Ukraine is increasingly striking Russia’s economic infrastructure deep behind the front line. On 7 September, Ukrainian forces reportedly hit oil refineries in Ryazan Oblast, Perm Krai and Tatarstan, alongside other military and logistical targets.
For Moscow, these are not simply attacks on individual industrial facilities. Oil refining is part of the imperial machine that turns the resources of territories controlled by the Kremlin into money, fuel and military power.
The significance is that strikes are increasingly reaching regions that Moscow has long presented as an unquestionable part of a supposedly unified Russia. Tatarstan, Perm, the Urals and Siberia form a vast space whose resources have been integrated into an economic system centered on Moscow.
The strikes challenge that imperial geography. The war launched by the Kremlin against Ukraine is increasingly returning to the infrastructure that sustains the empire itself.
For peoples subordinated to Moscow, this carries another message: the empire is not invulnerable. Its economic centre can be weakened, its logistics disrupted, and its ability to control an enormous territory challenged.
When imperial infrastructure begins to become a vulnerability for the empire itself, the question is no longer only how Moscow loses its war. It is also what comes after Moscow’s defeat.
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