While the World Does the Arithmetic
Thucydides left us one of the coldest sentences in all of literature: the strong do what they can, the weak suffer what they must. The Athenians said it to the Melians, who were still foolish enough to hope for fairness. I think of that dialogue whenever I hear a country’s fate being settled in rooms where its people are not sitting.
Thucydides left us one of the coldest sentences in all of literature: the strong do what they can, the weak suffer what they must. The Athenians said it to the Melians, who were still foolish enough to hope for fairness. I think of that dialogue whenever I hear a country’s fate being settled in rooms where its people are not sitting.
This week there were plenty of such rooms. There were also places far louder.
On 7 October a Russian missile hit Pryluky and killed 22 people, children among them. The next day it was Kramatorsk, and the victims were people standing near passenger buses. The Associated Press first reported 30 dead; Reuters later put the toll at 35, counting subsequent attacks. These numbers have a habit of climbing, because the rubble keeps giving up its stories. Over two days, Zelensky says, 78 people were killed across the country and 215 wounded. A bus stop does not look like a military target, whatever the word used for it in Moscow. A week earlier, on 2 October, an FPV drone struck a bus on its regular route in the same city. Two people were hurt then. This time it ended differently.
Winter as a weapon
The front line has barely moved. The sky is what has moved. Missiles and drones are going after power stations, substations and water systems, and Kyiv has already gone to emergency blackouts. The weather is an accomplice here. In a few weeks every hit on the grid will mean something far more personal than “economic damage”: a cold flat, a hospital running on a generator, a child doing homework by candlelight.
Moscow is playing a game of attrition and makes little effort to hide it. It wants the cost of the war to become kitchen-table personal. None of this means the front is about to crumble, though. History offers plenty of cases where the sky burned and the line held. London in 1940 and Hamburg in 1943 are reminders that bombing rarely breaks a will as quickly as the bombers expect.
Ukraine answers in kind. A Russian tech company has confirmed damage to its data centre in the Ryazan region. Ukraine’s military claims a strike on a refinery complex at Salavat, and so far that is only a claim. Both sides are lengthening their lists of “legitimate targets”. Escalation ladders have a peculiar property: it is easy to add rungs and almost impossible to take them away.
Talk about who owns what
Meanwhile Washington and Brussels are speaking another language. Zelensky has publicly reproached the Americans for not providing what is needed to defend the skies, and he is again asking for access to satellite capabilities. Marco Rubio calls the war a dangerous stalemate and promises not to abandon mediation. Both statements may be sincere. They are simply about different things. For Kyiv, strength must come first and talks second. For Washington, talking matters in itself, even when nothing is visibly coming of it.