In Ukraine’s Sky War, Borrowed Arms and Half-Measures Are Already Defeats

Five Russian ballistic missiles fall on Kyiv and the Ukrainian prince says he had no warning from his partners. That single complaint tells me more than a hundred communiqués. A state at war is naked in the most important hour: when iron is already in the air. At the same time, the Russian Defense Ministry boasts of striking Ukraine’s military‑industrial facilities, its logistics, its ports, even a bulk carrier said to carry military cargo. Drones hit an educational institution in Rivne, and Russia claims it shot down hundreds of Ukrainian drones over its own regions. Everything moves. Whoever expected a stable front or a tidy ceasefire has already misunderstood the first rule of politics: nothing stands still.

In such a storm, I never ask first who is right. I ask who is maintaining his state and who is losing it. Russia uses drones and missiles against infrastructure and logistics; it tries to choke the arteries that feed its enemy’s arms. This is harsh, but intelligible. Ukraine throws its own drones at Russian regions and the Sea of Azov; it tries to show that no rear is safe. This too is intelligible. As I argued in The Prince, in W. K. Marriott’s translation, fortune is like a flooding river that drowns only those who failed to build dykes in fair weather. Here both sides now learn which preparations were real and which were ceremonies.

The most alarming fact is not any one strike, but that Kyiv received “no early warning” from its partners about those five missiles. This is a hole not merely in radar, but in confidence. When a prince leans on allies for his defense, his true arms are the goodwill, habits, and calculations of foreign councils, and these can shift in a single season. I wrote once that mercenary and auxiliary arms are useless and dangerous, because they obey another will; the same holds for intelligence. Information is an arm. When it arrives late, or not at all, you discover that your army is partly mercenary even if your soldiers are natives.

Meanwhile merchants burn in the Black Sea. A ship bound for Mykolaiv with what Russia calls military cargo is struck. Off Bulgaria, drones hit merchant vessels; one sinks, crew missing, and the Bulgarian prince summons the Russian ambassador. You see how a local war, fought with long‑range, deniable instruments, slowly pulls in those who thought themselves spectators. In my time we called them Italian wars; now you call it escalation. The rule is the same: those who trade in a contested sea become auxiliaries whether they wish it or not. Commerce without power is simply a hostage sailing under bright flags.

Over this, modern princes debate with words instead of cannon. One announces an “energy ceasefire,” then when strikes on energy infrastructure continue, explains that Ukraine hit “many sites the day before” and that “they’re both a little off.” This is not policy; it is commentary. A ceasefire that exists more in a mouth than in the missile batteries is a middle course of the worst kind: it convinces the public that peace is near while convincing neither army to stop shooting. When I warn against the middle course, I mean precisely this theater—half‑war and half‑peace, which accumulates the costs of both and the fruits of neither.

The deeper conflict is not only between Russia and Ukraine, but between appearances and the effectual truth. Each side needs to persuade its own people, its soldiers, and its partners that it is strong, wronged, and advancing. Missiles on Kyiv without allied warning hurt not only the city, but the image of a seamless coalition. Russian claims of shooting down 604 Ukrainian drones and facing 417 near Moscow serve the opposite purpose: to say to its people that they are assailed yet impenetrable. As I observed in the Discourses on Livy, in Ninian Hill Thomson’s translation, the voice of the people has a force that tends to fulfil itself. Whoever wins the narrative at home lengthens his endurance in the field.

Someone will object: is it not better to seek compromise, to call all parties “a little off,” to cool the fire? Only if the compromise is armed. No reform, no truce, survives unless it has instruments to punish its violators. Here we see supposed ceasefires declared without clear terms, without shared verification, without agreed reprisals. That is not peace; it is a pause granted by fortuna to the side that best uses it. The occasion now favors those who build real dykes—independent arms, reliable intelligence, hardened infrastructure—and abandon the hope that phrases can do the work of power. In war, the side that treats words as bullets finds itself speaking alone.

All this leaves me uncertain on one crucial point: I cannot yet tell which leaders are building lasting dykes against fortune and which are only painting walls on the floodplain.