India, Sept. 21 -- The residents of Zaporizhzhia woke to fires in the rooftops of buildings they had slept in for decades. Two nine-story apartment blocks were burning. A shopping center nearby had taken a direct strike. The building that houses the city's oldest university, a structure that survived the Second World War, was in ruins.

Russia launched 172 drones at Ukrainian cities overnight, the counter-strike that came less than twenty-four hours after Ukraine sent more than a thousand drones at Moscow, the largest single-night barrage against the Russian capital in nearly three years of fighting.

The sequence is not coincidental. Russia chose civilian residential areas in at least eight Ukrainian cities in what its military presented...