A clown was the last thing I expected deep in the dialysis building of Kyiv’s children’s hospital.
There, 20 or so kids are trapped by their own bodies.
Without the dialysis machines they may die. If they stay in war-torn Kyiv, they may die.
Friday’s news of Russia ’s capture of Europe’s biggest nuclear power plant and gains in the south was bleak.
So a young woman becoming red-nosed clown Chou-Chou – “Crazy-Crazy” – and getting sick kids to laugh out loud showed how the ordinary, extraordinary people of Ukraine can turn terror into sheer, bloody brilliant joy. It stabbed me in the heart.
As the desperately poorly kids giggled, cracked jokes and gave me the thumbs up, I was in tears behind my mask.
Grief is common in Kyiv but so is anger. The Kremlin hates free speech, reporters, democratic argument, MPs mouthing off or comics poking fun – all of which you can see on Ukrainian TV.
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Vladimir Putin ’s solution? Fire missiles at Kyiv’s TV tower. I hitchhiked to the tower to inspect the damage, where I was challenged by Rost, a Ukrainian in a dark hoodie armed to the teeth.
Everywhere you go you get challenged by men with guns. A Russian missile had punched a hole the size of beach hut in the TV control building.
There was a bright patch of red against the rubble and snow. The worker’s body had been removed but his blood had not been washed away.
I asked Rost what he did before the war. “I used to be a hot air balloon pilot,” he replied.
In Ukraine, the surreal comes as standard. Across a road two more Russian missiles had overshot their target and hit a row of shops, some of which were still smoking.
In front of us were the bodies of an old man, a mother and her child. Men from the mortuary came out and placed blankets over the dead. Yet the Kremlin insists it is not targeting civilians in Ukraine. That is a lie.
This is not Russia’s war. Its soldiers don’t want to kill their Ukrainian grannies in Kyiv and are abandoning their heavy machinery.
On social media you can see Ukrainian tractor boys towing a $25million tank and three lads on a side-car stealing a Russian gun, and laughing their heads off.
The Ukrainian army are the world’s best warriors. Last time Russian soldiers voted with their feet was in 1917 and things did not go well with the old Tsar. More than a century on, things are not going well for the new Tsar.
Putin’s grip on power is weakening by the day as the rest of Russia realises that he no longer has full control of his military machinery.
He can huff and bluff but if his soldiers don’t want to kill people, he has a problem. How many people die before good Russia rises up against him is the critical question of our time.
In 2014, a Russian BUK missile shot down MH17, the Malaysian Boeing jet packed with 298 holiday makers and crew. I stood in a cornfield in pro-Kremlin rebel-held eastern Ukraine surrounded by aircraft engines, the stink of kerosene, paperbacks, plane seats and corpses.
That September, thanks to my clever Panorama producer, I was able to pose as a professor at a museum opening and quiz Putin about the shooting down of the passenger jet. He gave one of his long, monotonous replies blaming the Ukrainians for the mass murder he was responsible for.
In the flesh, he came across as curiously effeminate. You won’t hear that on Russia Today.
Here Boris Johnson, ever the cunning populist, has been banging the pro-Ukrainian drum but it’s too little, too late. I have been an enemy of Putin since I saw the evidence of his army’s cruelty in Chechnya in 2000.
The European Union quickly threw open its doors to anyone with a Ukrainian passport for the next three years, no questions asked.
It was Friday before the British Government followed suit. A Tory minister had said some Ukrainians could come in, so long as they picked fruit.
Johnson’s government has been mean with the ordinary poor Ukrainian but sanctions against Putin’s oligarchs have been slow to bite and will probably be easily sidestepped. Roman Abramovich has known links to Putin but his biggest yacht has been allowed to slip into international waters.
The reason is, I believe, that Moscow gold has long been more important to Johnson’s gang than Ukrainian and Russian blood. Johnson and company have made sure “Londongrad” has stayed a safe place for Russian money throughout Putin’s crimes against British people and British interests.
On Friday my ordinary email was hacked and the IP address turned out to be somewhere near the Kremlin. I have changed my digital security. When I say the Kremlin is out to get me I’m not being paranoid – it really is.
- British journalist John Sweeney is a former Panorama reporter and has been covering the war from Kyiv.
