Kyiv
When Winston Churchill visited bomb sites during the Blitz, the most common sentiment he heard was, ‘We can take it!’, followed closely by ‘Give it ’em back!’. That emotion is very evident in Kyiv, where Ukrainians are understandably nonplussed at opposition in some British newspapers like the Times to their drone attacks on Moscow. They point out that they are attacking military targets there, unlike Russia’s terror attacks on civilians.
I was in Kyiv as part of General David Petraeus’s delegation to a conference organised by the Cipher Brief, a national security-focused media organisation. He and I are publishing a book entitled Conflict: The Evolution of Warfare From 1945 to the Russian Invasion of Ukraine in October, which includes a chapter on the future of war, so it was invaluable to meet special-operations, military-intelligence, cyber-security and army officers. For all that we learnt about the probable future of warfare, however, the banshee wail of sirens is an atavistic sound redolent of its past.
I downloaded the Air Alarm Ukraine app, which proved useful in warning about the nightly air-raids, but despite being attacked by more than 400 Iranian Shahed drones and 114 cruise missiles in the past month, Kyiv is in fact one of the less unsafe cities, as it is superbly protected by the Patriot anti-missile system. An aide to President Zelensky joked that just as celebrities are given lifetime supplies of products they promote, Ukraine should get a lifetime’s supply of Patriot missiles from its manufacturer Raytheon. The attacks on Kyiv have cost Russia $1.7 billion, which Ukrainians point out it can only afford because European countries still buy so much of its oil and gas.
Earlier in the war another kind of patriot shot at drones: Kyiv citizens who went out on to their roofs to take potshots.
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