Ukraine......more thoughts.

 

It's been almost a month since Putin's minions invaded the country.  A month of bloodshed and murder.  A month of desperate people - two million or more of them - depserately fleeing for their lives, taking whatever pitiful belongings they could manage in suitcases and Ikea bags, mostly women and children as their menfolk remained at home to defend their home land (and perhaps perish in doing so).  The images on the television news programs, both here in Poland and on the BBC World channel, haunt me night and day.....

It's also been a month of mealy-mouthed platitudes from the leaders of the Western Alliance (or whatever epithet you want to use): of Biden and Johnson, Macron and Stoltenberg, Sholz and Blinken and Truss. Stating their admiration for the Ukrainian people and President Zelensky.  He is no more the stand-up comedian, but a lonely, heroic figure, prowling the ruins of Kyiv and posting mobile phone videos aimed at shoring up the morale of the population, and speaking to the British Parliament, the EU, the Knesset and Congress by video link, appealing for more sanctions, more assistance, more weapons, a no-fly zone.....  Appeals that have usually been acknowledged but not acted upon.  I admire the man immensely.

A month of pledges from these same leaders that Putin must be called to account for his war crimes, but without saying how this can happen unless and until the butcher loses the war and falls from power.  If he gets his way and takes Ukraine, that will not happen.  But it seems to me that unless NATO gets actively involved Ukraine cannot win, no matter how brave their people are and how hard they resist.  The threat of an "all-out European war" - that the West insists will be the result if they intervene - is errant nonsense: the European War started eight years ago when Russia annexed first Crimea, then later the Donbas regaion in Eastern Ukraine and shoot down MH17 - a war ctime if ever there was one!

And now we have that fat fraud Johnson likening the Ukrainian people's "struggle for freedom" to that of the British people "voting in their millions" to regain their "freedom from the EU."   Of all of the obscene lies this vacuous and incompetent Prime Minister has spouted during his tenure this is probably the worst of the lot.  If nothing else, it ignores the fact that Ukraine wanted to exercise its democratic right and join the EU, and this desire seems to have gone some way towards triggering Putin's brutal act of  retribution. The fact that the comments were made during a speech to the Tory faithful at their Spring Conference tells you all need to know - this is not a party fit to govern.  Remember that, please, at the next election......

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The Press coverage is unsurpisingly focused on some of the more visible Russian atrocities.  The bombing of a maternity hospital.  The destruction of a theatre sheltering people. The opening of "humanitarian corridors" that lead from beseiged cities but only towards Russia and its ally - for which read lapdog and vassal state - Belarus, and then shelling the refugees using them in their desperation.

It's focused on the refugees flooding across the borders into Moldova, Slovakia, Hungary and, most of all, Poland and the help they are being given by these host nations, the extraordinary generosity being shown by ordinary people.  I know one person, a friend of a friend, here who iss fortunate enough to own a couple of apartments in the city - these are now housing two groups of Ukrainian refugess, at no cost to them.  There are thousands of similar instances across Polish cities and towns and villages: the population of Warsaw has grown by nearly 20% since the conflict began.  And still the poor people come.....

There are many famous people, actors and singers and musicians, doing their bit to help, opening their doors and providing shelter and transport, but not publicising the fact in the way that David Cameron is: "Driving a truck to Poland with supplies", he tweets,  "a gruelling journey but I'll tweet our progress"......  Well, no, actually.  Google maps tells me that from Calais Harbou to the centre of Warsaw should take a little over 14 hours, most of it motorway driving.  Add on a couple of hours to get from Warsaw to the Ukrainian border, and you're still doing the trip in well under a day.  And Cameron is not fleeing Russian troops,  on foot, or trying to hide from Russian fighters and helicopter gunships out for easy pickings, trying to comfort a distraught fice year old....  That is a "gruelling journey", Dave, not your motorway cruise.   And anyway, unless he has an HGV licence, I doubt that Dave is doing the driving.....   Another Tory has-been whose book sales have dropped, I guess, courting publicity.  

But then I'm an old cynic, right? 

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Last night, one of the major tv networks here broadcast live a Concert for Ukraine.  It featured singers and artists and actors from both Poland and Ukraine, performing on a big arena stage with a backdrop that alternated between a light projection of the country's blue-and-yellow flag, and newsreel footage from the conflict.  What struck me, and still haunts me, is that while the focus is on the millions of young people and kids affected by this obscenity, they at least have time on their side.  Eventually - in months or years - the trauma will fade, and they will be able to build a life and a future wherever they end up: God willing, back home, but if not in Poland or Britain or Germany or whichever host country they end up in.  Ttragic, yes, but they have life and hope.

But the newsreels are full of footage of the older people caight up in all this, of my generation or perhaps a bit older.  Images of ladies like my elder sisters, in their 80s, struggling through the rubble in Mariupol and Kharkiv and elsewhere, clinging on to the arms of firefighters or militia or each other, carrying nothing, possessing only the clothes they are wearing.  The faces are dusty and perhaps bloodied, their expressions blank and shellshocked, or else streaked with tears.  These are the kinds  of pictures you see in the history books, of refugees struggling through the wreckage of Stalingrad or Berlin or Warsaw, or any other city devastated during the Second World War - but it's live footage, happening now, in a modern city in the 21st century.  It's not so different to the pictures that have been coming from Syria and Iraq and Afghanisatan for the past twenty years, but much much closer to home - just a few hours' drive from my front door in fact.  That's what makes it so terrible, I suppose.

There people, some of them, lived through those awful war days as children, then endured fifty odd years of Communist brutality under Stalin and Khruschev - a Ukrainian himself - and Brezhnev and all the rest, then found a new dawn, a new hope, with the collapse of the USSR and rise of a free and independent democratic nation - only to have it snatched away in their twilight years by yet another maniac in the Kremlin.  Everything they worked and struggled for over those dark years is gone.  When they should be able to enjoy their last days in the comfort of apartments ahd cottages in the lush countryside, surrounded by accumulated souvenirs and family photos and heirlooms, visited by their children and grandchildren and perhaps great grandchildren, they face a future with nothing.  No wonder they are in despair!

But back to the concert.  Many of the performers, after their brief spot of song or narration, left the stage in tears.    The finale brought them all back out for a beautiful mass rendition of John Lennon's "Imagine".

I cried too.