There’s a certain volatility in the Eastern European region which has always created issues. The entire area, from the Baltics to the Black Sea has been politically uneasy for centuries. There have been times and areas of unity but they’re only temporary. And normally centred around collective hatred for someone else. Like the Jews. Ukraine is the site of 2 of the last war (the one before the current one)’s biggest massacres. One at Babyn Yar and the other at Dnipro. The Nazis had taken over that part of Ukraine as they made early inroads into the Soviet Union. So, aided and abetted by locals, as was always their way, they collected and murdered hundreds of thousands of Jews as they ‘cleared the way’. Buried in mass graves. Which were later found but had to be distinguished from the mass graves Stalin had dug for his own mass murders of Germans, Poles and Ukrainians. Very messy in those forests.

Ukraine now has a Jewish president and we all love him. For his bravery as much as anything else. It’s normal for presidents to send messages of support from Zurich at times of war, regardless of which country they’re actually the president of, not to be out on the streets with the bombs and missiles. So all credit and love to Zelensky. And support of course for the Ukrainian civilians who asked for none of this. Civilians never do. That’s the nature of war, the people who start them do so for political reasons and principles and then send in everyone else to do the fighting and dying for them.

And there’s always propaganda around war. In Eastern Europe there’s propaganda all the time, but just more so during a crisis. So Putin’s propaganda machine has gone into overdrive. Not just in stating his own weird, distorted and totally fictional side of events, but also in simply eliminating or banning any form of news which might state something in any way different from his ‘party line’. The only ‘non-state’ tv and radio stations in Moscow have been shut down. The internet is closed. The Russian soldiers captured in Ukraine claim, very credibly, that they had no idea what they were doing. They were told ‘peace-keeping’. And yeah, ‘keeping peace’ using heavy artillery, cluster bombs and missile launchers might seem a stretch to us in the comfort of our post-operative neo-naziism, but Russians are trained to ‘believe’. To choose a more questioning approach to authority will result in death.

What worries me most is that Putin appears to believe his own rubbish. Which is very scary indeed. Though possibly the perception of his fragile grip on sanity is part of the plan. Which is why no-one is talking about any plans which might involve attacking anything Russian other than the economy. You don’t fuck with a loony with nukes. Rule number 1.

Happy Friday

A xxxx