The refugee's tale

I had dinner last night with a foreigner who has lived in Kiev for twenty hears and just arrived in Bucharest, very shaken by his experience of two weeks being bombed and full of understandable cold anger at Putin. Kiev inhabitants are determined never to give in and never will.

The Russians deliberately bomb civilians, he told me. I knew this anyway.

He and everyone he knows like Zelensky now and think he is doing a good job.

Some have decided to stay, others to leave. He suspects he may never return and nor will most of the refugees. He thinks it's important when you flee to flee to somwhere nice where you'll enjoy living. 

The so-called ethnic Russians in the east are just as much Ukrainian as the Ukrainian speakers and just as patriotic. The inhabitants of the enclaves that Putin created in Lugansk and Donetsk feel Ukrainian.

I was reminded of the ethnic Germans in Eupen and Malmedy who were the most patriotic of all Belgians during the Second World War and afterwards.

I had dinner last week with a Cambridge educated British friend who told me he sees this war as a reasonably cheap (in terms of Ukrainian lives not money) way to defeat Putin and the populists and boost Nato and the EU.

Does anyone in the State Department or the chanceries of Europe think like this?

I hope the war will not cost many more lives before it ends, but Ukraine will still lose much much more than had she promised Putin to be neutral in January.

David Goldman writes for Asia Times, sometimes under the pen name Spengler. He is a keen observer of life and just posted on Facebook:

The Biden laptop revelation has geostrategic implications: If the Intel Community and Big Tech can tilt a presidential election by alleging "Russian disinformation" and squelching evidence of Biden's corruption, Moscow will conclude that it is dealing with fanatics in the US.