Day 1591
Under the waning Strawberry moon
Day 8 of Z's influence operation against Putin. No clouds, lots of smoke, at least a dozen dead by morning, twenty-eight locations across the capital hit by Russian drones and missiles.
They came, as they always come now, in a manner that had long since stopped surprising anyone and had not yet started to feel survivable — up to six hundred of the buzzing things, Gerans and Gerberas and their cousins, a very large number of them jet-propelled now. Behind them, up to twenty-five Iskander-M ballistic missiles lifting off from Bryansk and Kursk, launched, one assumes, by men who believe in the necessity of their labor, up to thirty Kh-101 cruise missiles crossing out of Vologda airspace, patient and low and old-fashioned in their way, and, almost as an afterthought, about eight Kalibrs from the direction of Novorossiysk.
Of the newest and proudest children, little can honestly be reported, since eyewitness accounts of hypersonic Zircon arrivals are thin — they are faster than their own sound. The city hears the missile’s wake before it hears the missile, a boom that announces an object already past, followed a beat later by the sound of that object detonating. It arrives having already announced its own arrival, from the future, so to speak, of its own flight path.
Preliminary damage report:
Obolonsky district: A major fire broke out in warehouse facilities in an industrial zone.
Darnytsky district: A 9-story residential building partially collapsed — destruction from the 1st to the 6th floor.
Pechersk: Strikes recorded in the courtyards of the Frantsuzkyi Kvartal, Bulvar Fontaniv, and Trinity residential complexes. Dozens of cars destroyed or damaged; a private clinic destroyed.
Desniansky district: An apartment building damaged; people remain trapped under the rubble.
Shevchenkivsky district: Residential buildings, a hotel, and a medical facility damaged. Medical workers were among the injured; one paramedic is in extremely critical condition.
Podilsky district: Residential buildings in the Dibrova Park complex damaged.
I checked in on Caolan, who increasingly reminds me of Sarah and Trey. And, no, billions of people don’t live in Kyiv.
Maybe they’ll team up and serve together in the same Ukrainian military unit some day.