It Is in No Way Lawful: What the Church Teaches When a Government Calls Its Strikes a Price

On Monday afternoon a Russian drone flew into the headquarters of Ukraine’s National Academy of Sciences, a 19th-century building in the center of Kyiv, and set it burning with people at their desks inside. The same day, the Kremlin’s spokesman told reporters that Ukraine “will have to pay a price” for its attacks on Russia, and that the paying had begun. The Church has a precise teaching about who may be made to pay for a war, and it binds both sides of this one.

The News Story

A Russian jet-powered drone struck the headquarters of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine in central Kyiv on Monday, September 28, setting several floors of the 19th-century building on fire in the middle of the working day. Officials said 2 people were killed there. One was Nataliia Bukalo, an aide to Volodymyr Horbulin, the academy’s vice president and a former secretary of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, who was himself slightly wounded. Video of the strike showed the drone diving into the building at a steep angle, and workers were later seen leaning from windows and escaping the flames on ladders.¹

The academy was founded in 1918 and oversees research institutes across Ukraine. Its building on Volodymyrska Street dates to the 1850s and stands near St. Volodymyr’s Cathedral, the national opera, the German Embassy and government offices. Academy president Anatoliy Zagorodny told reporters: “We are not connected with the military. This is an attack on science. It is terrorism.” Leaders of the U.S. National Academies issued a statement condemning “this direct attack on the country’s scientific infrastructure.”²

The academy was one target in a nationwide wave of strikes. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Russia launched more than 120 drones on Monday, 90 of them jet-powered, and that Ukrainian defenses stopped only 57 percent of the jet models, against about 70 percent overall. He said new interceptors built for the faster drones are being tested. Zelenskyy put the day’s toll at 9 killed and more than 80 wounded; the toll was later revised to 10. A drone hit an office center in Dnipro during working hours, killing 3. A strike on an apartment building in Kharkiv wounded 43 people, 11 of them children, and an attack in Zaporizhzhia wounded 32. In Kyiv, drones also hit a medical center, a pharmaceutical company, gas stations and data centers.³

Russia’s Defense Ministry said it struck 2 data centers and gas stations in Kyiv and described its targets as military-related. Both governments deny deliberately targeting civilians. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov tied the campaign to Ukrainian attacks inside Russia, including a large drone attack on Moscow during Russia’s recent parliamentary elections. “Ukraine will have to pay a price for the actions that have taken place in recent months,” he told reporters. “That is happening right now.”⁴

Russia struck Kyiv again overnight into Tuesday with missiles and drones. Mayor Vitali Klitschko said a missile hit an educational institution in the Solomianskyi district and started a fire. The State Emergency Service said 1 person was injured when an apartment building in the Holosiivskyi district was hit.⁵

Also on Monday, a Russian jet-powered drone crashed in a forest near the Yahodyn checkpoint in Ukraine’s Volyn region, on the border with Poland, and its blast wave damaged the checkpoint premises; no casualties were reported. Poland’s military scrambled fighter aircraft and put ground-based air defenses on high readiness, air raid sirens sounded across the Lublin province, and officials in eastern Poland told residents to shelter in place.⁶

Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha said Russia “is deliberately expanding the boundaries of what it believes the world will tolerate,” asked allies for more air defenses, and called on UNESCO to strip Russia of its voting rights. As of September 23, UNESCO had verified damage to 560 cultural sites in Ukraine during the war.⁷

Ukraine said its long-range drones hit oil facilities in Russia’s Krasnodar region and defense plants in the Tula and Voronezh regions on Monday. The strikes followed a week of discussion at the United Nations General Assembly on ending the war, now in its fifth year, where Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov accused Europe of working to block peace talks.⁸

Catholic Social Teaching Analysis

A Spokesman Names the Purpose

Russia’s government rarely says out loud what a strike is for. Its Defense Ministry reports targets: data centers, gas stations, sites it calls military. On Monday, the Kremlin’s own spokesman said something else. Asked how Ukraine’s attacks inside Russia bore on the prospects for peace, Dmitry Peskov answered, “Ukraine will have to pay a price for the actions that have taken place in recent months,” and added, “That is happening right now.”⁹

A price is paid by someone. On Monday afternoon it was paid by Nataliia Bukalo, an aide at work in a building full of scientists. It was paid by 3 people killed in a Dnipro office center, and by 43 people wounded in a Kharkiv apartment block, 11 of them children. Russia says it aims at military targets, and I can’t audit every strike from here. But the man who speaks for the Kremlin described the campaign as payment for what Ukraine’s government has done. That is a claim about punishment, and the Church has a clear teaching about who may be punished for a war.

The Moral Law Keeps Working in Wartime

The Catechism opens its teaching on conduct in war with a sentence that sounds almost too plain to need saying: “The Church and human reason both assert the permanent validity of the moral law during armed conflict.” Then it quotes the Second Vatican Council: “The mere fact that war has regrettably broken out does not mean that everything becomes licit between the warring parties.”¹⁰

Look at the first five words. The Church and human reason. Any honest person can check this claim without reciting a creed, and the laws of war most nations have signed say the same thing in drier language. The next paragraph states the rule itself: “Non-combatants, wounded soldiers, and prisoners must be respected and treated humanely.” And it closes the door an order-giver might try to slip through: “Actions deliberately contrary to the law of nations and to its universal principles are crimes, as are the orders that command such actions. Blind obedience does not suffice to excuse those who carry them out.”¹¹

St. Thomas Aquinas gives the reason under the rule. Asking whether it is ever lawful to kill the innocent, he answers that “the life of righteous men preserves and forwards the common good, since they are the chief part of the community.” His conclusion is flat: “Therefore it is in no way lawful to slay the innocent.”¹² The Latin innocens means, at its root, one who does no harm. A physicist at his desk does no harm to the Russian army. Neither does a pharmacist, or an aide carrying files down a corridor on Volodymyrska Street.

Thomas’s reason fits this case closely. The academy’s president, Anatoliy Zagorodny, said of Monday’s strike, “We are not connected with the military. This is an attack on science.”¹³ Thomas would have understood the complaint. The people who teach and study are part of what keeps a nation a nation, and a war that spends them spends the common good itself.

A Political Demand Cannot Outrank a Person

The Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church takes the same rule and names the pressure that usually breaks it. “The principle of humanity inscribed in the conscience of every person and all peoples includes the obligation to protect civil populations from the effects of war.” Then it quotes an earlier teaching on how that protection fails: “That minimum protection of the dignity of every person, guaranteed by international humanitarian law, is all too often violated in the name of military or political demands which should never prevail over the value of the human person.”¹⁴

Peskov’s price is a political demand in a military uniform. Ukraine struck Moscow during Russia’s elections, and Russia wants Ukraine to feel it. As a human reflex, that’s easy to understand, and it is exactly what the Compendium says may never outrank a human person. Reprisal of this kind works by moving the cost of one government’s choices onto people who didn’t make them.

The Church has watched societies grow out of that habit before. The Compendium puts it this way: “As in the internal life of individual States … a system of private vendetta and reprisal has given way to the rule of law, so too a similar step forward is now urgently needed in the international community.”¹⁵ A town that settles scores by burning the other family’s barn is living in a feud. A court exists so that the injured party can’t collect from whoever happens to be nearby. On Monday, Moscow collected from whoever happened to be at work.

The same rule binds Kyiv, and a fair reader should say so. Ukraine’s long-range drones hit refineries, oil facilities and defense plants deep inside Russia, and Russia says it downed 254 of them in a single night. A defense plant is a military target. A Ukrainian drone that falls on a Russian apartment block answers to the same paragraph of the Compendium as the Russian one that hit the academy. Ukraine has a real right to defend itself, and every interceptor it fires at an incoming drone is that right in its plainest form. The protection owed to the innocent belongs to Russian civilians as fully as to Ukrainian ones.

What Pope Leo XIV Adds

In Magnifica Humanitas, his encyclical on artificial intelligence, Pope Leo XIV writes that, “without prejudice to the right to self-defense in the strictest sense,” the “just war” theory, “which has all too often been used to justify any kind of war, is now outdated.” In the same paragraph, he describes how a war talks itself into cruelty: “When historical memory fades, and the ethical principles that protect civilians and the most vulnerable are weakened, it becomes easier to justify violence as necessary, inevitable or even ‘sanitized.’”¹⁶

A price is a sanitizing word. It turns a burning building into a line on a ledger.

Leo also wrote about weapons like the ones that crossed Kyiv on Monday. He framed his criteria for artificial intelligence in warfare, but the third one is older than any machine: “The third criterion is the identification and protection of civilians. Any technology that facilitates attacks without seeing the face of human beings lowers the moral threshold of conflict. Target selection and the use of force must not confuse combatants and non-combatants, nor ignore the impact on defenseless populations.”¹⁷ A jet-powered drone launched hundreds of miles away never sees the face at the window. Leo’s point is that the people who send it still have to answer for it.

Leo narrows the permission for force to self-defense in the strictest sense, and inside that narrower space the protection owed to civilians stands at full strength. The older tradition and the new teaching agree completely on this much: the innocent are never the price.

What I’d Watch

Watch whether the language of payment spreads. When a government names punishment as the purpose of its strikes, it has already stopped arguing about which targets are lawful. Watch the air defense deliveries too, because under Leo’s teaching those are the easiest weapons in this war to defend: they exist to stop the thing from landing.

And pray. Pray for Nataliia Bukalo and for the others killed on Monday, for the 11 children in Kharkiv, and for the scientists whose building burned around them. Pray for the Russian officers who give the orders and the crews who carry them out, that they remember what the Catechism says about blind obedience. And pray for the faithful of Kyiv, Orthodox and Greek Catholic, whose Cathedral of St. Volodymyr stands near the burned academy.

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This story turns on the immunity of the innocent in war: the moral law binds while the shooting lasts, and no government may make civilians pay for what another government has done.

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Notes

1. ↑ “Russia pounds Ukraine’s Kyiv after deadly strike on Academy of Sciences,” Al Jazeera, September 29, 2026, aljazeera.com; Georgia Gilholy, “America’s Own National Academies Have Now Condemned Russia’s Direct Strike on Ukraine’s Scientific Infrastructure,” National Security Journal, September 29, 2026, nationalsecurityjournal.org; Sophia Kishkovsky, “Ukraine’s historic Academy of Sciences severely damaged by Russian drone,” The Art Newspaper, September 29, 2026, theartnewspaper.com; “Russian strikes on Ukraine kill at least 7, including woman at Kyiv’s National Academy of Sciences,” CBS News and Associated Press, September 28, 2026, cbsnews.com.
2. ↑ Kishkovsky, “Ukraine’s historic Academy of Sciences”; Al Jazeera, “Russia pounds Ukraine’s Kyiv”; Gilholy, “America’s Own National Academies.”
3. ↑ Al Jazeera, “Russia pounds Ukraine’s Kyiv”; Gilholy, “America’s Own National Academies”; CBS News and Associated Press, “Russian strikes on Ukraine kill at least 7.”
4. ↑ CBS News and Associated Press, “Russian strikes on Ukraine kill at least 7”; Olena Mukhina, “After Russia hits Kyiv’s Academy of Sciences with jet-powered drone, the Kremlin says Ukraine must ‘pay a price,’” Euromaidan Press, September 28, 2026, euromaidanpress.com; Al Jazeera, “Russia pounds Ukraine’s Kyiv.”
5. ↑ Lachlan Hyatt and Tamara Nowakowsky, “Russian overnight missile attack on Kyiv injures 1, damages railway depot, data centers, educational institution,” Kyiv Independent, September 29, 2026, kyivindependent.com; Al Jazeera, “Russia pounds Ukraine’s Kyiv.”
6. ↑ Katherina Popilnichenko, “Russian Jet-Powered Drone Crashes Near Poland Border, Blast Damages Ukrainian Checkpoint,” United24 Media, September 28, 2026, united24media.com; “Headlines for September 29, 2026,” Democracy Now!, September 29, 2026, democracynow.org.
7. ↑ Al Jazeera, “Russia pounds Ukraine’s Kyiv”; Kishkovsky, “Ukraine’s historic Academy of Sciences.”
8. ↑ CBS News and Associated Press, “Russian strikes on Ukraine kill at least 7”; Al Jazeera, “Russia pounds Ukraine’s Kyiv.”
9. ↑ CBS News and Associated Press, “Russian strikes on Ukraine kill at least 7”; Mukhina, “After Russia hits Kyiv’s Academy of Sciences.”
10. ↑ Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd ed. (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1997), no. 2312, vatican.va.
11. ↑ Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 2313.
12. ↑ Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae II-II, q. 64, a. 6, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province, in New Advent, newadvent.org.
13. ↑ Gilholy, “America’s Own National Academies.”
14. ↑ Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2004), no. 505, vatican.va.
15. ↑ Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium, no. 439.
16. ↑ Pope Leo XIV, Encyclical Letter Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, May 15, 2026), no. 192, vatican.va.
17. ↑ Pope Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas, no. 199.

Books Cited

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• Catechism of the Catholic Church, Second Edition (Doubleday / Image, 2003)
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Latin-English edition, Complete Set (Aquinas Institute / Emmaus Academic, 2012)