On the first night of my recent trip to Russia, driving from the airport at around two in the morning, I passed a gas station just outside Moscow. A long line of cars and trucks snaked around it, waiting for their ration of 40 liters (about 10 gallons) of fuel.
At least this station was still operating. Several others I passed along the way had no gasoline to sell at all.
There was something surreal about watching drivers queue for fuel in the capital of one of the world’s largest oil-producing countries. I had never seen anything like it in the city where I grew up. It was also an unmistakable sign that the war Russia launched against Ukraine was becoming much harder to keep at a comfortable distance—even in Moscow, the city the Kremlin had worked hardest to shield from it.
For most of the past four years, the Russian capital existed in a kind of parallel reality—something I repeatedly observed on my semiannual trips back home. While Ukrainian cities were being bombarded, occupied, and destroyed, Moscow’s restaurants, shops, and nightclubs remained busy. Western businesses, many of which left the country in the immediate wake of the invasion of Ukraine, had reopened using Russian names. (McDonald’s became Vkusno—i tochka, which can be roughly translated as “Tasty—period.”) While poorer Russian regions bore the brunt of mobilization and military recruitment, Muscovites had remained comparatively insulated from the war’s human costs, with independent casualty tallies consistently showing the capital had suffered among the country’s lowest per-capita battlefield losses. The war itself was confined mostly to TV, where it was packaged as a distant “special military operation,” conducted by soldiers somewhere far away.
Until now.
