India, Sept. 8 -- The missiles arrived before dawn. Two people were dead in Kyiv by Tuesday morning and seven wounded, the city's administration confirmed, the ceasefire that Vladimir Putin had granted as a diplomatic courtesy to Donald Trump's peace envoys having quietly expired the night before.

Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner had left. The strikes resumed.

The 72-hour pause, announced by the Russian president as his American interlocutors shuttled between Moscow and Kyiv this past weekend, was never a settlement. It was the architecture of gesture: a signal that Russia could restrain itself, timed to end once the envoys had departed. That it lasted exactly as long as Putin intended, and no longer, says more about the state of Ukrain...