Kyiv has had 9 missile attacks this month so far. Beyond intense and totally evil.

Timothy Snyder describes the situation brilliantly :

We have to work to preserve the concepts needed to characterize Russian behavior even as the Russian state strives to make them meaningless.  It is certainly terrorism to launch missiles and drones at a city.  What if, for no reason at all, the United States launched ballistic missiles at Toronto?  Certainly this would be terrorism, among many other things.

And what if American leaders and propagandists, in this hypothetical scenario, gave senseless reasons for such an action?  What if they claimed that Canadians and Americans were actually one people, and that Canadians who did not realize this had to be killed?  That the U.S.-Canadian border was illegitimate because of Joe Biden’s personal views about the past?  That English speakers in Canada needed to be united with their true American homeland? That Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau was a Nazi?

The day after these latest missile attacks, though, there was less to “celebrate,” since all of the Russian missiles and drones were shot down by Ukrainian air defense.  The noise woke up the city of Kyiv, but not one of the Russian missiles or drones reached its target.  Kyivans have to live with the knowledge that Moscow wants them dead, but they also know that they are being defended.  Of course it is good for Ukraine when its citizens are protected.  But they should not be attacked in the first place.