Another day, another salvo of Russian missiles slamming into a Kyiv suburb. The residential quarter of Vyshneve now bears the familiar scars: shattered windows, smouldering wreckage, and the hollowed-out shells of apartment blocks. Survivors sift through the debris, their faces a mask of grim resignation. ‘They fix buildings, not souls,’ one elderly woman tells a reporter, gesturing at the emergency crews. The phrase is perfect in its bleakness, a testament to a war that grinds on, indifferent to human suffering.
Let us be clear, this is not a military strike. This is a deliberate act of terror, a tactic as old as war itself. The Russians are not seeking to break Ukraine’s defence lines; they are seeking to break its people. And in that, they are succeeding, but not in the way Moscow imagines. The buildings can be repaired, the glass replaced. But the soul? That is a different matter.
I think of Rome, of the Gothic wars, when the city was sacked not once but thrice, and the citizens learned to live among the ruins. They repaired aqueducts, they patched up temples, but something inside them had died. The empire’s soul had been corroded by decades of decay. Ukraine is not Rome, not yet. But the pattern is there: the slow erosion of hope, the gradual acceptance of loss. The woman’s words echo not just her own pain but a collective weariness.
And yet, there is a perverse historical parallel. The Victorians, for all their moralising, understood something about resilience. They built monuments and hospitals, but they also knew that the spirit of a people must be fed by more than bricks. They had their own wars, their own terrors. But they also had a sense of national identity, a stubborn refusal to be erased. Ukraine has that too, in spades. The question is whether it can outlast the steady drip-drip of trauma.
The West, of course, will send more aid, more air defence systems. But what about the soul? The intellectual decadence of our age, with its obsession with safety and comfort, is no match for the raw brutality of Russian strategy. We talk of sanctions and defensive perimeters, but we forget that war is, at bottom, a contest of wills. The Ukrainians are fighting for their existence. The Russians are fighting for a fantasy of empire. Both are driven by something deeper than territory.
I look at the photograph of the woman, her face smudged with grit, her eyes hollow. She is not broken, not yet. But the missile that tore through her home also tore through her illusions. She now knows that no amount of reconstruction can bring back the dead, or restore the trust that once lived in her heart. That is the real cost of this war: a generation scarred not just by bullets, but by the death of normalcy.
So what is to be done? We can send more warnings, more condemnations. But as the old saying goes, ‘The best among men are those who are useful to others.’ And the most useful thing we can do now is to remember that Ukraine’s fight is our fight. If the souls break, the rest is mere paperwork. The missiles will keep falling. But so long as the people keep fixing, not just buildings but each other, there is still a chance that the soul will endure. The historians will judge us not by the number of missiles we intercepted, but by the courage we showed in the face of rubble.
