Ukraine's attack on Saint Petersburg 'brings war back to Russia'

Oh, for the love of Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf - here we are, watching the whole ghastly symphony of escalation replay itself like a scratched record, the needle jumping from one atrocity to the next with the mechanical precision of a Soviet-era tractor. Ukraine, in a move that makes chess look like checkers played by drunken babushkas, has lobbed a little “fair response” right into the heart of Saint Petersburg, that once-elegant city where Pushkin strolled and Dostoevsky brooded, now reduced to a stage set for some absurdist tragedy where the director keeps changing the script mid-scene. Zelensky, bless his telegenic soul, delivers this “fairness” with the gravitas of a man who’s just balanced his checkbook and found it in the black - never mind that fairness, like a good soufflé, requires more than one ingredient, and the ones missing here are restraint, diplomacy, and, frankly, a map that doesn’t look like it was drawn by a sleepwalking cartographer.

The Russians, of course, will now respond in kind, because that’s the script: tit for tat, but with the gloves off and the brass knuckles on, and before you can say “Chekhov’s gun,” we’ll be treated to another round of “escalation with quiet confidence,” a phrase that sounds like it was coined by a committee of actuaries who moonlight as undertakers. The whole affair has the rhythm of a bad polka - two steps forward, one step back, and a misstep that sends everyone tumbling into the orchestra pit. I can just see it now: the diplomats in their starched collars, the generals with their chests bristling with medals like overripe pomegranates, all dancing on the edge of a crater that used to be a bakery or a kindergarten or, God help us, a hospital.

And what’s the point? To prove that war is hell? We already knew that. To show that violence begets violence? A revelation so profound it could only come from a think tank funded by defense contractors. No, the real tragedy is that this is all so predictable, like a bad sequel where the hero keeps making the same mistakes but with more explosions. The only thing missing is the popcorn, and even that would be in poor taste.

Thursday.

They say it brings the war ‘back’ to Russia.

Back. As if it had ever left. As if a war is a parcel that can be returned to sender, postage due. The trapdoor opens here: the war was always in Russia. It was in the mothers who get the wrong kind of official letter. It was in the empty chairs at dinner tables where sons and fathers used to sit. It was in the silence that follows the state television being switched off. It just hadn’t, until now, been in the architecture.

That’s the thing about empires. They export the violence but keep the picturesque facades. They build grand cities like stage sets, forgetting that eventually, someone in the audience might throw something onto the stage. Saint Petersburg was always a beautiful idea hammered into a swamp by a tsar who thought geometry could defeat nature. Now it learns that geometry does not defeat ballistics either.

Zelensky calls it ‘fair’. FAIRNESS is another of those CAPITALISED ABSTRACTIONS, like GLORY or DESTINY. It’s what generals and politicians invoke when the arithmetic of grief becomes too complicated for human hearts to calculate. One rocket for your hundred dead, two for our fifty. Fairness is the language you use when you have run out of everything else, including hope.

And yet.

The humanist reversal, always. Somewhere in Saint Petersburg tonight, a man is sweeping up glass. Not a soldier, not a strategist. A man with a broom. His back aches. He’s thinking about where to get a pane of glass replaced, and how much it will cost, and whether his cousin in the hardware trade will do him a favour. The war, for him, is now a problem of glaziers and dustpans. It has become domestic. It has come home.

That’s the real ‘bringing back’. Not the symbolism of striking a famous skyline, but the simple, dreadful mundanity of conflict arriving in the hallway and taking off its boots. It’s the same hallway, everywhere. The same dust.

We build monuments to forget the people. Then the people, through their awful, persistent habit of existing, remind us what the monuments were supposed to be about in the first place.

Diary Entry

The reports of Ukraine striking Saint Petersburg present a curious symmetry. Zelensky calls it “fair,” and on the surface, it appears as a simple equation of retaliation - an eye for an eye. But symmetry in war is often an illusion. The proposition that a strike on one city justifies a strike on another assumes both acts are morally equivalent, which requires evidence I do not yet possess.

What interests me is not the act itself, but the language framing it. “Bringing war back to Russia” implies war had left, which is false - war has been in Russia’s making since the invasion began. The phrase suggests a shift in perception, not fact. Similarly, calling it “fair” raises questions of proportionality. If fairness is measured in destruction, then the standard must apply equally to both sides - yet I see no impartial tribunal weighing the scales.

The more troubling implication is the assumption that escalation is inevitable. If every strike demands a counterstrike, the logic leads only to ruin. This is not theory; it is arithmetic. By this reasoning, war has no terminus but exhaustion.

I withhold judgment on the act itself - the evidence is too fragmented. But I observe with unease how readily we accept the language of retaliation as justification, as if history has taught us nothing of its consequences. The question is not whether it is fair, but whether it is wise. And wisdom, unlike fairness, cannot be measured in explosions.