Ukraine–Russia War

There are images that encapsulate a historical transformation better than any treatise. The column of black smoke that rose from the Moscow Refinery in the Kapotnya district, sixteen kilometers from the Kremlin, on the morning of June 18, 2026, is one of those images. Not because of the material damage—considerable, but repairable—but because of what it announced: a state without air superiority, without bomber fleets, and without tactical nuclear weapons managed to project destructive power over the symbolic and industrial heart of its continental adversary, using machines that cost less than a mid-range car.

This book uses this specific event as a starting point to develop a broader thesis and pose a question about the future. The thesis: the Ukrainian campaign against Russian refining ceased to be a series of media-driven incursions and became the most successful long-range strategic economic interdiction operation since the Allied Oil Campaign of 1944-45—and, by achieving this through cheap, distributed, and deniable means, inaugurated an era in which strategic reach ceased to be the monopoly of the great powers. The question: what does this transformation tell us about the course of the war in the next three to four years?

To answer this, the book rejects two shortcuts. The first is triumphalism, which interprets each burning refinery as proof of Russia's imminent collapse—when energy revenues represent little more than a fifth of the federal budget and the Russian economy, although stagnant, is not on the brink of collapse. The second is defeatism, which dismisses the campaign as inconsequential fireworks—when it has already forced export bans, rationing in dozens of regions, and the reversal of Russia from a fuel exporter to an importer. The truth, as is almost always the case in war, lies in the middle ground and requires patience with the numbers.

The work is organized into nine parts. Part I reconstructs the war from the 2022 invasion to 2026, so that the non-specialist reader has the context without which nothing else is understood. Parts II to VI dissect the refinery campaign—the event, the instrument, the target, the effects, and its historical, doctrinal, and legal aspects. Parts VII and VIII shift the focus to the entirety of the war and its probable future, with scenarios and warning indicators. Part IX draws out the implications for NATO, Europe, and Portugal, and concludes. Three appendices—a glossary, a general chronology, and a panel of indicators—serve as a compass.

A word about ambition. I don't intend to prophesy; prophecy is charlatanism. I intend to engage in disciplined foresight: to read the dominant trends and possible bifurcations, always anchored in verifiable data and always distinguishing what I know from what I suppose. If the reader closes the book able to distinguish, in the daily torrent of news, the noise from the signal—and to recognize, behind each burning refinery, the epochal shift it heralds—then it will have been worthwhile to write it.