On 24 February 2022 a warmongering billionaire tyrant, a latter-day would be Tsar of all the Russias, invaded Ukraine, an independent and largely peace-loving neighbour in mainland Europe. Western countries fulminated and imposed sanctions on a few of the tyrant’s gang but otherwise did nothing to protect its friend and neighbour. Baltic, Scandinavian and Central European States must now be fearful of further Russian expansion over the next decades and whether their allies will take any steps to stop it.

We can now see all too well the effect of a disintegrating Europe initiated by a disastrous politically motivated Brexit, both in terms of a unified policy and economically. We accepted an attempted assassination of a British resident by Russian agents and a consequential death of a British citizen. We subsequently continued to permit Russian investment in the UK, no doubt to the benefit of some of the London political and professional classes. We ignored the annexation of the Crimea. It was all a green light for a tyrant.

The consequences of a self-interested, inward-looking, incompetent Government, ill-equipped to combat a period of unrest and uncertainty will be seen for years to come.

Eighteen days on from the start of the invasion and after what appears to be deliberate bombing of a maternity hospital and numerous other massacres, what we should do about Ukraine? To date sanctions and the provision of weaponry to Ukraine have been put in place. Consideration of imposing a no-fly zone and putting forces on the ground have been dismissed in short order. Much of the policy thinking in the West seems to have been developed on the basis of a fear that opposition to Putin runs the risk of starting WW3 and / or the use of nuclear weapons. So allow the massacres and devastation to continue.

In Putin we have a man who is a cowardly bully and either mad or megalomaniac. In my experience of the concept of bullying it is necessary to confront the person. Until that happens they continue to act outside the boundaries of normal behaviour. Having got a taste for blood the lust for it increases. Although it is good to read that the Pope has somewhat belatedly after 17 days called on Putin to ‘stop this massacre’, this man is unlikely to respond positively to pious imploring. Nor will he worry that the Russian people will become impoverished by his actions. He appears to place little value on life.

While it may be improbable that he will immediately seek to reestablish his fantasy of a Russian Empire, once he has conscripted more armed forces, an onward march to Poland, Moldova and Estonia must be probable. He is only 69. His model is Stalin.

The West needs to construct a more coherent plan to bring this man’s evil activities to an end sooner rather than later.

But what do I know? I am 75 and it is my end of life which could be blighted or shortened and not my whole future. As I have thought in other contexts a younger generation has to make its own decisions and probably its own mistakes.

Ukraine Update

The war criminal remains undaunted 32 days on. His forces have surrounded one city, bent on starving 120,000 innocent civilians to death, and flattened other cities with cruise missiles, one a mere 50 miles from a western country. We allow genocide to rage unopposed except by feeble sanctions. Western politicians seem primarily concerned to protect their own immediate interests, with little concern for those dying an unpleasant death on their borders, or for the longer term consequences of unchecked barbarity.

The #StopRussianAggression video shown to the UN Meeting on 5 April 2022 is quite horrific and could prove to be a turning point. Russia pretends that Ukraine has invented the atrocities. Can anyone seriously believe that? How can the Russian Ambassador to the United Nations, Vassily Nebenzia and Sergei Lavrov Foreign Affairs Minister ever sleep?

If China continues to ignore what has happened it is in danger of becoming a pariah state as well. Day 40.

It is said that most Russians believe Putin’s propaganda. Does that make them accessories to murder?

After two months of unceasing aggression Russia continues its murderous campaign against the innocent and independent state of Ukraine. Putin’s sideback, the mad Lavrov, who calls himself Foreign Secretary, issues threats of World War III and nuclear attack, as a prelude to talks with the UN Secretary General, simply because Ukraine does its best to oppose its country being destroyed and its people murdered, raped and pillaged. Meanwhile the Russian population at large stand by and take no steps to oppose the mindless violence, heedless of the loss of 15,000 of its army, with many times that wounded, or the consequences of war for generations to come. [Updated 26 April 2022]

War exhaustion has set in after four months of ceaseless Russian barbarity. But renewed atrocity in bombing a shopping centre today causing the deaths of countless Ukrainians must surely make NATO rethink its policy of only arming them to defend themselves. Given the support Putin appears to have among his subjects, the war must be taken to them by some means to make them recognise the crimes that are being committed on their behalf. [Updated 27 June 2022]

Reading recently about the Holocaust it made me think that the only people I could compare Putin and his oligarchs to are Hitler and the Nazis. Sadly it seems they have the support of many of the Russian people.

24/10/2022

Regrettably this is what you get if you support a brutal, war-mongering regime which has no boundaries. Anton Krasovsky, the chief of Russian-language broadcasting live for the RT channel formerly called Russia Today, said Ukrainian children who said they were being occupied by Russia should be “thrown in a river with a strong undercurrent. Just drown these children. Drown them. Burn them alive.”

“Russia is being reduced by the Bolsheviks to an animal form of barbarism…Civilisation is being extinguished over gigantic areas, while Bolsheviks hop and caper like troops of ferocious baboons amid the ruins of their cities and the corpses of their victims.” Churchill in a speech in 1918. Plus ca change.

Russia retreats

Remembrance Day in the UK is memorable for the Russian retreat from Kherson, the only major city in Ukraine which they captured during their invasion. I cannot help but wonder how the Russian people can continue to be deluded about Putin’s claim that he was saving Ukrainians. It was a relief to see the joy obvious in Kherson today at their family reunions in spite of the privations visited on them by the invading barbarians.

Moving in to 2023 and eleven months on from the invasion Russia continues to send its men to the slaughter. At last the West has decided to assist Ukraine with tanks.

ONE OF THE FEW IN RUSSIA IT SEEMS

She imagines the muffled screams of those trapped under the rubble, the fire and smell of smoke, the grief of the mother who lost her husband and infant child beneath the ruins of the building in Dnipro bombed by Russia. She imagines being unable to breathe.

That is why she is here, at a statue to the Ukrainian poet Lesya Ukrainka, a largely unknown monument tucked away among Moscow’s brutalist apartment blocks that has hosted a furtive anti-war memorial at a time when few in Russia dare protest against the conflict.

“I don’t know what else I can do … I wanted to show that not everyone is indifferent [to the war] and that some people still have a conscience,” she says, her eyes filling with tears. It is the second time she has returned to place flowers at a makeshift memorial to victims of the strike on 14 January that killed 46 people and wounded more than 80. She passes it when she comes to visit her mother, who lives nearby.

This is the closest Russia comes to an anti-war demonstration these days. While Vladimir Putin’s announcement of the invasion of Ukraine brought thousands on to the streets last February, the government has methodically stamped out public dissent, arresting thousands and pressuring many more to flee the country.

Now, more than 10 days after the missile strike in Ukraine, a trickle of Muscovites still come to pay respects to those who died. An elderly man silently bows to the statue and crosses himself as he passes. Returning from class this week, Ilya, a student, bent over to read the memorials left at the statue.

29 January 2023