From a bombed beach in Russia to a family wiped out in a Ukrainian village, civilians keep paying for a war Washington’s establishment won’t end.

This week gave the world two images it shouldn’t have to see in the same seven days.

In Gelendzhik, on Russia’s Black Sea coast, a Ukrainian drone slammed into a crowded beach, killing at least seven people, including three children, and wounding roughly forty more. Debris from the strike also hit the nearby village of Arkhipo-Osipovka. Russian officials called it a deliberate act of terrorism against civilians; Ukraine, as of this writing, has not commented on the incident, and Kyiv has consistently maintained it does not intentionally target civilians. Whatever the intent, the outcome is the same one that’s defined this war for four and a half years now: families on a beach, gone in an instant.

Four days earlier, in the village of Radushne in Ukraine’s Dnipropetrovsk region, a Russian Iskander ballistic missile hit the home of the Voronov family directly. Ten people were believed to be inside. Rescuers pulled the bodies of the parents, Artem and Olena, and several of their children from the rubble — kids as young as six — along with their eighteen-month-old grandson. “The impact of the Russian missile was so powerful that almost nothing remained of the house,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky wrote afterward. The family was buried this week in a small church in Kryvyi Rih, in front of a crowd of mourners who described them as an “exceptionally good and sincere” family.

Two tragedies, two different militaries responsible, one and the same war grinding through its fifth year with no end in sight.

That’s the part that should stop everyone — regardless of which side of this conflict they instinctively root for. Ukraine’s long-range drone campaign has increasingly reached deep into Russian territory, including strikes on commercial infrastructure like Wildberries fulfillment centers, Russia’s largest online marketplace, aimed at pressuring the economy and disrupting supply chains that support the war effort. Russia, meanwhile, continues to launch near-daily barrages of missiles and drones at Ukrainian towns and cities — Zelensky said one recent overnight assault alone involved more than seventy missiles and 280 attack drones aimed at cities from Kyiv to Kharkiv. Both militaries insist they’re targeting military and economic infrastructure. Both keep killing civilians anyway.

This is exactly the dynamic the MAGA movement has warned about for years: a war that keeps escalating because there’s no real end strategy attached to the money and weapons flowing into it. Washington’s foreign policy establishment has spent tens of billions of taxpayer dollars keeping this conflict funded, with no clear off-ramp and no serious diplomatic push commensurate with the scale of the killing. Zelensky himself has said Ukraine is burning through Western-supplied air defense missiles faster than they can be replaced — which either means allies need to send more indefinitely, or someone needs to actually negotiate an end to the war generating the demand in the first place.