“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.