The Kapotnya refinery is inside Moscow. Not the region. The city. And its core processing unit is on fire.
I’ve been watching this war for years now. I’ve seen the front lines shift, the cities burn, the bodies counted and miscounted. But tonight, a different kind of line was crossed. Not a territorial one.. a psychological one.
Photo by Patrick Hendry on Unsplash
The Kapotnya oil refinery is inside Moscow. Not the Moscow region. Not some distant industrial outpost. It sits within the administrative boundary of the Russian capital, about 15 kilometers from the Kremlin. It supplies roughly 40 percent of the fuel that keeps Moscow’s cars moving, its trucks delivering, its economy breathing. And tonight, its primary crude distillation unit — the AVT-6 installation — is on fire after a Ukrainian drone strike.
The mayor confirmed it. Air defenses, he said, intercepted dozens of drones. But some got through. One hit the heart of the refinery. And the heart is burning.
I keep thinking about the phrase Putin used when he launched this invasion. He told Russians the war was far away. It was a “special military operation” clinical, contained, something happening on television screens but not in…
