Tag Archives: Invasion

Putin’s Troops on the Run

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It’s been a long time since I posted.  I was waiting, hoping that I could include Vladimir Putin’s obituary in my next post, but… well, Mikhail Gorbachev has died, Queen Elizabeth and died, but Vlad the Invader is still with us.

He has received a bloody nose, however, and there are reportedly murmurs within Russia that it’s time for him to go.  Unfortunately the complaint is not that he has invaded a peaceful neighbour and visited destruction and death upon its people, and in the process forced his troops to commit atricities and war crimes that will stain the name of Russia for generations.  The complaint is that he is not winning!

Heroes

I still hold to my belief that a comfortable majority of Russians do not support Putin’s war but fear to speak out; or support the war only because they believe the absurd lies they have been told: Ukraine is run by Nazis, Russian-speakers are being oppressed, NATO plans to invade Russia through Ukraine…

Putin’s people seem nonplussed by the humiliating failure of their army.  They overlook the simple fact that Ukrainians are fighting to defend their land, their homes and their very existence as a nation.  The Russians are fighting to gratify the ego of a deranged kleptocrat who dreams of reassembling an obsolete empire.

I assume that Putin will now resort to wholesale missile strikes against the cities, towns and villages that he has failed to subdue.  Then, at last, the Western allies will lift the ban on directing the weapons they have supplied to Ukraine against targets beyond Ukraine’s own borders.  Logically and morally there is no reason why the Ukrainian army should not destroy any site, any airfield, any vessel from which Russian missiles have been launched; and any transport infrastructure that is used to bring troops and materiel to the theatre of war.  US intelligence can surely provide very precise coordinates.

Cancelling Russia

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Dr Ann Jones

One of my favourite radio shows is called “What the Duck?”. The host is Ann Jones, a naturalist, and every week she addresses odd, extreme and downright quirky things in the natural world. In her most recent show she investigated whether any of Aesop’s Fables were scientifically as well as morally sound. Could, for example, a tortoise really win a race with a hare?

This moved me to pull down my copy of the book and browse at random. I came across the fable of The Wolf and the Lamb, which I offer below in condensed form. The moral is “Any excuse will serve a tyrant.” How apt at this moment!

The good guys (to lump a multitude of countries into one geopolitical category) have not reacted to Putin’s invasion very cleverly or courageously. The Ukrainian people’s own ferocious defence of  their national sovereignty stands in stark contrast, as does President Zelenskiy’s leadership.

Aesop’s Fables: The Wolf and the Lamb

But I am appalled by recent reports of Western institutions’ “cancelling” Russian books, music and art.  Putin and his coterie are our enemy, not the Russian people and certainly not Russia’s rich contribution to the cultural life of the world.  

Putin has lied to his people and to his own army.  True, he is mining a rich vein of nationalism and fear born of past invasions from the west, but few Russians would have supported the brutal assault on peaceable fellow-Slavs if they had known the truth.

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THE WOLF AND THE LAMB (CONDENSED)

A wolf is drinking at a brook and sees a lamb paddling a little way off. Wanting a reason to eat the lamb the wolf says, “How dare you stir up the mud while I’m drinking?!”

The lamb replies, “But I’m downstream of you.”

“Huh,” said the wolf, “I bet it was you saying bad things behind my back a year ago.”

“A year ago I was not born,” said the lamb.

“Then it must have been your father, which comes to the same thing!”

And the wolf leapt on the lamb, killed it and ate it.