“The bloodshed begins,” read the front page of The Independent on February 25 alongside an image of a Ukrainian woman with a bruised, bloodied face. Some 1,550 miles away, a breaking news banner appeared on Russia’s Channel One: “Ukraine launched three missiles at the Donetsk People’s Republic in the last seven minutes.”
Their contrast illustrates the two parallel universes inhabited by Britons and Russians. In one, Vladimir Putin has launched a brutal, horrific invasion of a sovereign nation; in another he is in the process of liberating a Slavic country from the grip of neo-nazis and drug-addled gangsters.
