Bulgaria with Noodles

War memorial in Simferopol, 2018 According to the legend, Stalin was more than a bit surprised when the USSR was invaded in 1941. For quite some time, Uncle Joe just could not believe that it really was happening. Yes, his intelligence officers tried to warn him that Hitler was going to attack and Stalin dismissed their fears. So it was not quite a case of history repeating itself when Putin's soldiers invaded the Ukraine. As readers of my blog will already know, I saw a lot of good things that have happened since the Russian takeover of the Crimea back in 2014. Way back before we were married, I also had the opportunity to see what things in the Crimea were like when the region was part of the Ukraine and under the authority of the government in Kiev. What a mess!  But whatever good Putin may have done in the past is far outweighed by the disaster that is unfolding in the streets of Kiev, Kharkov and towns and cities all over the Ukraine.   With Albert, my father-inlaw, and Y...

Tovarich Lenin is still around The big news is that it hasn't happened. The Russian military has not launched an all-out invasion of the Ukraine. Mr Putin has said that the Russian forces have already started returning to their bases, but NATO says that they haven't. Hmm. There are supposed to be 100,000 Russian military personnel on the border with Ukraine and Belorussia, so maybe it might take some time for all of them to pack up and go home. When I was in the Crimea in 2018, I definitely had the feeling that most people there felt that Putin is doing a good job. They had a lot of respect for their president and that is not something that most Brits feel about Boris Johnson. I think that Joe Biden is a decent sort of chap, but it seems that most Americans think that he is a disaster and that Donald Trump would do a much better job. In the centre of Simferopol, my dear Irena's hometown and the biggest city in the Crima, you can see these statues. A young and rather sweet-l...

This is part of an angry e-mail that I wrote to the BBC. The steppe, just outside Mamulichka's datcha in the Crimea I am fed up with the BBC's inaccurate, false and dishonest reporting of the so-called "occupation" of the Crimea by Russian forces. Why don't they also write a piece about the British Army occupying Aldershot? Or the American army invading West Point? The Crimea is part of Russia. It always has been. The Tsar had his summer palaces in the Crimea. Thousands of Russian soldiers died defending the Crimea during the Crimean War. It was the same in WW2. Have you ignorant and stupid people at the BBC never bothered to open a history textbook? Most people in the Crimea speak RUSSIAN and think of themselves as RUSSIAN. Sevastopol was (and always has been) a major Russian military base.  I was in Yalta thirteen years ago, when the Crimea was still part of the Ukraine (thanks to Kruschev, who was half Ukrainian) and it was a MESS. The useless govern...

This is Simferopol's registry office, where we were married. I never intended this blog to become political. On the whole, I find politics amazingly boring, as do most people, but I have to write this post because I think that many people have just not heard the truth. They are probably not going to hear (or read) the truth because most TV news outlets in the UK and in the USA have not treated this subject in a fair and even-handed manner. I used to be (and to some extent I still am) a great fan of the BBC, but the BBC’s coverage of this issue has not been fair, balanced or unbiased. Well, this piece in my blog is going to try to present the other side of the coin, the side that CNN and the BBC do not want you to think about. So what am I going to write about? Russia’s “annexation” or “invasion” of the Crimea. The T34 tank was nicknamed "the Snow King". Russian casualties in the Second World War were 20 million. Huge swathes of Russian territory were occupie...