach, which is effective. But to name the alternative that Western governments have not yet fully used.*

## The path forward: what sustained coercion can achieve

### The realistic outcome space

The realistic outcome space for the **Russia-Ukraine** war in the current phase is not a clean **Ukrainian** military victory resulting in the full restoration of **Ukraine's** internationally recognized borders, including **Crimea**. Nor is it a **Russian** victory resulting in the conquest of **Ukraine** or the installation of a compliant government. The most likely trajectory — absent a dramatic collapse of either side's capacity or political will — is a prolonged period of attrition in which cumulative costs on **Russia** eventually generate the conditions for negotiations under terms that are less favorable to **Russia** than its maximal ambitions require. **Ukraine's** coercive strategy is designed to accelerate this trajectory by maximizing those cumulative costs.

This is not a satisfying outcome from the perspective of international law and the principles at stake — the full restoration of **Ukraine's** sovereign territory and the full accountability for **Russia's** aggression would be the morally correct resolution. But wars end on the basis of military and political realities, not only on the basis of what justice demands. The question that **Ukraine's** strategy is trying to answer is what reality can be created through sustained pressure that gives **Ukraine** the strongest possible position in the negotiations that will eventually occur. The **40-day deep-strike operation** is one answer to that question: it is building the leverage that the diplomatic endgame will require.

### The West's obligation: to stay in

The most important thing that **Ukraine's** Western allies can do right now is to sustain their support — political, military, and economic — for the duration of the campaign that **Zelenskyy** has approved. This means continuing to supply the precision munitions, drone components, air defense systems, and ammunition that allow **Ukraine** to maintain both its deep-strike capability and its front-line defensive capacity. It means maintaining and strengthening the sanctions architecture, including pushing harder on the enforcement gaps that have allowed **Russia** to continue earning energy revenue above the price cap. And it means resisting the temptation to condition support on a negotiating process that **Russia** would design to benefit itself — demanding that **Ukraine** accept terms under pressure that it would not accept from a position of strength.

The history of this war is, in part, a history of Western decision-making that responded to **Ukrainian** resilience with successively greater levels of support, each delayed longer than it should have been, each accompanied by the same warnings about escalation that the previous provision had disproved. That pattern should inform the current moment: the support that **Ukraine** is requesting is the support that its strategy requires, and the consequences of withholding it — a **Ukraine** denied the capacity to impose costs on **Russia** — are worse than the speculative risks of providing it. The West has an obligation to stay in. Not as charity. As the strategic interest that it is.

*I am writing this knowing that **Ukrainian** soldiers are fighting right now, at this moment, with whatever weapons and ammunition they have. Some of them will die today. The distance between their reality and the comfortable debates in Western capitals about the risks of escalation is immeasurable. I try to hold that distance consciously when I write. It is too easy, from safety, to be cautious about risks that others are paying for. The people who have the most moral authority on the question of escalation risk are the ones who are bearing the consequences. Their judgment, reflected in **Zelenskyy's** approval of the deep-strike campaign, deserves more deference than it typically receives.*

## The Pravda Ukraine source: first-hand reporting from the front of information

### Ukrainian journalism under fire

**Ukrainska Pravda** — one of **Ukraine's** most respected independent news organizations — has covered the strikes and the strategic developments surrounding them with the combination of immediacy and precision that comes from journalism conducted under direct threat. **Ukrainian** journalists covering the war face not only the general dangers of conflict reporting but the specific risk of being targeted by a **Russian** state that has demonstrated willingness to kill journalists. The continued operation of independent **Ukrainian** media throughout the conflict — maintaining coverage standards, sourcing claims responsibly, and providing the information basis for the international understanding of the war — is itself a form of resistance that deserves recognition.

The reporting of **Ukrainian** media on the deep-strike campaign has been, overall, more careful and more accurate than Western commentary — unsurprisingly, given that **Ukrainian** journalists are embedded in the reality they are covering and cannot afford the luxury of abstract strategizing from a distance. The combination of **Ukrainian** primary reporting, **ISW** daily assessments, and the analytical work of Western think tanks and academic institutions provides a reasonably complete picture of what is happening on the ground and what its strategic significance is. The problem is not a lack of information. It is a lack of will, in some Western capitals, to act on the information that is available.

### The information dimension: why narrative matters in this war

The information dimension of the **Russia-Ukraine** war has been a consistent front on which both sides have invested heavily. **Russia's** disinformation operations — targeting Western publics, **Ukrainian** civilian morale, and the international perception of the conflict — represent a sustained campaign designed to undermine Western support and create a narrative that justifies **Russia's** position as a reasonable actor responding to Western provocation. The accuracy of this narrative has been consistently refuted by evidence, but evidence does not automatically win information wars — the resources, sophistication, and reach of **Russian** information operations ensure that false narratives maintain traction in significant portions of Western public opinion.

Countering this requires not just factual correction but the kind of moral clarity that this editorial is attempting to provide: naming what the war is, who is responsible for it, and what is at stake if **Russia** is allowed to achieve its objectives. The drone strikes on **Kapotnya** and the **Kerch Strait** are not events that can be neutrally described without a moral context. They are acts of self-defense by a country that has been attacked, conducted against legitimate military and economic targets, in the service of a strategy aimed at ending a war that **Russia** started. That context should be present in every account of these events. When it is absent, the narrative serves **Russia's** interest more than the truth's.

*I have been careful in this editorial to be accurate about what is happening — not to exaggerate **Ukrainian** success, not to dismiss the costs and risks, not to pretend that the path to a just resolution is clear or easy. But I have also been clear about the moral dimension of this conflict, because I believe that clarity is necessary for honest analysis — and because the absence of that clarity in much Western commentary is itself a problem that needs to be named. **Russia** started this war. **Ukraine** is defending itself. Those two facts are the foundation of any honest account of what the drone strikes at **Kapotnya** mean. I will not pretend otherwise.*

## Diplomacy and the negotiators: who can play which role

### Turkey as a contested mediator

**Erdogan**'s **Turkey** has played a mediating role between Ukraine and Russia since the start of the conflict — notably by negotiating the **Black Sea Grain Initiative** of 2022 and maintaining communication channels between Kyiv and Moscow. This mediation is valuable but deeply ambivalent: Turkey is a **NATO** member but refuses to fully apply Western sanctions against Russia and continues trading with both belligerents. This equivocal position makes Turkey acceptable to both parties as a mediator, but also unreliable as an impartial arbiter.

In **2026**, ceasefire negotiations involve several platforms: direct contacts facilitated by Turkey, European channels through the **OSCE** and **EU** envoys, and informal discussions via Gulf states. This multiplicity of channels creates a risk of contradictions and mixed signals. What Turkey says about a Russian proposal can differ from what Germany says. This diplomatic cacophony weakens Ukraine's negotiating position. **Stricter Western coordination of negotiating positions is a precondition of diplomatic effectiveness.**

### What a just peace concretely requires

Beyond diplomatic formulas, what does a just peace for Ukraine require in concrete terms? First, **Russian withdrawal** from all internationally recognized Ukrainian territory, including **Crimea** and the four partially occupied oblasts (**Donetsk**, **Luhansk**, **Zaporizhzhia**, **Kherson**). Second, **reparations** for the destruction caused by Russian aggression, estimated at more than **500 billion dollars** by the United Nations. Third, credible **security guarantees** — either **NATO** membership or bilateral defense agreements with the major Western powers.

These demands are those of international law and the logic of lasting peace. Not all of them are immediately achievable through negotiation. But they define the spectrum of the acceptable — below which any agreement would be nothing more than a pause before the next aggression. Zelenskyy carries these demands with resolve. The West must support him by maintaining pressure on Russia until these conditions are at least partially met. **Pressure is not war — it is the condition of peace.**

*The demands of a just peace seem impossible today. They seemed so too at the end of every major conflict in modern history — until they no longer did. Ukrainian pressure changes the equation. Sustained Western support changes the equation. Europe's collective determination changes the equation. The impossible becomes possible when we refuse to accept the unacceptable.*

## The post-war: rebuilding Ukraine and reforming European security

### The Ukrainian Marshall Plan

Rebuilding **Ukraine** after the war will be one of the most complex and costly projects in modern European history. Infrastructure destruction is estimated at more than **500 billion dollars** according to assessments by the **World Bank** and the United Nations: housing, hospitals, schools, factories, roads, bridges, energy networks, ports. Reconstruction will not only be expensive — it will also be an opportunity to build differently, integrating standards of energy sustainability, resilience to future shocks, and economic modernization.

The **European Union** launched the **Ukraine Facility** in **2024**, a fund of **50 billion euros** over four years to support Ukrainian reconstruction and institutional reforms in connection with the EU accession process. That is a start — largely insufficient given the scale of the needs, but representing a concrete commitment. Additional financing mechanisms, including the use of frozen Russian assets (approximately **300 billion dollars** in Western central banks), are under discussion. **Rebuilding Ukraine must begin before the war ends — and must be financed primarily by Russian assets, not Western taxpayers.**

### Rethinking European security architecture

The Russo-Ukrainian war has definitively buried the post-Cold War European security architecture. The idea that collective security could be founded on political agreements without credible military capacity — the hope of the 1990s — died on the plains of eastern Ukraine. **NATO** is stronger, more united, and more relevant than it has been since **1991**. **Finland** and **Sweden**, traditionally neutral, have joined the Alliance. European military spending has increased across most member states.

This revitalization of NATO is positive. But it does not resolve everything. **Ukraine** is still not a NATO member. The security guarantee that membership represents has not yet been granted to it. And the ambiguity over post-agreement security guarantees is precisely what makes Zelenskyy reluctant to accept a ceasefire without solid commitments. **Ukraine's accession to NATO, or equivalent bilateral security guarantees, is the condition of a peace that is not merely a pause.**

*A rebuilt Ukraine must be a Ukraine inside NATO or with equivalent guarantees. Any other arrangement leaves the door open to a next aggression. Europeans who still hesitate to offer firm commitments to Kyiv out of fear of "provoking" Moscow have not absorbed the lessons of 2022. Deterrence is built. Not on the day of the invasion.*

## Conclusion: the coercive logic is sound — the West must not flinch

### Why striking Moscow is the right strategy

**Ukraine's** deep-strike campaign against **Russian** infrastructure is, in the strategic sense that matters, the right approach for this phase of the war. It imposes real and accumulating costs on **Russia's** war economy. It degrades the logistics and energy infrastructure that sustain the military campaign. It demonstrates to the **Russian** decision-making class that the war has costs for them, not only for **Ukraine**. It builds leverage for eventual negotiations. And it does all of this without triggering the nuclear escalation that **Russia's** rhetoric has long threatened and never followed through on — because the conditions for nuclear use that would be rational from **Russia's** perspective do not exist, and the threshold for their creation is higher than the deep-strike campaign approaches.

The assessment that this strategy is working is not wishful thinking. It is supported by evidence: the offline status of **Kapotnya** and multiple other refining facilities, the degradation of **Crimean** military infrastructure, the forced relocation of the **Black Sea Fleet**, the measurable fuel supply constraints on **Russian** military operations. These are real effects with real strategic implications. The strategy requires patience, continued Western support, and the refusal to accept **Russia's** nuclear bluff as a reason to limit **Ukraine's** military options. None of these requirements is beyond the capacity of **Ukraine's** allies. The question is whether the political will exists to provide them consistently, without the periodic crises of confidence that have characterized Western support throughout the conflict.

### The moment of decision

The fires at **Kapotnya**, visible from **Moscow**'s apartments, and the disabled ships in the **Kerch Strait**, carry a message that **Putin's** Russia needs to receive clearly and without equivocation: the war that **Russia** started has costs inside **Russia's** borders, and those costs will grow as long as the war continues. The decision about whether those costs reach the level that changes **Putin's** calculus is one that **Ukraine** and its allies are making together. It requires the West to hold — to sustain support, to resist escalation anxiety that **Russia** deliberately cultivates, and to maintain the moral clarity that the situation demands. The alternative — a **Ukraine** abandoned to fight without the tools its strategy requires — is not a de-escalation. It is a different kind of catastrophe. One that is avoidable, if the West chooses to avoid it.

*I end this editorial with the only conclusion that the evidence supports: **Ukraine** is right to strike **Russian** infrastructure. The strategy is sound, the legal basis is clear, the risks of the alternative are greater than the risks of the action. What is needed is not a more cautious **Ukraine**. What is needed is a more resolute West — one that understands what is at stake, trusts the judgment of the people who are actually fighting this war, and provides the support that **Ukraine's** strategy requires without the episodic uncertainty that has been the defining failure of Western policy over the past four years. The fires at **Kapotnya** are not the problem. They are part of the solution. The West must not flinch.*

**By Maxime Marquette, columnist**

## Columnist's transparency note

### Editorial stance

I am not a journalist but a **columnist and analyst**. My expertise lies in observing and analysing the geopolitical, economic and strategic dynamics that shape our world. My work is to take political strategies apart, to understand global economic movements, to put the decisions of international actors in context and to offer analytical perspectives on the changes that are redefining our societies.

I do not claim the cold objectivity of traditional journalism, which stops at reporting facts. **I claim analytical clarity**, rigorous interpretation and a deep understanding of the complex issues that concern us all. My role is to give meaning to the facts, to place them in their historical and strategic context, and to offer a critical reading of events.

### Method and sources

This text keeps the basic distinction between **verified facts and interpretive analysis**. The rule never changes: a factual claim is published only when a verifiable source supports it, and the sources this article actually used are listed under **Sources**, never here.

**Primary source families** used by the publication, when the story has them: official statements from governments and international institutions, public statements by political leaders, reports from intergovernmental organisations, dispatches from recognised international news agencies.

**Secondary source families**: specialised publications, internationally recognised news media, analyses from established research institutions, reports from industry organisations.

When an article cites statistical, economic or geopolitical data, it comes from the institutions that produce it (intergovernmental organisations, central banks, national statistics offices), and the exact institution is named under **Sources**.

### Nature of the analysis

The analyses, interpretations and perspectives in the analytical sections of this article are a **critical, contextual synthesis** based on the information available, the trends observed and the expert comments cited in the sources consulted.

My role is to interpret these facts, to set them in the context of today's geopolitical and economic dynamics, and to give them a coherent meaning within the larger story of the changes shaping our time. These analyses reflect expertise built through continuous observation of international affairs and an understanding of the strategic mechanisms that drive global actors.

This article describes a documented state of affairs on its publication date, not a prediction: later developments may shift its outlook. No update is promised in advance; when an article is corrected or completed, the change is dated in the text.

## Sources

### Primary sources

- [Ukrainska Pravda — Ukraine's 40-day deep-strike operation: strategic objectives and progress — June 26, 2026](https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2026/06/26/8041208/)

- [Militarnyi — Moscow refinery unlikely to resume operations before 2027 after drone strikes — June 2026](https://militarnyi.com/en/news/moscow-refinery-unlikely-to-resume-operations-after-drone-strikes-until-2027-reuters/)

- [Institute for the Study of War — Russian offensive campaign assessment, June 26, 2026](https://understandingwar.org/research/russia-ukraine/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-june-26-2026/)

### Secondary sources

- [Euromaidan Press — Ukraine's drone campaign against Russian energy infrastructure — June 2026](https://euromaidanpress.com/2026/06/ukraine-drone-strikes-russia-energy-infrastructure/)

- Foreign Policy — Ukraine's coercive strategy: striking Moscow and the logic of deep warfare — June 2026

- Kyiv Independent — Ukraine drone strikes Kapotnya refinery, Kerch ships in 40-day operation — June 2026

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Source: Maxime Marquette, MadMax. When citing, name the author and link https://mad-max.co/en/article/editorial-frapper-moscou-n-est-pas-de-l-escalade-c-est-de-la-negociation