London 1940, Kyiv 2026: The Tedious Futility of Terror Bombing

There is a profound, almost bureaucratic stupidity to the way modern wars are fought. Take, for instance, the air raid siren in Kyiv. After a while, it stops sounding like the herald of the apocalypse and starts sounding more like a faulty car alarm that your neighbour refuses to fix. You don’t dive for cover; you merely sigh, check your phone to see if it’s a ballistic missile or just another swarm of glorified flying mopeds, and order another drink.

We are currently witnessing a masterclass in missing the point. The recent barrages raining down on Kyiv are fundamentally disconnected from the actual mechanics of winning a war. Lobbing a few million quid’s worth of supersonic metal at a children’s clinic or an apartment block in the capital does absolutely nothing to shift a trench line three hundred miles away in the Donbas.

It is, at its core, the exact same flawed mathematical formula the Luftwaffe applied to London in 1940. The theory goes like this: if you turn enough civilian postcodes into grey, smoking rubble, the population will simply throw their hands up, collectively declare they’ve had enough of this rubbish, and demand their government surrender.

It didn’t work for the Nazis, and it isn’t working now.

During the Blitz, the British public didn’t suddenly develop a fondness for fascism just because their local pub was vaporised. They got angry, they got deeply cynical, and they developed a stubbornness born entirely out of spite. You can only terrorise people for so long before the terror ferments into a sort of aggressive, exhausted boredom.

The strategy in Kyiv today relies on that same archaic delusion. The attackers are not aiming for military targets—or if they are, their targeting systems were seemingly programmed by someone who has had three pints on an empty stomach. They are aiming for the electricity grid, the heating infrastructure, the residential blocks. The goal is to make life so utterly miserable, so cold, and so perpetually sleep-deprived that the psychological dam breaks.

Instead, the opposite happens. The “Blitz Spirit” isn’t the romanticised, stiff-upper-lip singsong in a London Underground station that the history books like to peddle. Real resilience is far grimmer and far more practical. It’s the bloke sweeping glass off the pavement outside his cafe at 7:00 AM so he can open for breakfast. It’s the sheer, unadulterated refusal to let some autocrat in a bunker dictate your Tuesday schedule. When death falls from the sky on a weekly basis, the human brain simply adapts, recalculates the baseline for normality, and carries on. Danger just becomes the weather.

Militarily, it’s a spectacular misallocation of resources. Every cruise missile wasted on turning a Kyiv playground into a crater is a missile that isn’t stopping a tank advance or taking out a supply depot on the actual front line. It is performative cruelty. It’s a fireworks display for the domestic audience back home—a way for failing generals to point at a burning building on the evening news and pretend they are doing something decisive, while their ground forces are busy turning themselves into fertilizer in the east.

History is a broken record, and humanity keeps insisting on playing the B-side. You cannot bomb a nation into submission when the only thing you’re successfully destroying is their patience. The people of Kyiv are tired, yes. The grief is unimaginable, and the cost in innocent blood is a ledger that will take generations to settle. But if the objective is to break the will of the city?

They’re wasting their bloody ammo.