Let us begin with the drones. Not the whimsical buzzing things you fly in the park while your Labrador chases shadows, but the grim reapers of the Donbas, the sort that turn a Tuesday afternoon into a cloud of smoke and a hole in the ground. Eight dead in Russian-occupied Ukraine, the wires say. Eight souls extinguished by a whirring assassin with no conscience and a GPS coordinate. The British-supplied air defence systems, those marvels of engineering and export licensing, have left a gap. A gap the size of a coffin, perhaps, or the moral vacuum inside a Kremlin strategist’s head.
I imagine the scene: a marketplace, a queue for bread, the shuffle of weary feet. Then a sound like a giant wasp with a grudge. Then nothing. Then everything. The drones, they say, are Iranian-made, or Russian-assembled, or perhaps they sprout from the soil like poisoned mushrooms. Who knows anymore? The fog of war is thicker than the gin in my thermos.
Now, let us consider the British angle. His Majesty's Government, bless their starched collars, has sent air defence systems to Ukraine with the solemn promise that they will shield the innocent. And yet here we are, counting bodies in occupied territory. Is this a failure of technology? A failure of logistics? Or simply the eternal truth that war is a leaky bucket, and every system has a flaw the size of a politician’s promise?
But the gap is not just in the radar. It is in the rhetoric. We speak of ‘defence gaps’ as if they were potholes in a council road, easily filled with asphalt and a bit of grumbling. But this gap is a chasm of blood and bureaucracy. The drones slip through because the systems are too few, too slow, too bound by the red tape of coalition warfare. Or perhaps because the Russians have learned to fly low, to hide in the clutter, to exploit the gap between what we supply and what we actually defend.
And what of the occupied? The eight dead are not just statistics; they are people who woke up under Russian rule, who dreamed of liberation, who died under a sky that had forgotten to protect them. Their tragedy is that they are trapped between two armies, each claiming righteousness, each dropping death from above. The air defence gap is a metaphor for a world where promises are made in London, broken in the Donbas, and forgotten in the next news cycle.
I look at my gin glass, half empty, half full, half nonsense. It is warm, the ice having surrendered to the heat of my fury. I think of the engineers who designed those systems, the politicians who signed the cheques, the soldiers who operate them. They are all part of a great machine that grinds slow but exceedingly fine. Yet the grinding never stops, and the gaps remain.
Let us raise a glass to the eight. Not a salute, but a toast of bitter recognition. They are the price of our civilisation, the cost of our complacency, the evidence that in war, the gap between intention and outcome is always measured in human lives. The drones will fly again. The systems will fail again. And I will write again, because that is the only defence I have against the absurdity of it all.
