In February 2022, Russian President Vladimir Putin told Russians that invading Ukraine was an act of self-defense. If NATO were left unchecked, he warned, Western missiles would soon be able to reach deep into Russia — past Volgograd, Kazan, Samara, even beyond the Ural Mountains. To prevent that nightmare, he launched what the Kremlin euphemistically calls a “special military operation.”

On June 20, a Ukrainian drone struck an oil refinery in Tyumen, in western Siberia — beyond the Urals, nearly 1,900 kilometers, roughly 1,200 miles, from the Ukrainian border. No NATO basing was required. Just Ukrainian drones, Ukrainian engineers, and four years of Putin insisting this could never happen. It was the deepest confirmed Ukrainian strike of the war, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky acknowledged it that evening.