The news from Ukraine is very grim – to paraphrase Churchill on the fall of France in 1940. The Russians are advancing slowly, steadily, brutally in Donbas. There are hundreds, possibly thousands if civilians are included, of casualties every day. Cholera is reported to be spreading through the uprooted populations of Mariupol and the trashed towns of the Black Sea shoreline.
Granaries are being pillaged, harvests fields burned and shelled and some of the best wheat lands of Europe are uncultivable wastes.