Russia shot down three of its own aircraft again, reportedly while trying to stop Ukrainian drones near St Petersburg. Seven pilots were killed. The joke belongs to the system that put them in the sky, pointed its own air defenses at them, and called the circus national security.
The dome has misplaced the memo
The Kremlin sells Russian air defense as a magic dome. Nothing gets through, every Ukrainian drone is supposedly intercepted, every target supposedly protected, every official map a flawless masterpiece. Then the dome starts firing at Russian aircraft. The state can insist the sky is under control, but the sky appears to have misplaced the memo.
This is not some isolated glitch in an otherwise efficient machine. When a state’s defenses are operating in crowded, frightened, poorly coordinated airspace, the people and machines meant to protect it can become targets too. The official story may change, the numbers may be argued over, and fog of war is real. But even the reported version is revealing.
A competent defense requires coordination, clear identification, reliable communications, training, and honest reporting. A propaganda defense needs a triumphant statement before breakfast. Russia has invested heavily in the second one. It shows.
The safe backyard
Ukraine has struck the oil-export terminal at Ust-Luga, on the Baltic coast west of St Petersburg. The terminal reportedly burned for much of the day, with fires visible in several places. The Russian missile corvette Naro-Fominsk was also reportedly hit. This is not a remote corner of the Black Sea that Moscow can pretend is somebody else’s problem. The Baltic is supposed to be comfortably inside Russia’s safe backyard.
Apparently, the backyard now has drones in it.
And then there is the refinery campaign. In just 13 days, Ukraine reportedly hit nine Russian refineries. The Omsk refinery, the country’s largest, was attacked for hours, more than 2,500 kilometres from Ukraine. The second-largest refinery, in the Leningrad region, had been hit two days earlier and was reportedly out of operation. This is not a single dramatic fire for television. It is pressure on the infrastructure that turns oil into fuel, money, transport, and military logistics.
Ukraine is striking Russian military and energy assets not just around the Black Sea, but across the Caspian and Baltic regions too. Russia has to defend ports, refineries, ships, airfields, and energy facilities across a huge territory while also prosecuting a war it chose to launch. Every new target adds another demand to a military system already stretched thin.
The bill comes due
Russian oil and shipping face rising insurance costs. Black Sea vessel insurance is put at as much as 10 percent of a ship’s value, compared with roughly a quarter of one percent before the full-scale invasion. At those rates, some voyages stop making commercial sense. A government can demand that the world fear its navy, but insurers are famously unmoved by patriotic speeches. They see risk, price it, and send the bill.
The domestic economy is not exactly providing a comforting counterpoint:
- A major Moscow-region fuel-station network reportedly moved toward bankruptcy amid a broader fuel shortage.
- The Bratsk aluminum plant had an explosion and fire, reportedly caused by a forklift, because even the mundane machinery seems to be auditioning for the role of national crisis.
- Yandex Cloud acknowledged losing some customer data, including originals and backups for a portion that could not be restored.
- A railway bridge collapsed in the Komi region, cutting off rail access to Vorkuta and surrounding areas, with no convenient road network ready to save the day.
Not every fire, outage, or broken bridge is caused by Ukraine. That distinction matters. The point is not that every bad thing in Russia is a Ukrainian operation. The point is that the state has built a country so brittle, and a war so demanding, that each failure lands on top of another. Then the propaganda machine tries to sell the pile as evidence of strength.
A successful operation, apparently
The Kremlin’s favorite trick is to treat every failure as proof of a greater victory. A refinery burns, but the drones were all intercepted. A ship is hit, but the fleet remains powerful. A region loses fuel, but the economy is resilient. Three aircraft are reportedly destroyed by their own side, but the air-defense operation was a success. Somewhere in Moscow, a spokesman is probably trying to staple the words “controlled situation” over a smoking hole.
It is also worth keeping the human cost straight. Seven pilots reportedly died in the friendly-fire incident. They were not the people writing the war’s grand promises or drawing the TV maps. They were inside a system whose leaders treat lives as expendable and mistakes as a public-relations inconvenience. The joke belongs on the regime, the command structure, and the endless television theater that calls preventable chaos a glorious defense. Not on the dead.
That distinction is one Moscow never manages when the victims are Ukrainian. It launches attacks on cities, power infrastructure, and civilian life, then demands sympathy for the consequences of its own aggression. It calls invasion security, calls occupation history, and calls every failed plan a strategic success. The arsonist keeps filing complaints about the smoke.
The contrast with Ukraine’s approach is not that Ukraine can strike without risk or that every operation goes perfectly. War is not a clean spreadsheet. Ukraine is forcing Russia to spend attention and resources defending places Moscow once treated as untouchable. Every refinery under threat, every port on alert, every ship needing protection, every aircraft ordered into a confused interception adds friction to the Russian war machine. Friendly fire adds a particularly grim kind.
And the regime cannot solve that problem with another announcement that all targets were destroyed. It can censor a video, blame sabotage, invent a NATO hand, or declare that the situation is fully under control. But it cannot make a burned terminal unburn. It cannot make a ship safer by calling it invincible. It cannot restore aircraft or pilots by changing the wording on state television.
Russia wants to wage a war of conquest, protect a vast network of military and energy assets, intimidate its neighbors, and keep the public convinced that nothing can reach it. Those goals collide with limited resources, stretched defenses, bad coordination, and a leadership that rewards the appearance of control more than the reality. So the system fires at the sky, the sky catches fire, and the Kremlin calls it a successful operation. Propaganda does not know friend from foe.