Last night Russia gave us another sleepless night. It threw a huge swarm of Shahed drones and missiles at Kyiv. But this attack was different from most, and the difference is the whole point: one of those missiles came down on the Dormition Cathedral of the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra, one of the oldest treasures we have.

You will hear, in the coming hours, that it was unintentional. A stray hit. A tragic coincidence. Let us be honest with one another instead. Russia laid its paw on this shrine a very long time ago and held it captive for generations. Only recently did Ukraine manage, quietly and stubbornly, to take it back, by driving out the Moscow priests. Until they were finally expelled, the place was a residency in the literal intelligence sense, a node from which Russian special services ran their work in the heart of our capital. It is a good thing that this is over.

But the more useful question is not who fired the missile. It is why it mattered so much to Moscow to hit this particular treasure.

They Gave the Lavra Back Its Mazepa

The answer begins with what was returned to the Lavra, the thing it had genuinely been missing. They gave it back Mazepa. In 2025 a monument to Ivan Mazepa was raised inside the Lavra, and that monument stands for a return to our own historical roots and a refusal of the so-called shared past with Russia. We are saying, plainly: this is ours, this is our hero, we are restoring him, and he will be the largest diamond in the crown of our churches.

The day that monument went up, we dealt Moscow a real ideological blow. We declared that we will no longer disown this inheritance, nor what this man did for Ukraine and for the Ukrainian church. A missile is Moscow's reply.

Do Not Hand the Enemy Someone Else's Crime

Here I have to stop and correct a piece of mythology that, for reasons I cannot understand, is now being repackaged as clever wartime messaging. The line goes: Russia struck this cathedral in 1941, and now it has done it again in 2026. Let us say it cleanly. That is false.

I listened to Vitaly Portnikov hold forth on how the NKVD mined the Dormition Cathedral and then gloated, in 1941, when it blew. It did not happen that way.

In 1941 the NKVD in fact ran one of the most effective special operations Kyiv has ever seen. It mined nearly the entire city center. It mined the Lavra. It mined just about everything that could be mined. On 20 September 1941, during one of those operations, a senior German general was killed by an explosion on the observation terrace of the Pechersk Lavra. It was an enormous success. Afterward the Germans went through every building they could reach, and inside the Dormition Cathedral they found an enormous cache of explosives. The place was wired to the rafters. They had no idea when it would go off. So the Germans, with cameras already set up, filmed their own demolition of it, a little video set for their propagandists, and they blew it up for one reason only: they could not defuse it.

That fact stands, and it shouts down the convenient story that Moscow once again destroyed a Ukrainian treasure in 1941. It was a war in which Ukraine was caught between the hammer and the anvil, and our treasures were ground down by both. There is no point hunting for who was the guiltier party. But if we are going to follow the facts, then forgive me: the cathedral was blown up by the Germans.

The Street They Fight Over

There is a second reason the Lavra matters so much to Russia, and almost no one looks at it. It is the street the Lavra stands on.

Until roughly 2007 that street was named after the January Uprising. Then it was renamed for Ivan Mazepa, and rightly so, because it was Mazepa who poured vast sums into rebuilding the Lavra, helped it grow, and supported the church in every way he could. He is a Ukrainian hero, a figure from our national pantheon. The renaming did not last. In 2010, when Yanukovych came to power, there was an attempt to rename the street Lavrska. Only the resistance of the Ukrainian public kept Mazepa's name on part of it. So today the avenue of the Heroes of the January Uprising is half Lavrska and half Mazepy. Whether Mazepa's name should be restored in full is still, to this day, an open and contested question. That ambiguity is not an accident either.

A Phone Call About "Peace," a Salute of Missiles

Now back to the strike, and to what we should refuse to misunderstand. We keep losing sight of one detail: yesterday was Donald Trump's birthday. Yesterday Putin spent about an hour on the phone with him. Yesterday, they say, they spoke of peace.

Yesterday Putin called Trump, and every Russian outlet is reporting it, and asked him to rein in Zelensky, to rein in Europe, to stop the war. Putin, the man who started the war against Ukraine, called the American president to ask him to stop Zelensky. It is, frankly, an astonishing thing to say out loud, but for Russian state media it will land beautifully.

The harder question is for us. How completely do we keep swallowing the reality they manufacture, in which Putin telephones to beg for an end to the war, and that same evening, as though setting off birthday fireworks, destroys the largest Ukrainian relic and shells the city? A man speaking of peace delivers a savage missile strike. We all understand perfectly well that there was no conversation about peace. What Russian media are selling today is a low, deliberate lie, the kind they manufacture every single day.

The One Thing That Is True

Here is the one thing that is true: Putin is in serious trouble. Every recent strike on Kyiv, on Ukraine, has been chaotic and unsystematic. None of them carries a hard military objective. None inflicts strategic damage. Look at it honestly and it is simply chaos.

Plenty of people are now straining to read it otherwise. They publish photographs, of Mykhailo Fedorov, say, standing beside a building hit overnight, and argue that Russia is targeting the homes of our political class. Come on. Every address of our untouchables, the residents of the Pechersk hills, is perfectly well known to the Russians. They could hit those addresses with great precision. They simply do not. The same goes for the addresses of our defense plants. Let us be honest yet again: we all spent time, sooner or later, in that colony called the Soviet Union, and we know exactly where every defense facility sits. Every one. We know how many floors it has, how hardened it is, all of it. So when we look at these Russian strikes, we have to understand what they are not. They are not strikes on targets, and they are not strikes on military targets. They carry an ideological subtext, or they serve some entirely different purpose.

And the purpose, right now, is a single one: to make Ukrainians demand that Zelensky stop the war. Because Putin has no way to stop it himself, not militarily, not economically, not physically. He is caught in a trap of his own greed and his own stupidity, and he can do nothing. No one can help him end this war but himself. And he does not want to.