Vladimir Putin’s army hasn’t made much headway in Ukraine this year, and his territorial goals – annexing four Ukrainian provinces – remain elusive, despite more than four and a half years of war. That explains his recent efforts to sap Ukrainians’ will to resist by launching relentless drone and missile strikes against their cities – targeting, among other sites, residential buildings, large open-air markets, shopping malls, the Dobrobut medical centre and the National Academy of Sciences, both in Kyiv. The capital has been hit the hardest, but other cities – Dnipro, Kharkiv, Kherson, Odesa, Mykolaiv, Sumy – haven’t been spared.

Air-raid sirens pierce the quiet of night. People scramble to shelters (assuming there are any nearby) or, in Kyiv, race to below-ground subway stations. Even walking along city streets, shopping, or filling up your car at a garage forecourt – which are prime targets – can lead to injury, or even death.

I got a taste of what these unremitting attacks are like during a September trip to Ukraine. One night in Mykolaiv, I counted more than a dozen alerts between midnight and dawn. In Kopyliv, about 31 miles west of Kyiv, I was having dinner in a restaurant when a deafening bang made the walls shudder. A drone had hit a building about 500m away; orange flames engulfed its roof within seconds.

Incidents like this are now part of daily life for Ukrainians, but are no less nerve-racking for that.

During September, Russia launched 3,177 jet-powered drones, mainly Geran variants, at Ukraine: nearly 12% more than in August, and a massive increase compared with 350 such strikes in June. Drones, jet-powered or not, are often supplemented by ballistic missiles such as the Iskander –........

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