While you were scrolling past it, Kyiv was burning again.
Let me ask you something. When was the last time Ukraine led the news on your feed? Not a brief mention wedged between a celebrity divorce and a think-piece about AI taking everyone’s jobs… but actually led it? Opened with it. Made you stop mid-scroll and feel something?
If you’re struggling to remember, you’re not alone. And that, right there, is the problem.
Because while we’ve all been collectively distracted… while the world’s diplomatic bandwidth has been consumed by Iran, while Trump has been doing whatever it is Trump does at 3am, and while the rest of us have been quietly normalising the idea of perpetual geopolitical chaos as a kind of background noise… Russia launched one of the most devastating attacks on Kyiv since this war began.
This was yesterday. Sunday, the 24th of May, 2026.
Let that sit for a moment.
Six Hundred Drones and a Missile That “Travels Like a Meteorite”
Here are the facts, since the front pages seem uninterested in them.
Russia fired 600 strike drones and 90 missiles at Ukraine in a single overnight assault. Not a skirmish. Not an “exchange.” A full-scale, coordinated aerial bombardment that shook buildings across every district of Kyiv. Fires broke out. Explosions rattled through the night. At least four people are dead, over 80 injured.
And then there’s the weapon at the centre of it: the Oreshnik. A hypersonic intermediate-range ballistic missile that Putin, with the particular dramatic flair of a man who’s watched too many Bond films, once described as travelling “like a meteorite” and being impossible to stop with air defence systems. He wasn’t entirely wrong about the latter part. Ukraine’s air defences, stretched desperately thin and perpetually short of the interceptor missiles they’ve been begging the West for, couldn’t catch them all.
This was the third time Russia has deployed the Oreshnik in the conflict. The third time. And there was a time when a single use of a nuclear-capable hypersonic missile against a European city would have sent shockwaves through every parliament, every news desk, every dinner table conversation from Dublin to Warsaw. Now? It barely trends.
They Bombed the Chernobyl Museum
I want you to pause on this for a second, because I think it’s the detail that perfectly captures the dark, absurdist theatre of where we are.
Among the buildings destroyed in the assault was the National Chernobyl Museum in Kyiv… the museum dedicated to the worst nuclear disaster in human history. Ukraine’s culture minister confirmed it was the largest number of cultural institutions damaged in the capital in a single attack since the 2022 invasion. One of the city’s oldest markets burned to the ground. A missile struck near the residence of Albania’s ambassador.
The Kremlin, predictably, insisted it only struck “legitimate military targets.” Because nothing says military target quite like a museum about nuclear catastrophe and a centuries-old market.
Meanwhile, Zelenskyy walked through the rubble of the Chernobyl Museum the following morning and said, in a tone that has long since passed through exhaustion into something quieter and more haunting: “Decisions are needed… from the United States, from Europe and others.”
He’s been saying something like that for four years. The decisions, broadly speaking, have not been forthcoming with any great urgency.
The Peace Process: A Study in Beautiful Nowhere
Here’s where the cynicism really has to kick in, because the diplomatic situation is genuinely farcical.
There was a ceasefire, you know. A 32-hour Orthodox Easter truce back in April. Lovely gesture. Very symbolic. Russia and Ukraine stood down, in theory, and the world briefly cooed at the prospect of de-escalation like people watching a baby deer take its first steps. Then it ended. And the war continued exactly as before, because a 32-hour pause is not peace. It’s a nap.
Trump, who famously boasted during his 2024 campaign that he could end the Ukraine war within 24 hours of returning to office, has… not done that. What he has done is broker a three-day ceasefire earlier this month and loosen some sanctions on Russian oil exports to compensate for the energy disruptions caused by the American and Israeli war on Iran. So Russia, whose economy is substantially funded by oil revenues, is now benefiting from American policy adjustments while simultaneously flattening Kyiv with hypersonic missiles. You genuinely could not write this.
The Kremlin’s stated position remains what it has always been: Ukraine hands over the Donbas (the territory Russia has been trying and failing to fully conquer for four-plus years), NATO backs off, Ukraine demilitarises. Ukraine says no, because agreeing to that is essentially agreeing to an extended pause before the next invasion, not an actual end to anything. So we are, as one NPR correspondent put it recently, at a standstill. The talks are as stuck as the front line.
Russia, for its part, is experiencing its own internal fatigue. Support for the war among younger Russians is reportedly weak. But Putin doesn’t run focus groups… or if he does, he doesn’t much care about the results.
War Fatigue as a Strategic Weapon
Here’s the thing that doesn’t get said loudly enough: war fatigue in the West isn’t just an inconvenience. It is, in itself, a strategic objective.
Russia understood from the start that it couldn’t win a short, sharp conflict against a motivated Ukrainian population with Western backing. So the plan, always, was to grind. To make the war long, expensive, tedious, and demoralising. To turn it from a crisis into a condition. To wait until the news cycle moved on, until Western populations got bored, until politicians looking over their shoulders at domestic opinion decided that the blank cheque had limits.
And look around. It’s working. Not completely. Not irreversibly. But it’s working.
The attention has drifted. First to Gaza. Then to Iran. Now to whatever fresh catastrophe is queuing up behind it. Each new emergency competes for the same finite amount of global outrage, and Ukraine… four years in, front lines barely shifting, no dramatic victories to report… struggles to compete. A Ukrainian fundraiser quoted a few years back put it bleakly: “The longer we talk about our war, the less interest it holds for people.”
That’s not a criticism of human nature. It’s just human nature.
But here’s what human nature gets wrong: the idea that a conflict becoming boring means it’s becoming less serious. The strikes on Sunday were not boring for the people in Kyiv pulling rubble off their neighbours. The chronic shortage of Patriot interceptor missiles… the ones that Ukraine has been requesting, again and again, with diminishing results… is not an abstract policy discussion for the air defence crews watching 600 drones appear on their screens at 18:00 on a Saturday.
What The Symbolism Is Telling Us
I keep coming back to the Chernobyl Museum.
Not because it’s the worst thing that happened on Sunday… it isn’t, measured in human cost. But because of what it represents. Chernobyl is the quintessential symbol of what happens when powerful institutions prioritise appearances over reality, when warnings are ignored, when the machinery keeps running because acknowledging that something is catastrophically wrong would be too inconvenient. The Soviet authorities famously delayed evacuation, suppressed information, and told people not to worry while a reactor burned and spread contamination across a continent.
There’s a metaphor in there that practically writes itself, and I’ll leave you to connect the dots at your own pace.
What I will say is this: a war that has been running for four years, that has killed hundreds of thousands of people, that has displaced millions, that has now seen a nuclear-capable hypersonic weapon deployed three times against a European capital… does not become less dangerous because we’re tired of hearing about it. It just becomes less discussed. And there’s a very significant difference between those two things.
The Scorecard Nobody Wants to Read
Let’s be honest about where we stand.
Ukraine is still fighting. Against considerable odds, with robotic warfare innovations plugging gaps that Western support has left exposed, with a population that has sustained four years of this and somehow not broken. That part is genuinely remarkable, and deserves more acknowledgement than it gets.
Russia has not won. But it hasn’t lost either. It’s grinding. It has the numbers, the resources, and… crucially… the patience of a government that doesn’t have to worry about opinion polls or election cycles.
The West has been supportive, unevenly, inconsistently, in ways that often feel more performative than decisive. The EU is dispatching more support for air defence systems after Sunday’s attack. There will be statements. There will be condemnations. Ursula von der Leyen posted on social media that Russia’s attack “shows the Kremlin’s brutality.” Kaja Kallas said EU foreign ministers would meet to discuss “how to dial up the international pressure on Russia.”
The Kremlin, one imagines, is not losing sleep over the prospect of being discussed at an EU foreign ministers’ meeting.
So What Now?
I don’t have a tidy conclusion for you. I’m not a diplomat or a military strategist, and anyone who tells you they know how this ends is selling something.
What I do know is that the worst thing a society can do to a conflict it doesn’t understand how to resolve is to simply… stop paying attention to it. Not because attention alone saves lives. It doesn’t. But because the moment a war becomes wallpaper is the moment the political will to do anything meaningful about it evaporates entirely.
Ukraine is still there. The people in Kyiv who woke up on Sunday morning to fires and sirens and the news that their Chernobyl Museum… their monument to catastrophic institutional failure… had been destroyed by a missile that “travels like a meteorite” are still there.
They didn’t get a choice about whether to stay interested.
We do. And most of us, to our collective discredit, have quietly taken it.
This piece was written on 25th May 2026, the day after one of the heaviest aerial assaults on Kyiv since Russia’s full-scale invasion began in 2022.
Until Next Time
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