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

The dynamo of war, once exported, completes its circuit and returns to its source with a force the old diplomatic virtues were never calibrated to contain.

Every action generates its equal and opposite reaction, a fundamental law the architects of this conflict forgot would apply to their own systems.

The prince who believes he can inflict injury without receiving it in return understands neither human nature nor the inevitable logic of retaliation.

You cannot sow violence in another's fields and then express surprise when the harvest of that violence ripens upon your own.

Observe the same parabolic arc in a stone thrown into a pond and in a conflict launched from a capital, for both obey the law of equal dispersion.

Modern warfare is the terrible beauty of watching someone else's house burn, until the wind changes.

He who lights the fire should not complain when he smells the smoke.

Calling your violence 'justice' and theirs 'atrocity' is the oldest moral sleight-of-hand, concealing the identical will to power beneath both.

Having established the precedent that capitals are valid military targets, we must now, with perfect consistency, accept the logical extension of that precedent.

It is curious how a nation's definition of 'fair play' changes depending on which side of the board it finds its own pieces.

It appears to be a universal law that the cannonball you fire today will teach ballistics to your enemy by tomorrow.

'Bringing war back' implies it ever left, a grammatical deception that conceals its permanent residence in the language of statecraft.

Separate the demonstrative truth of cause and effect from the rhetorical claim of injustice, for the former operates regardless of the latter.