On Palm Sunday, Russian missiles hit the Ukrainian city of Sumy. At least 34 civilians were killed, including two children, and more than 100 injured. The targets weren’t military. A university building was hit, a trolleybus destroyed. Zelensky called it terrorism. The EU condemned it as a war crime. Keir Starmer issued a statement of support. President Trump called it “a mistake.”
“A mistake.” As if 34 civilians died because something went wrong. But nothing went wrong. This is how Putin wages war: deliberate strikes on civilian centres, on housing, schools, power stations, hospitals. It’s not new. It’s the method, tested in Syria, refined in Mariupol, repeated in Sumy. The goal is to terrorise, demoralise, destabilise. And the real scandal is that by now, it barely registers. A hundred injured, children dead, and the response is the same as ever: a statement, a headline, and silence.
It’s not that the West doesn’t know what’s happening. It does. But the framework it built to respond to this kind of violence no longer functions. The rules-based order, the UN, Geneva, the language of international norms—still exists on paper. But the machinery has seized up. The words remain, but there’s no force behind them. Just habit. Just ceremony.
This isn’t about diplomatic failure. It’s structural. The international system was never designed to protect people, it was designed to protect capital. Human rights were the branding. The product was markets. And now that the contradictions are naked—Gaza, Sudan, Sumy—there’s no cover left. These aren’t profitable crises. They don’t disrupt trade routes or energy supplies. So they’re allowed to burn.
Trump’s response isn’t a deviation, it’s the logical endpoint. His foreign policy is pure theatre: strongmen over statesmen, spectacle over diplomacy. He offers cover to aggression, keeps the arms contracts flowing, and otherwise treats suffering as a local issue. What’s new isn’t the cynicism, it’s how open it is. There’s no longer any need to pretend.
Britain under Starmer plays its part. He condemned the Sumy strike, but this is the same government approving arms sales to Israel, keeping quiet on Sudan, and redrawing foreign policy around national interest and ‘pragmatism’. Humanitarianism has been buried under a new realism.
David Lammy, now Foreign Secretary, almost gets it. Not always, and never radically. But sometimes he gestures toward something braver, a line on Rafah, a warning on famine, a defence of international law. And just as quickly, someone from No.10 shows up to walk it back. The message is clear: say what you like, as long as it doesn’t interfere with the business of state. Lammy calls it “progressive realism,” but the realism is doing all the work. The progressive part is shaved down until it fits inside a NATO press release.
So where does that leave us? Sumy isn’t an exception, it’s the system working exactly as intended. A system that mouths the language of law and rights but does nothing when they’re torn apart. When missiles hit a city on Palm Sunday and the most powerful man in the world calls it a mix-up, we’re not in a moment of confusion. We’re in a moment of reckoning.
There’ll be more Sumys. Not because we’re powerless, but because the tools we built to stop this were never built for that purpose. They were built to manage empire, secure flows, hold the line. Now the line is broken.
The world is coming undone. Not in a single rupture, but in pieces. One city, one crisis, one war at a time. And in that space, stripped of illusion, the work of building something new begins. Or it doesn’t.
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