Reporting of the war in Ukraine suffers from the tendency of journalism to exaggerate a trend. The most recent one has been Ukraine’s success in drone attacks on key energy and strategic sites deep inside Russia. These are indeed innovative and prodigious. The Russian summer offensive has also failed to break through. This leaves too little room, however, to cover fully the dramatically worsening plight of Ukrainian civilians. Olga Rudenko, editor-in-chief of the Kyiv Independent, said this week: ‘Even if you think you’re used to everything, you are not.’ Russia has switched tactics from big, one-off aerial bombardments to almost continuous drones. In Kyiv one day last week, the air-raid sirens signalled 13 different attacks. My courageous friend Rose Cecil, who is ‘in theatre’, spoke to me on Monday, mentioning a colleague whose train journey from Kyiv to Odessa was stopped ten times by raid warnings. Towns such as Kramatorsk and Zaporizhzhia which, when I visited them earlier in the war, were already difficult, are now virtually impossible. Civilians – people on buses or bicycles, or in schools or supermarkets – are deliberately targeted. Many are fleeing, though the Russians lack the power to take the territory vacated. The wonderfully efficient petrol stations, usually called by the unfortunate acronym of WOG (West Oil Group), which also serve as local grocers, are targeted, as is the private postal and delivery service, Nova Poshta, and pretty much anything that moves. These horrors do not make people demand peace, because, as........

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