Zanny Minton Beddoes, editor-in-chief of The Economist, returned from Kyiv this week with an account that complicates a familiar narrative. Ukraine has built one of the most sophisticated drone programs in the world, deploying thousands of cheap, domestically made interceptors to shoot down Russian missiles and Shahed attack drones. Yet, according to Minton Beddoes, this technological ingenuity has not translated into safety for ordinary residents. The capital, she reports, is being pounded with an intensity that seems designed not to win territory but to grind down daily life itself.

The strategy, as she describes it, looks less like a battlefield campaign and more like an attempt at slow suffocation. Power stations, heating plants and apartment blocks have all been targeted in recent months, particularly as winter approaches. For a city of nearly three million people, the loss of heating or electricity is not an abstract inconvenience; it is a matter of survival through temperatures that regularly fall below freezing. Residents described to her a rhythm of life built around air raid sirens, generators and the constant, low hum of anxiety that comes from not knowing which night the power will fail.

What makes the situation striking is the apparent mismatch between Ukraine's defensive innovation and the scale of what it is up against. Kyiv's air defenses, reinforced by domestically produced interceptor drones, reportedly down a large share of incoming threats. But Russia has adjusted by sending larger waves, overwhelming the system through sheer volume rather than sophistication. Minton Beddoes suggests this reflects a broader calculation in Moscow: that exhausting a population psychologically may succeed where territorial advances have stalled.