Unhappy Anniversay

Lunch with the in-laws

I am not quite sure why I married a Russian lady. It was just one of those things that happened. I remember reading War and Peace when I was about 12. At Oxford, in my final year, I lived in the House of St Gregory and St Macrina and there was a sprinkling of Russian Orthodox. 

It was a few years ago, the summer of 2018, when I was last in the Crimea. After we left China, Irena said that I must go and see all of my in-laws and I said okay. When will I see them again? It has been more than four years since Irena saw any of her family and no one knows when this war with Ukraine will come to an end. Yes, she can talk to them over the Internet, but maybe for not much longer. The Russian government is trying to promote Max, their homegrown alternative to Skype, WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger.

In Simferopol, with Yevgenny, my brother-in-law
My wife and I do not talk about politics. There is absolutely no point in discussing “the special military operation”. Irena says that Putin is in the right and he is defending Russia from Nazis and NATO (and maybe really they are one and the same thing). I say that Putin is another Hitler, invading another country and causing appalling suffering. How much death and destruction have already happened? How much more is going to happen, before it is all over? Western experts think that Russian casualties (dead and seriously wounded) are something 1.2 million. Ukrainian battle casualties are probably a lot less, but their civilian deaths have been much higher.

In front of Lenin's statue
I used to think that Putin was a good president for Russia. I don’t think that any more. The war has caused terrible (and perhaps irreversible) damage to the Russian economy and to Russian society. Just as the Russian Empire collapsed after defeat in the First World War and failure in Afghanistan during the Cold War contributed to the end of the Soviet Union, so it looks as though the Russian Federation will break up into fragments when the looming military disaster leads to political and social unrest.
Yev and a T34

Yes, I do think that the Russian army is now on the back foot. (Recently the Ukrainians re-took in three day 300 kilometres of territory that had taken the Russians three months to capture.) While it is true that drones and missiles continue to damage apartment blocks in Kyiv, on the battlefield it is a different story. The Ukrainians might be outnumbered, but the Russians are outclassed.   


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