For years there was an unspoken bargain between the Kremlin and the residents of Moscow: you live normally, and the war is somewhere far away, on someone else's territory. That bargain is now falling apart - because Ukrainian drones increasingly reach Russian cities, carrying the conflict to where it wasn't before.

On May 17, over 500 drones attacked the Moscow region; at least three people died. St. Petersburg was hit hours before an economic forum in the Kremlin, and residents were told to stay home. In Khimki, just 18 kilometers from Moscow's center, a residential building was damaged. The war, in other words, is already knocking on the balconies.

Yelena Vladimirovna, a 56-year-old mother from the Moscow region, describes how her apartment caught fire after a drone strike - and expresses gratitude that she survived. Her neighbor Maksim describes the new everyday life with one bitter sentence: „Now I have two mobile phones, you know what I mean" - an allusion to the state surveillance that grows together with the fear.

Social anthropologist Aleksandra Arkhipova describes the collapse of that old, quiet bargain: „There's no war for you," was the message the Kremlin sent Muscovites for years. Now that message no longer holds. And the numbers show something deeper: according to the Levada Center, in April 62 percent supported peace negotiations, against 27 percent for continuing the military operation.

The Balkans know this dynamic by heart - war is an abstraction until it reaches your yard. When missiles fall on someone else's land, it's easy to stay silent; when the building next door catches fire, suddenly everyone has an opinion. The question Russia is now quietly asking itself is the same one many nations learned the hard way: how long can a state wage a war that its own people are starting to feel on their own skin?