Russian rockets are falling indiscriminately on Ukrainian cities

attack on Grozny, Chechnya’s capital, in December 1994 was like “a great iron hand swooping down from the sky and crushing and tearing to pieces innocent people at random,” wrote Anatol Lieven, a journalist who was in the city at the time. The highest rate of fire in Sarajevo, during the Bosnian war, was 3,500 shells per day; the figure in Grozny reached 4,000 per hour. “Every morning when we got up,” recalled Mr Lieven, “a malign giant had taken another bite out of the familiar streets.” The great iron hand is now back, and it is devouring the streets of Ukraine. After to seize Kharkiv with small detachments, Russia began bombarding the city with shells, rockets and cluster munitions—which release small bomblets over a wide area—on Monday, inflicting heavy civilian casualties. On the morning of March 1st a missile struck Freedom Square, the centre of the city, outside government offices, causing a huge fireball. Oleh Synehubov, the head of the regional government, called it a “treacherous”. Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s president, called it “naked terror”. The mayor of Mariupol, on the Sea of Azov, said his city was being “pounded” with shells, rockets and air strikes. And British defence intelligence reported that Russia had increased its use of artillery north of Kyiv and in Chernihiv, a city north-east of the capital. Kyiv itself was hit, but not as heavily as had been feared.