More attacks on Ukrainian civilians

Sunday 26 April 2026

There are moments in a war when the language of strategy collapses under the weight of events — when the analyst’s lexicon of “targets”, “capabilities”, and “operational objectives” becomes morally threadbare. The latest wave of Russian strikes upon Ukraine, killing at least ten people in the Dnipro region on 25 April 2026, is such a moment. It demands not merely description but judgment.

For more than two years the war launched by Vladimir Putin against Ukraine has oscillated between phases of grinding military attrition and episodes of theatrical brutality. The most recent strikes belong emphatically to the latter category. They are not acts of war in the classical sense — engagements between armed formations seeking advantage on a battlefield. They are instead punitive expeditions against a civilian population, designed to terrorise, exhaust, and degrade the social fabric of a nation that has refused to submit.

The pattern is by now grimly familiar. Missiles and drones descend not upon entrenched positions, but upon apartment blocks, power stations, hospitals, railway junctions — the sinews of civilian life. The targets are chosen not because they yield tactical gains, but because they impose maximum psychological cost. In the vocabulary of international law such conduct approaches, and often crosses, the threshold of war crimes. In the vocabulary of history, it is something older and more primitive: barbarism.

Barbarism is a word that has been overused and diluted, but in its original sense it captures something precise. It describes the abandonment of restraint — the rejection of the idea that even in war there exist limits, boundaries beyond which violence becomes self-defeating, even for the victor. Those limits are not merely legal conventions codified in treaties; they are civilisational achievements, painfully constructed over centuries of European conflict. The Geneva Conventions, the norms against targeting civilians, the distinction between combatant and non-combatant — these are not abstract ideals. They are the accumulated wisdom of a continent that has seen what happens when such restraints collapse.

In striking Ukraine’s cities with indiscriminate ferocity, Russia is not merely attacking her adversary. She is repudiating that inheritance. She is reverting to a mode of warfare that belongs less to the modern state system than to the sack of medieval towns — a politics of fear, plunder, and spectacle.

Yet there is a further dimension to this violence, one that distinguishes it from historical precedents. The strikes are conducted with advanced technology — precision-guided munitions, long-range drones, satellite targeting. This is not the chaos of primitive warfare. It is the calculated application of modern science to ancient impulses. The paradox is stark: a technologically sophisticated military apparatus employed not to achieve decisive battlefield outcomes, but to inflict suffering upon civilians at scale.

This convergence of technological modernity and moral regression is one of the defining features of the present war. It raises uncomfortable questions about the relationship between capability and restraint. Possession of advanced weapons does not, in itself, produce civilised conduct. On the contrary, it may enable more efficient forms of barbarism when unmoored from ethical constraint.

The humanitarian consequences are immediate and severe. Each strike leaves behind not only physical destruction but also a residue of trauma that accumulates over time. Families are displaced, children are orphaned, communities are fractured. The destruction of energy infrastructure, in particular, carries long-term implications — exposing civilians to cold, darkness and economic paralysis. These are not collateral effects; they are integral to the strategy.

There is also a diplomatic dimension. Such strikes complicate any prospect of negotiation. They harden attitudes within Ukraine, where the idea of compromise becomes increasingly untenable in the face of continued assault upon civilians. They also shape international perceptions, reinforcing the view that Russia is not merely pursuing strategic interests but is engaged in a campaign that disregards the basic norms of international conduct. In this sense, each missile that strikes a residential building carries a political message far beyond its immediate impact.

For Ukraine, the response has been one of resilience — a word that risks becoming cliché, but which remains accurate. Civil defence systems adapt, air defences improve incrementally, and the population endures. Yet endurance should not be mistaken for normalisation. The capacity to absorb violence does not legitimise it; it merely reflects the absence of alternatives.

For Europe and the wider international community, the question is more uncomfortable. What is to be done when a major power systematically employs such methods? Sanctions, diplomatic isolation and military assistance to Ukraine are the principal instruments available. Yet their effectiveness depends upon consistency and resolve. If barbarism is met with equivocation, it acquires a form of tacit acceptance.

There is a temptation, particularly amongst distant observers, to view the strikes as part of the background noise of a protracted conflict — tragic but inevitable. That temptation must be resisted. The deliberate targeting of civilians is not an incidental feature of war; it is a choice. It reflects decisions taken at the highest levels of command and political authority. To describe it as anything less than barbarism is to obscure its nature.

History will judge these events, as she judges all wars. But her judgements are not formed in abstraction; they are shaped by the responses of contemporaries. Whether the Russian strikes on civilian targets in Ukraine come to be seen as a turning point — a moment when the international community reasserted the limits of acceptable conduct — or as another step in the erosion of those limits, depends upon what follows.

For now what can be said with clarity is this. The missiles that fall upon Ukraine’s cities do more than destroy buildings. They assault the very idea that war can be constrained by law and morality. In doing so, they reveal not strength, but a profound and dangerous regression — a descent into a form of warfare that Europe once believed it had left behind.