Grain, Fuel, Blood: Russia's War Economy Is Cracking

In eastern Ukraine, in a city that has absorbed more Russian ordnance than most governments could calculate, a woman goes to collect something — bread, water, a child from school — and the air becomes fire. Kramatorsk. The name appears in dispatches the way certain names always do in long wars: repeatedly, quietly, until the repetition itself becomes a kind of violence. Civilian casualties in Ukraine have reached their highest level since May 2022, and the number carries a particular weight because 2022 was the year the world was still paying attention.

But zoom out from the crater and something else becomes visible. Ukraine has spent months doing what smaller militaries do when they cannot match an opponent gun for gun: they go for the engine. Drone strikes on Russian oil infrastructure have been consistent, deliberate, and — by Moscow's own admission — effective enough to produce new petrol shortages inside Russia. This is not a side story. A war machine runs on fuel, and fuel runs on revenue, and revenue runs on the exports that Ukraine has been systematically targeting from a distance. The strikes on Russian energy sites are not spectacle. They are arithmetic.

The grain attacks work the same logic from a different angle. Ukraine and Russia have both been hitting each other's food storage — warehouses, silos, transport corridors — and the damage is beginning to ripple outward in the way agricultural destruction always does: slowly, then everywhere at once. Food price analysts are watching the Black Sea corridor with the same attention usually reserved for central bank meetings, because what gets destroyed in eastern Ukraine gets priced in Lagos and Dhaka and Valletta three months later. Wars are local until they aren't.

Meanwhile, in the southeastern Ukrainian countryside, something unexpected: Ukrainian forces retook 26 settlements and more than 600 square kilometres of territory in a coordinated mechanised push that analysts at the Institute for the Study of War are describing as proof that Kyiv can still mount offensive operations after four years of largely static warfare. 600 square kilometres is not a symbolic number. It is villages, roads, farmland — geography that carries weight when the eventual negotiations come, as all negotiations eventually do.

And then there is Sebastian Coe, standing in front of cameras to defend World Athletics' sanctions against Russian track and field, promising to fight the new arbitration claim at the Court of Arbitration for Sport. The claim is that Russian athletes are being punished collectively for their government's decisions. The counter-claim is that sport does not exist outside history. Both are true, which is precisely why the argument never ends — it just changes venue.

What connects all of it is a single thread: Russia is absorbing costs — military, economic, diplomatic, sporting — that are not decreasing. The war is not going the way it was designed to go. The engine is still running, but it is running rough.