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As the four great non-thinkers of our age – Donald Trump, JD Vance, Steve Witkoff, and Marco Rubio – flushed the withered remnants of America’s diplomatic credibility down the gold-plated toilet of time, Vladimir Putin unleashed unholy hell on the city of Kyiv last night.
At 1 am, when everyone was home due to the midnight curfew, air raid alarms sounded in Kyiv. This is a regular occurrence; many of them are false alarms, and the tendency is to wait and see if anything happens. About fifteen minutes later, the sound of air defence rockets and heavy machine gun fire echoed through the city’s suburbs. Again, this is a fairly regular event, but what followed has shaken the city to its core.
In a few moments, what began as a regular air raid escalated into a full-on combined Shahed drone, Iskander ballistic missile, and cruise missile attack. The buildings in downtown Kyiv trembled as rocket after rocket struck the city. Outside, a few revellers on the wrong side of the curfew screamed and dashed for shelter. Searchlights illuminated the night sky as air defence gunners tracked the high-pitched, tell-tale whine of drones circling the city.
At the same time, the bright orange trails of ballistic missile engines streaked across the sky, impacting with sickening, deep explosions on apartment blocks. Kyiv, usually well defended with American Patriot missile systems, was overwhelmed by the scale of the attack. As emergency service vehicles raced to the scenes, reports of fires raging across the city were posted on social media. Acrid smoke and ash drifting on the night breeze served as ominous portents of what would later emerge.
This morning, I drove to the scene of the most devastating attack: a housing
complex in the Svaytoshinsky neighbourhood, fifteen minutes from downtown Kyiv. The
destruction was total and complete. It’s hard to convey the extent of the destruction; the
best I can manage is that an area of four to five football pitches was in ruins.
At a press briefing, the official death toll was adjusted from nine to eight, as rescuers had
mistakenly assumed that body parts recovered from the ruins were a victim’s, when in fact
they were limbs from the confirmed dead. Over a hundred people, including many children, have been wounded.
Ten people had officially been reported as missing. Heavy-duty lifting equipment and
hundreds of search and rescue workers, many with sniffer dogs, combed the wreckage
looking for more bodies.
The elderly were the most tragic. They milled about, comforted by their neighbours, yet still in a state of deep shock as they surveyed the remnants of their lives now strewn across the rubble-filled gardens. Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko surveyed the ruins and invited Donald Trump to come and see for himself the Russian atrocities.
In total, 70 missiles and 150 Shahed drones were unleashed on Ukraine last night. Such
coordinated attacks are not spontaneous and require weeks of planning. The deep fear here is that America’s slide into total alignment with Russia raises a more sinister question about the timing of the attack.
