A Russian missile has chosen to cosy up with a Kyiv suburb, turning a quiet Tuesday into a cacophony of breaking glass and shattered lives. The strike, which local officials are calling a 'brutal act of terrorism,' has left at least four dead and over thirty wounded. Among the wreckage: a community centre, a playground and whatever shreds of hope remained for a diplomatic solution. The Kremlin, with its usual grim theatre, insists it was targeting 'military infrastructure' – a phrase that now ranks alongside 'the cheque is in the post' and 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help' in the pantheon of hollow reassurances.
As the smoke billows and the wounded are triaged, Britain has remembered it has a moral compass. UK aid, including medical supplies and generators, is being scrambled. But let us not mistake charity for strategy. A few pallets of paracetamol do not a foreign policy make. The real question is whether this latest atrocity will stiffen spines in Whitehall or merely provide fodder for another round of earnest parliamentary questions. I suspect the latter, given our national talent for mistaking hand-wringing for action.
Meanwhile, the citizens of Kyiv suburbia pick through the debris. They are not looking for geopolitics. They are looking for their neighbours, their pets, their passports. The sheer unglamorous futility of it all: dying for a piece of land that will be disputed in law courts long after the blood is dry. This is not war as depicted in the cinema. This is war as a charnel house staffed by bureaucrats.
Yet even in this horror, there are moments of grim comedy. The Russian defence ministry's spokesman managed to describe the strike as 'precision' while speaking over footage of a smoking crater. I half expected him to praise the missile's upholstery.
So here we are again. Another city, another round of indignation, another shipment of aid that will soothe the consciences of the comfortable without disturbing the sleep of the perpetrators. The only thing rising faster than the body count is our capacity for outrage followed by forgetting.
Kyiv suburb, we see you. We may not save you, but we will certainly write about you.
