Russia's war against Ukraine has turned into terrorism

Russia is not pursuing traditional war aims in any of these places. No infantry assault on Serhiivka or Kremenchuk is under way. The Russian military’s planned occupation of Kharkiv failed several months ago. There is no scenario in which an apartment block in Chasiv Yar poses a threat to Russia or Russians, let alone the Russian army. Instead, the purpose of attacking these places is to create fear and anger in those towns and across the country. Perhaps the ultimate goal is to persuade Ukraine to stop fighting, although—as was the case in Britain during the Second World War—the bombardment of civilians seems to have had the opposite effect. Over time, many Ukrainians have become more accustomed to the raids, more determined to withstand them. In the Odesa City Garden, an elegant park that dates back to the beginning of the 19th century, people didn’t move, didn’t stop drinking coffee, didn’t even pause mid-sentence when air-raid sirens went off in the early evening last week.

But if the bombing campaign is not part of a “war,” as we normally understand it, that doesn’t meant that it has no purpose. On the contrary, it seeks to achieve several goals. One of them may be to persuade people to leave, to become refugees, to become a burden and perhaps a political problem for Ukraine’s neighbors. Clearly the bombs are also meant to impoverish Ukrainians, to prevent them from rebuilding, to weaken their state, to persuade their compatriots who are abroad not to come home. Who wants to return to a country that features on the evening news every few nights, as another bomb falls on another apartment building or shopping mall? Who will invest in a place of smashed rooftops and broken glass? Sowing such doubts is a classic goal of terrorism too.

We Americans and Europeans are used to thinking of terrorism as something involving fertilizer bombs or improvised weapons, and of terrorists as fringe extremists who operate conspiratorially in irregular gangs. When we speak of state-sponsored terrorism, we are usually talking about clandestine groups that are supported, covertly, by a recognized state, in the way that Iran supports Hezbollah. But Russia’s war in Ukraine blurs the distinction among all of these things—terrorism, state-sponsored terrorism, war crimes—for nothing about the bombing of Serhiivka, or Kremenchuk, or Kharkiv, is surreptitious, conspiratorial, or fringe.