On Saturday Panic and uncertainty in a voice from Kyiv

SOMETIMES big things making historic headlines can enter even the most peaceful of Westcountry parishes, which was the case at my place this week as a Ukrainian journalist friend began sending me a series of panicky messages via social media. Suddenly those TV images of tanks and missile strikes began to seem very real and scary.

Certainly my friend Sasha, a highly successful young magazine editor, was terrified as the sound of air raid sirens began to wail around her home in Kyiv. For days she had been messaging me to say she knew the situation with Russia was bad, but she didn’t really believe Putin would throw caution to the wind.

Then, on Thursday morning, Sasha messaged: “I’m home now, staying in my apartment in the western part of Kyiv. My husband is with me. We woke up at 5am because of missile strikes. We were in panic. We really hoped this would never happen. We gathered our documents and thought about possible options. But everybody is in panic, so there are huge traffic jams in the western direction from Kyiv.” I had asked if she was planning to go to the city west of Kyiv where her parents live. “Zhytomyr is also not safe,” she replied. “My family, my parents and cousin also heard missile strikes. So we decided to stay at home. Because the risk of getting stuck on road without petrol is very high.”

Sasha is the same age as my daughter and I cannot imagine what I’d be feeling right now if Nancy and her partner were facing the full horror of a Russian army advancing under the orders of a dictator who seems increasingly deranged.

I imagine that youthful inexperience was probably responsible for her misplaced confidence that common-sense would prevail. Sasha has carved out a successful career in the media, specialising in travel journalism – everything about her is modern, European, sophisticated.

For the entirety of her short adult life, she has been surfing a wave of excitement, witnessing her young country finding its place in a wider world.

For us in the West, war is something that happens elsewhere – or at least it has been for 77 years. The countless conflicts we hear about tend to be other people’s wars, waged in far-flung places. We may have given to charities in a bid to help victims of war but, by and large, most of us push such conflicts to one side. Yes, it’s terrible, but what can we do about it? Crazy tinpot dictators have wars, not civilised nations which learned the long, hard lessons of peace and diplomacy through centuries of conflict.

Now it seems there is a tinpot dictator on the loose in Europe… And how many millions of young people like Sasha are seeing their lives and dreams shattered as we speak? I refer, also, to the hordes of innocent youngsters who’ve been brave enough to take to the streets in Russia… Sasha directed me to a Kyivbased

website reporting news in English, where I read: “If you are wondering why the people of Ukraine will fiercely resist Putin’s aggression, google ‘holodomor’. It was the deliberate famine that Stalin used to kill nearly four million Ukrainians. One of the worst crimes of the 20th century.”

Holodomor: a Ukrainian word specially coined to mean ‘killing by hunger or starvation’. That unimaginable genocide ended just 80 years ago – within living memory for some. No wonder it is now a nation filled with fear.

“We went to the supermarket earlier and bought some food and water which should last us for a few days,” wrote Sasha. She added: “Martin, I am glad to have this opportunity to tell a few words about what is going on. It is not safe to stay in Kyiv, but it is not safe in any other Ukrainian city, either. I don’t know why, but my home feels like the safest place for me. Of course, we think about different options. But we can predict nothing.” I messaged back saying, if the unthinkable were to happen and that she and her husband were forced to flee the country, I’d do my humble (probably hopeless) best to try and help them achieve refugee status and maybe find a temporary home here in Britain.

“Thank you very much for your support,” replied Sasha in her final message. “I hope it will never come to that – but I will be relieved if you can stay in touch and I am glad that you are able to show concern. Thank you. I don’t have many friends abroad – and most of the ones I do have are Ukrainians. So it is very important that I can talk to you and provide information.”

I have not heard from Sasha since. What I have reported is the sort of brief interchange I imagine people had by old-fashioned letter in the late 1930s. Now the conversation seems all the more stark and alarming because it is carried out instantly, in real time. It is certainly not a conversation I thought I’d ever have.

But I write about it because it’s the little personal moments in life which can sharpen the massive blur of noncomprehension caused by the likes of self-obsessed dictators desperate for a place in history.

Crazy tinpot dictators have wars, not civilised nations. Now it seems there is a tinpot dictator on the loose in Europe