Besieged, but their fighting spirit remains
AT OUR motel outside Lviv the siren went, which I took to be for real after the oil depot bombing two hours earlier.
I was joined in the basement by Olesya, the receptionist, on her 24-hour shift. We sat alone awaiting other guests. I asked if she spoke English and how many guests were in the hotel. “Seventy. I am here because I have to be if a guest is here.” “I am the most cowardly resident then?” “So it would seem, sir.”
We agreed I go to my room and she can sleep under her reception desk before laying up for breakfast. The country is now “dry” and you eat what you are given in many places.
In Lviv, a lot of the supermarkets have been shut, serving as reception centres for the constant westward flow of mothers and children.
We take a 12-hour sleeper train. In Kyiv, I am put up in a toy-littered flat abandoned by a mother and three children.
It is on the 11th floor, as everyone has moved down the tower block to be nearer the basement.
We tour central town.
The top hotels have been commandeered as operations centres.the streets are nearly deserted. Roadblocks are frequent and might stop a Chelsea tractor but not at80.
Kyiv teems with troops, women of all ages carrying AK47S. I meet American volunteers heading to the front. Jim was in Afghanistan and Iraq, and has left his wife and seven children in Montana.
Returning to Poland we pass convoys of trains coming in to Ukraine laden with weaponry.
Our train arrives at a crossing point for refugees.the female border military smile and wave at the children, and hug them.
My neighbour, a 16-year-old would-be computer scientist, is off to study in Canada: “But I will fight the Russians with cyber every night.”
THE latest suggestion that Vladimir Putin is ready to promise to stop shelling Kyiv and other parts of Ukraine as a gesture towards a possible peace deal should be treated with utter disdain.
Remember, this is the man who said his troops would never invade the country in the first place.
He also vowed they wouldn’t bomb schools, shelters or hospitals.
This is simply a man who wouldn’t know the truth if it slapped him in the face, and we’re not talking Oscars night.
THE numbers tell the story. Nearly 200,000 families in the UK have stepped forward to offer to house refugees from Ukraine. More than 20,000 Ukrainians have applied for visas to enter the country – of which a mere 2,700 have been approved.
And only a little over 1,000 have actually arrived in Britain.
This Whitehall red tape farce is shameful, but when you remember it is the Home Office at the heart of this incompetence it comes as little surprise.
From the Windrush scandal to the shambles of people trafficking across the Channel, this is a department mired in failure
– but now it is also bringing global shame to this nation.
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