Casualties Reported in Recent Drone and Missile Attacks Between Russia and Ukraine

The takes

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  Adam Smith

  1723–1790, Scotland (the Scottish Enlightenment: Kirkcaldy, Glasgow, Edinburgh)

  Bombs, Bookstalls, and the Folly of War’s Grand Designers

  Aerial volleys that burn markets and warehouses do not defend a nation’s wealth; they dismember the very fabric from which that wealth is woven.

  Among the many images that reach me from your age, one seems to me more instructive than the rest: firefighters picking through the ruins of a book market struck by a missile, the wares of the stall-keeper scattered and charred in the street. We are told of drones in their hundreds and missiles in their dozens, of at least six killed in one country and at least five in the other, of civilians buried in rubble and wounded in their homes. States call these acts defence, retaliation, or necessity; the impartial spectator, if he could stand amidst the fallen books, would struggle to distinguish them from plain destruction.

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  John Locke

  1632–1704, England (writing amid the Exclusion Crisis and the Glorious Revolution)

  Drone War Without Consent Is Power Without Right

  When hundreds of unmanned engines cross borders to strike homes and markets, the question is not whose flag they serve, but whether any people ever consented to be so used.

  Men now speak of “hundreds of drones” launched in a night, of “822” intercepted here and “600” detected there, of warehouses in one country in flames and private houses in another struck from the sky, and they speak of it as if they were describing weather. We are told that at least six persons in Russia were killed by one such vast aerial attack, and that missiles and drones from Russia in turn have killed and wounded many in Ukrainian cities, even at a book market and in a town whose very name I only learn from your reports. I am struck less by the number of machines than by the ease with which the lives beneath them are counted up, and written off.

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  Niccolò Machiavelli

  1469–1527, Florence (republican secretary and diplomat, then exile, amid the Italian Wars)

  Ukraine’s Drone Swarm Shows How Weak States Must Fight Strong Ones

  When hundreds of small machines cross a great power’s skies, you are watching virtù search for a crack in fortuna’s armor — and you must judge it by results, not sermons.

  Ukraine hurls hundreds of drones across Russia; Russia answers with missiles and its own drones; civilians die on both sides, warehouses burn, markets are smashed, and governors count corpses in single digits while defense ministries boast in the hundreds. This is the scene. Some 600 drones are detected near Moscow, Russia claims to destroy 822, at least six people die in Russia, at least five in Ukraine, including in Kyiv and Kryvyi Rih. A warehouse of a great merchant, Wildberries, burns, and a book market lies in rubble. To lament this as “barbarous” is easy; to understand it as a struggle to maintain the state is harder, but more useful to anyone who must actually decide.

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