Ukraine Launches Over 1,000 Drones in Attacks Across Russia Including Moscow
Ukraine’s Drones, Russia’s Annexations, and the Limits of Just Resistance
A people robbed of their territory may rightly strike the aggressor’s war machine, but the law of nature draws a hard line at the deliberate or reckless harming of innocents, however righteous the cause.
On a recent Sunday, as I am told, more than a thousand Ukrainian drones crossed into Russia, hundreds headed toward Moscow itself, while the rulers there were completing several days of parliamentary elections. Russian officials say some 1,100 were shot down across their territory and over annexed Crimea; the mayor of Moscow reports damage to an oil refinery and to a residential building, and in the wider region a woman of forty‑four was killed when a drone struck a three‑storey dwelling. Ukrainian authorities, for their part, openly claim to have hit a key oil facility and logistics site, representing, in their phrase, billions that sustain the war machine. The field of contest has moved from trenches to refineries and apartment blocks.
At the same moment, those who govern in Moscow were holding elections not only in their own country, but also in four regions of Ukraine and in Crimea, all of which they have declared annexed, though they do not fully control them and the annexations are widely termed illegal. Here we have, in naked form, the two great questions of political power which exercised me when I wrote the Second Treatise of Government: first, by what right may one people claim dominion over the territory and persons of another; and second, by what right may the injured people employ force, and how far, to shake off that usurpation. The new instruments—drones, missiles, electronic screens—do not alter these old questions. They only make the stakes for the innocent more terrible.
I begin where I always have: with men in the state of nature, equal and independent, with a right to preserve their lives, liberties, and estates under the law of nature, which is reason teaching that no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions. From that condition, no man is born subject to another; any authority one has over another must arise by consent, and is held on trust for their good. When a state seated in Moscow claims that parts of Ukraine are now its own, holds votes there during an ongoing war, and enforces this claim by arms, it is not enough that ballots are cast or that decrees are issued. One must ask: did the people of those regions freely consent to quit one political community and join another; and does the new power plainly aim at their preservation? From what is reported, the annexations are described as illegal, the regions not even fully controlled. This wears, to my eye, all the marks of usurpation.
When I earlier argued that legislators who invade the people’s property or subject them to arbitrary power put themselves into a state of war with the people, I meant to fix just this point: the breach of trust lies first on the side of those who seize what is not theirs, not on those who resist. A people thus attacked are not rebels, but defenders. If Ukraine’s territory is annexed without lawful consent, then Ukraine, as a political society, retains the natural right that any man has when assaulted: to resist force with force, and, if need be, to carry the war back upon the aggressor’s soil until there is security that such injury will cease. To strike oil and logistics facilities that furnish the aggressor’s armies may therefore be, in kind, a legitimate act of war, an attempt to cut off the means by which an unjust conquest is sustained.
Yet the justice of the cause does not sanctify every means. The same law of nature that empowers a man to defend his life binds him not to take the life of the innocent. In these reports I find, on the Russian side, drones killing a mother and her two small children in a city under Ukrainian control, and four more persons in a car in another Ukrainian region; on the Ukrainian side, a drone that hits a residential building near Moscow and kills a woman in her own dwelling. Reason recoils alike at these. One may say that in war some collateral harm is hard to avoid; and I am not ignorant that in my own time besieged towns suffered much. But to foresee that one’s methods will repeatedly strike ordinary dwellings and yet persist, without visible, strict endeavour to distinguish combatant from non‑combatant, is to slide from unfortunate mischief into contempt of the workmanship of one Maker.
Those who defend such attacks on the grounds that the other side began, or that the other side does worse, forget that the law of nature is not a partisan. It binds all. If Russia, having first violated that law by invading and annexing, now attacks civilians with its own drones, it adds a new injury to the old. If Ukraine, resisting a long train of abuses, strikes not only refineries and logistics depots but also, with insufficient discrimination, the homes of persons who neither ordered nor consented to aggression, it stains a fundamentally just defence with acts that reason cannot wholly excuse. Political power is held on trust for those whose lives are entrusted to it, including one’s own citizens; to gamble with their safety, by provoking escalations that predictably fall on apartment blocks and cars, is itself a matter of that trust.
What then is to be said for those who govern on each side? First, that Russia’s claim to rule annexed Ukrainian regions, made and maintained amid war and against international protest, lacks the clear consent required of any rightful legislative and so tends toward arbitrary power. Secondly, that Ukraine, as a society under assault, possesses the right to resist by arms, even upon the aggressor’s territory, so far as it aims at disabling the unjust war. Thirdly, that every party to this conflict is bound, by the same universal reason, to frame its methods so that the probability of killing innocents is reduced as near to zero as human frailty allows. When rulers on either side make themselves judges in their own case, excusing the deaths of the harmless as necessary or inevitable without serious proof, they invite the world, and their own people, to see in them not protectors but contenders for power at any cost.
I do not pretend that the line can always be drawn with exactness between a fuel depot that feeds tanks and a factory that also warms homes, or between a building used for command and one that merely shelters clerks. Here the facts are thinner than the conclusions many are eager to draw from them. But the rule itself is plain, and it stands above all emergencies: no political society, however wronged, may pursue its safety by treating the lives of the blameless as expendable matériel. If men will not be governed by that law of nature, they appeal from it only to a darker tribunal, where victory proves nothing and every new weapon—drones today, something fiercer tomorrow—only deepens their shared insecurity.
From the works cited
- Second Treatise of Government — The state of nature as analytic baseline: perfect freedom and equality under the law of nature, so that government must be shown to improve on that baseline for everyone who leaves it.
- Second Treatise of Government — Government by consent and majority decision, with the legislative supreme but itself bound: a fiduciary power, held on trust, forfeited by breach.
- Second Treatise of Government — The dissolution of government and the right of resistance: when legislators invade property or set up arbitrary power, they rebel against the people, not the people against them.