There is a boundary drawn across the map of the world. The modern man, with his maps of shifting borders and his theories of fluid geopolitics, says, “I see no reason for this line; it is an arbitrary scar upon the earth; let us erase it.” The wiser man says, “If you see no reason for the line, I will not let you erase it. Go away and think. When you can tell me why the line was drawn, I may let you cross it.”

We are currently witnessing a most terrible and unreasoned attempt to erase the most fundamental of all boundaries: the boundary between the combatant and the non-combatant, between the soldier in his trench and the child in his bed. There is a certain school of modern thought - the sort of thought that thrives in the well-lit lecture halls of the great capitals - which treats the sanctity of the civilian life as a mere diplomatic convenience, a polite fiction that we all agree to observe only so long as it does not interfere with the grander, more abstract movements of historical necessity. They speak of spheres of influence, of strategic depth, and of the irresistible momentum of empires, as if the lives of the people in Kyiv, Odesa, or Dnipro were merely the ink with which these grander histories are written.

But the tragedy of the recent strikes is not merely a tragedy of explosives; it is a tragedy of the destruction of the most ancient and necessary fence of all: the distinction between the theatre of war and the theatre of life. To strike at a city is to declare that the fence of civilization has been dismantled. When a missile finds a twelve-year-old child, it is not merely a failure of international law; it is a failure of the most basic common sense. It is the act of a man who, having decided that the rules of the road are an obstacle to his speed, decides to drive through the garden gate, only to find that the garden was the only thing keeping the wildness of the road from swallowing the house.

The clever men of the aggressor’s class believe that by shattering the windows of the ordinary person, they can shatter the will of the nation. They believe that the destruction of the physical structure of the city will lead to the dissolution of the spiritual structure of the people. They are making the classic mistake of the educated fool: they have studied the mechanics of destruction so thoroughly that they have forgotten the mechanics of endurance. They see a city as a collection of targets, whereas the ordinary person sees a city as a collection of memories, of hearths, and of a shared, stubborn continuity.

They are attempting to remove the fence of sovereignty and the fence of human decency, believing that in the resulting vacuum, they will find only a void to be filled by their own power. They do not realize that the fence was there to protect the very thing they are trying to conquer. You cannot conquer a people by proving to them that you have no respect for the boundaries that make them human. When you destroy the distinction between the soldier and the child, you do not make the soldier more powerful; you merely make the struggle more absolute. You turn a political dispute into a cosmic one.

The tragedy of the strikes on these cities is that they are being conducted by those who have lost the ability to see the value of what they are destroying. They see the rubble, but they do not see the foundation. They see the casualty count, but they do not see the hardening of the soul. They believe that by breaking the physical fence, they are winning a victory, failing to realize that the more they tear down the structures of peace, the more they build the fortifications of a resentment that no amount of artillery can ever hope to level. The tragedy is not just that the missiles fell; it is that they fell upon a world that has forgotten that the most important things in life are precisely those things that cannot be measured by the weight of an explosive.