In Kyiv, an air-raid siren no longer sounds like the herald of the apocalypse. After a while, it just sounds like a neighbour’s faulty car alarm that you’ve learned to ignore while you order another drink, writes British urban explorer James Galbraith.
When death falls from the sky on a weekly basis, the human brain simply recalculates the baseline for normality. Danger just becomes the weather.
We are currently witnessing a masterclass in missing the point. Lobbing a few million quid’s worth of supersonic metal at a children’s clinic or a block of flats does absolutely nothing to shift a trench line 300 miles away.
It is the exact same flawed maths the Luftwaffe applied to London in 1940: the delusion that if you turn enough civilian postcodes into smoking rubble, the population will simply throw their hands up and surrender.
It didn’t work for the Nazis, and it isn’t working now.
During the Blitz, the British public didn’t suddenly develop a fondness for fascism just because their local pub was vaporised. They got deeply cynical, and they developed a stubbornness born entirely out of spite. You can only terrorise people for so long before the terror ferments into an exhausted, aggressive boredom.
Real resilience isn’t some romanticised stiff-upper-lip singsong. It’s a man sweeping glass off the pavement at 7:00 AM so he can open his cafe for breakfast. It’s the sheer, unadulterated refusal to let an autocrat in a bunker dictate your schedule.
Every cruise missile wasted on a playground is performative cruelty. It’s a fireworks display for a domestic audience back home so failing generals can pretend they are doing something decisive. But you cannot bomb a nation into submission when the only thing you’re successfully destroying is their patience.
They’re just wasting their ammunition.
