Ukrainian President Zelensky Calls for Support Amid Russian Attacks

The takes

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  Adam Smith

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

  Blowing Up Bridges, Narrowing Markets

  When drones sever Kyiv’s bridges, they do more than break concrete; they constrict the market on which the poor depend, in pursuit of ambitions that will never yield the happiness they promise.

  The image is brutally simple: a drone striking the Northern Bridge of Kyiv, cars upon it, a flash, a fireball, a gaping hole in the roadway. We are told this bridge has been hit on successive days, that another leading south has been struck repeatedly, that these are not accidents but a pattern of attack. A bridge is not an ornament of the prince; it is a workhorse of the people. It carries workers to their employments, provisions to the city, fuel and medicines and a thousand nameless necessaries. To strike it, not by mischance but of design, is to declare war not merely on a government, but upon the daily traffic of ordinary life.

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  John Locke

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

  Drone Strikes on Bridges Are Not War but Usurpation

  When a state turns its engines of war upon civilians’ roads and rivers, it steps outside government, and those it assails are left to the common refuge against naked force.

  Video now shows what in my time could only be reported: a drone descending upon the Pivnichnyi bridge in Kyiv as cars move across, a flash, a fireball, a gaping hole left in the roadway. We are told this bridge has been struck on two successive days, and that another, the Pivdennyi, has been hit multiple times in the same week. These are not fortified walls, but the ordinary passages by which a people pursue their trades, visit their families, bring food and medicine to market. Whoever orders such blows does something that must be judged not by its success, but by the rule that measures all political power: for what, and over whom, is this power held in trust?

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  Niccolò Machiavelli

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

  Drones on the Bridge, Deals in the Car: How Kyiv Turns Terror into Capital

  While Russian drones punch holes in Kyiv’s bridges, Ukraine’s leaders use the blasts as a stage to fortify their arms, alliances, and reputation — that is virtù working inside the storm of fortuna.

  A drone hits Kyiv’s Northern Bridge. Cars are on the roadway; then a fireball and a gaping hole. It is the second day in a row this bridge is struck, after other attacks on another bridge and a warehouse that killed at least one person. In the same hours, the German chancellor is in the city on a surprise visit, standing with Ukraine’s president at a memorial to fallen soldiers, speaking of the need to stop Russia and promising a new aid package. This is the scene: iron and explosives on the bridge, words and money in the car. One side speaks with drones, the other with agreements.

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