The body lay under a grey blanket on a rain-slicked street in Kyiv. Just hours earlier, it had been a mother, a father, a daughter, a son. Now it was a number, another tally in a war that has dragged on for 700 days.
The UK government responded with the usual solemn rhetoric and a pledge to bolster Ukraine's air defences. But for the families left behind, for the workers who will sweep up the glass tomorrow, for the nurses who will try to piece together the wounded, words feel hollow. The cost of this conflict is written not in budgets but in bones.
Britain is sending more missiles. It is not sending back the dead. In towns across the Midlands and the North, where the cost of living bites harder than any foreign policy speech, people watch the news and wonder when the price of war will hit their own kitchen tables.
The government says it is a matter of principle. The unions say it is a matter of resources. And in Ukraine, a woman weeps over a body in the street.
That is the real economy. That is the cost we all pay.
