One mother, whose student son has volunteered for the Territorial Defence Force, admits that this lethal concoction – a cocktail, if ever there was one, for Unhappy Hour – may not do much, but at least it will tell the Russians they aren’t welcome. I can’t help but imagine my sweet, disorganised boy, the same age as hers, in uniform and shudder.
That tremendous Ukrainian spirit, which we have seen all week, lifts your heart. It really does. What a fool Putin was to call them a “fake country”. It made people angry and, although fear may be strong, fury is stronger. President Volodymyr Zelensky must expect to be assassinated any day now, and yet the former comedian turned down a US offer of evacuation (“I need ammunition, not a ride!”) with a cheery, principled defiance that suddenly made him the statesman we all crave, led by heart and gut, not opinion poll.
On Monday, stars of the Dynamo Kyiv team exchanged their football strip for military uniforms. Will the Ukrainian players enjoy a home advantage against Russia’s mighty opposition? We pray that they will.
At the other extreme of civilian manpower, a message from the Ukraine Library Association regarding the cancellation of its forthcoming conference reads: “We will reschedule just as soon as we have finished vanquishing our invaders.”
It’s funny to think of librarians up in arms, isn’t it? Until you really think about all that cultivated, bookish, bespectacled earnestness pitted against the barbarians and their cluster bombs.
On a railway platform in Poland, a solitary, brown-haired refugee, sweet-faced as a doll, tells a reporter that her entire family is back in Ukraine. “They said, if you go then one of us will be still alive,” the girl explained. What would that sweet girl do if the Russian President were there now? “I would kill Putin with my bare hands,” she says, her doll-face impassive, “because you cannot be that bad in 2022.”
Oh, but it turns out you really can be that bad in 2022, a fact that appears to have taken our complacent leaders by surprise. The West’s strategy has been to hope for the best while failing to prepare for the worst. What did they think the Russian President was up to with his vast $635 billion war-chest of foreign currency – saving to go on his holidays?
Evidently, the Russians were delighted by the Europeans’ net-zero idiocy, investing $95 million in NGOs which campaigned successfully against shale gas and fracking, according to the Centre for European Studies. That meant many countries, but especially Germany, became hugely dependent on Russian gas, so their hands would be tied should Putin invade Ukraine.
The UK has pursued the same reckless energy policy, but at least we can be proud of the immense, “game-changing” contribution we have made to Ukraine’s defences. While Italy was wailing about the loss of a market for its luxury handbags and other EU members were too frit to throw Russia out of the Swift global payments system (as a revivified Boris Johnson demanded), our country has been front and centre of the international assistance.
Back in January, we sent Ukraine 2,000 NLAW anti-tank units. That’s £40 million in hardware for starters. Germany’s pitiful response was to send 5,000 helmets, but not to Ukraine itself. Good heavens, no, that might have upset the Gas Man! So embarrassingly bent backwards over a pipeline were the Germans they even refused to allow RAF planes, which were delivering weapons, to fly through their airspace to Ukraine until earlier this week when they suddenly discovered a spine.
