Civilians are dying on both sides of the Russia-Ukraine war — and every new casualty is another invoice sent to the American taxpayer.
In Russian-annexed Crimea, a Russian soldier opened fire on fellow servicemen before shooting up a village, killing four people total — one soldier and three civilians, ages 71, 64, and 59. Four more were wounded, including another serviceman. The Moscow-installed governor of Sevastopol, Mikhail Razvozhayev, confirmed the attacker was detained. The exiled Russian outlet Agentstvo, citing a local chat group screenshot, identified the alleged shooter as 21-year-old Maxim Alistratov from the Saratov region. The Moscow Times could not independently verify that claim. Razvozhayev urged the public to stay calm and trust only official information.
A day earlier and a few hundred miles west, a drone nose-dived into a crowded beach in the Krasnodar region of southwestern Russia, killing seven — including three children — and wounding 40. Verified social media footage showed the winged aircraft slamming into the resort at Arkhipo-Osipovka and bathers fleeing the blast. Krasnodar governor Veniamin Kondratyev called it a "cynical and inhumane terrorist attack against children" that "cannot be justified." Ukraine has made no official statement on the strike.
Here's the context the Beltway would rather you skip: this war is eating civilians on both sides, and the toll is climbing. The New York Times reported that Russian airstrikes killed roughly 400 Ukrainian civilians last month — the highest monthly figure since 2022. Russian strikes on Kyiv killed at least nine on Saturday alone. Ukraine's long-range campaign, once limited to military targets and oil refineries, has expanded to commercial infrastructure, including a Wildberries warehouse south of Moscow struck last week.
The framing split tells you everything. Euronews labeled Crimea "illegally annexed" and contextualized the shooting amid Ukrainian retaliatory attacks on the peninsula. The Moscow Times, publishing from exile, kept it straight — Russian soldier, annexed Crimea, here are the dead. The Times buried the Russian civilian deaths from the drone strike beneath three paragraphs of Ukrainian casualty figures and context about Russia's aerial campaign — as if dead children on a beach only count as a frame for the other side's suffering.
None of this is America's fight. No U.S. treaty obligation requires subsidizing this slaughter. Every billion shipped east is a billion not spent on American infrastructure, American borders, American families. The war is escalating — drone strikes on beach resorts, soldiers snapping and gunning down pensioners — and the only policy Washington can articulate is more money, more weapons, no exit.
The question isn't who's right in the Black Sea. The question is why we're still paying for it.
