Depth just stopped being a defense

Standoff weapons have made distance cheap. Cheap drones, launched from inside or just across Ukrainian territory, are landing 1,200 miles into Siberia, and the Omsk refinery — Russia's largest — is offline. Foreign Policy's reporting shows the geometry that once made Russia's industrial interior untouchable is now being broken by weapons the defender cannot reach and cannot afford to ignore.

Call it depth attrition: the slow, cumulative degradation of an economy's productive interior by repeated, recoverable strikes. It works because each hit is small enough to deny, and the sum is large enough to break things — the refining line, the fuel queue, the export contract, the state-media line. Four target classes — refineries, depots, export ports, fuel tanks — and the Black Sea tanker fleet are all in the kill chain. The 3.8 million barrels a day Russia now refines — down from 5.2 million before the war — is the visible scar of that pattern, and the spare capacity is being burned through.

This is not the front line moving. It is the front line dissolving. Standoff weapons have not won a war by destroying a tank column; they have won a position by making distance cheap. The Kremlin can keep losing one-fifth of something for a long time. It cannot keep doing so while drivers queue, ports sit dark, and state television runs out of ways to call it normal.