Targeting civilians in an upscale neighborhood. An all day curfew. The Language Issue

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The news of the day is that the Retroville shopping center was destroyed. As is often the case in war, the accounts are conflicting. Some said it was the result of an attack by an Iskandr guided missile. Others attributed it to artillery shelling. Yet a third cited bombs. Here is a before picture. The after pictures are horrific.

The photographs of the damage lend credence to the shelling argument. Also its location, just to the left of the P in the text "Podils’kyi District" on the map of Kyiv below.  Within Kyiv city, but also within artillery range of Russian positions in Irpin and Bucha. 

The attack totally destroyed the center and killed eight civilians. It is evidence of the wantonness of Russian attacks. They did it not for any military purpose, but because they could. The fact that it was new, upscale and Western probably had quite a bit to do with its selection as a target.

A year ago January I was looking at townhouse developments to get an idea of what was selling. That part of town has a lot of them. A developer will build five or six row houses on a third of an acre, usually with well water and septic. Systems like this work because the soil is very porous. All have parking.  People are wedded to their cars and are not bothered by the fact that public transportation is not so good out in the fringes. Last year you could get a two-story, thousand square-foot dwelling for a little over $100,000. The good life included fitness centers, upscale shopping and so on in places like Retroville.

My guess is that the high-rise apartments such as shown in the link above will be more attractive targets than the single-family townhouses. While I'm sure townhouse residents are properly panicked, I fear more for whoever lives in an upper story condominium within shooting distance of the Russians.

Yesterday we had a komendantskiy chas – commander's hour, or a total curfew from 8:00 PM Monday night to 7:00 AM today. Perhaps not coincidentally, I heard small arms fire that seem to come from the woods a half-mile or so away. Having no information at all, I'm only guessing that this is a game kind of like musical chairs. When they tell everybody to go home, the people without homes to go to are easy to identify. Some will be plainclothes Russian infiltrators. Today I can take Eddie on a walk past the neighborhood checkpoint, giving him an opportunity to ask in his perfect Ukrainian what happened.

There were cruise missiles going off all morning 10 miles or so to the east of us, out in the direction of Brovary, and then about 11:00 three loud ones from the North Northwest, toward Obolon. They have to be hitting civilian targets. I don't know of anything else in that direction. However, for reasons we will never know, the explosions petered out over the course of the afternoon and the night has been very quiet.

Projections that Russia had a limited quantity of such missiles were overly optimistic. I read recently that they had already expended more than a thousand of them. The bad news is that people will die; the good news is that these missiles are not going to win the war for the Russians. And forget about hearts and minds. They will be loathed for generations.

VDARE published my article on the language issue today.  I am sure that on account of this war the Ukrainian people will use their own language to emphasize the distinction between our country and Russia. Knowing their readership, the editors softened it up a bit.

That's the news from Lake WeBeGone, where curfew was a great opportunity for the strong man to put his back into spading the garden (after the sound of small arms fire died down), the good-looking women spent a quiet afternoon gardening while enjoying the 50° sunshine, and the children were getting in the way in their eagerness to help. What a wonderful problem to have.

Graham