Owen Matthews has narrated this article for you to listen to.
Rome and Kyiv have one thing in common – the distinctive whine of motor-scooter engines in the night. The difference is that in Kyiv the high, Vespa-like noise does not rise from the streets but drifts down from among snow-laden clouds. It’s the unmistakable sound made by Iranian-designed Shahed-136 suicide drones, essentially modern-day doodlebugs armed with warheads big enough to collapse a medium-sized building. Kyivans nickname these sky-borne menaces ‘mopeds’.
Shaheds are slow-moving, low altitude and easy to spot, so Russia fires them after dark. With a great deal of noise and spectacular flashes in the night sky, Ukrainian anti-aircraft and Patriot missile batteries usually blow most of them out of the sky as they come in. But Patriot ammo is expensive and becoming increasingly scarce as Kyiv waits for US money to arrive, now that the grim drama of a minority of Republicans blocking military aid has finally been resolved. At the beginning of this latest winter of bombardments, Ukraine’s air defences were downing more than 90 per cent of the missiles and drones. Now, though exact figures are classified, the hit rate has palpably reduced. Last week, more than a dozen people were killed in their beds in Kyiv and residential buildings were reduced to flames and rubble.
Unlike last winter, when the Russians attempted to destroy Ukraine’s electricity infrastructure with precise attacks, the targets this year appear to be no more specific than the civilian-inhabited centres of major cities. Such a shift in strategy is almost as old as air war itself. During the second world war, the US Air Force advocated precision daytime bombing, the less well-equipped Royal Air Force favoured night-time carpet bombing – most famously, of Dresden.
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