“Frontline City” is a pretty egregious misuse of words, Kyiv is underattack but it is not on the frontline, the whole reason russia has had to resort to random acts of terror with flying bombs and ballistic missiles is that no matter how hard russia tries (and with ~1.5 million russian soldiers obliterated in the maw) Kyiv is nowhere close to being a frontline city.
Kyiv is essentially under siege from afar, and I do not mean to minimize the violence, fear and exhaustion of that but it is a different thing than being a “Frontline City” that is being drawn nearer and nearer to a hostile land army gobbling up territory. Russia’s landwar has stalled almost completely and the more russia continues to prosecute the fight on the ground the more explosively it will backfire for them, this decisively makes Kyiv not on the frontline in a crucial sense we must not let be lost in the narrative about the Ukraine War.
The difference between a “frontline city” and a city under siege from afar is that as brutal as a siege from afar can get it can only ever temporarily deny residents their daily life in the city and at great ongoing cost to the denier, it can never capture the city, life can be destroyed and denied over and over again but political power cannot be leveraged out of thin air no matter how many bombs are dropped.
Meanwhile Moscow has become a potential wide open frontline city in Russia as recent Ukrainian refinery strikes have demonstrated and Russia can’t do a thing about it, and Ukraine is just warming up.
even respected outlets do annoying clickbait :(
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Yes well we can’t have indepth, critical and thought out analysis about war if we want to keep turning a blind eye to the Palestinian Genocide (we also can’t keep pretending the airpower we have can enact political change in the Iran War and elsewhere if we admit that the air power our enemy has cannot enact political change in a different context) so we had to get rid of all that stuff and now the result is otherwise extremely competent journalism continually undermining itself with silly misunderstandings of the mechanics of war and Ukraine has suffered immensely… not that many in power in the west wanted to help Ukraine that badly… shamefully enough… but still the “western” press pretty much accepts at face value the propaganda of strength that russia sells, and it is laughable how little they question what is deemed inevitable and what isn’t about the Ukraine War by russia.
My immediate reaction to this article was not that any of it is necessarily wrong or that the current and coming hardships are not brutal, but that nonetheless in order for russia to win this war it must truly make Kyiv a frontline city… by moving a damn land army close to it that threatens a realistic possibility of encirclement or direct capture… and because russia has shown itself incapable of that it is even more existentially necessary that russia create a commonly accepted sense that Kyiv is a frontline city through bullshitting and propaganda.
longer thoughts
Knowing that, I think it is irresponsible to lean into that and make russia’s job easier here, especially if you consider this kind of headline is red meat for russian propaganda made for domestic use, which isn’t to say russia is uniquely evil but rather that it is behaving as most countries would if they had put themselves militarily into a dead end and had no functioning cultural apparatus to mitigate unnecessary violence.
Think of it this way, Trump would absolutely proudly display Iranian news coverage headlines about how devastating an attack was if it makes him look like he is a tough guy to his cult, same logic here.
To put it another way, this is equivalent to portraying a mass shooter in media coverage in an ostensibly negative way that actually in narrative framing leans into the power fantasy and recognition the shooter so desperately sought in their heinous act…