Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine, is known as the City Of Domes. It was reputedly the epicentre of Eastern Orthodox Christianity, from which the Russian Orthodox church sprang. It contains two World Heritage Sites and the city's destruction would rank alongside the World War 2 Allied razing of Dresden according to some commentators. President Zelensky has invoked a parallel which should hurt Russians more: the Nazis' assault on Kyiv in 1941.
One would think that Russians aware of the city's history would spare Kyiv. Russia gave the world such cultural icons as Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Tchaikovsky, Fabergé eggs and ... icons. How could she subject Kyiv to an artillery barrage? But one has to consider that the military world view is a blinkered one. The single motive is to gain objectives by any means possible without consideration - or possibly even knowledge - of cultural implications. Hence the fire-storm which engulfed Dresden and, more relevantly, the Russian desecration of the ancient city of Aleppo during the brutal suppression of the Syrian uprising.
One can only hope that, in the light of the world's revulsion at the assault on Aleppo, Putin's instruction to his military commanders is to minimise human casualties and to preserve the Ukrainian/Russian heritage.
* The BM-21 Grad is a mobile rocket-launcher invented by the Russians in the 1960s. A BM-21 was identified as responsible for the downing of flight MH17 (pdf here) and Grads figured prominently in the images of the recent Russia-Belarus military exercises.
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