It would be wrong to say that nobody saw this war coming. Vladimir Putin’s troops had been massing on the Ukraine border in Russia and its ally Belarus for some months. And, despite his assurances to the contrary, the president’s bellicose rhetoric and his insistence that Ukraine was an inalienable part of the Russian nation, were pretty clear signposts that an invasion could be imminent. Take, for example, the weird, rambling speech on February 21 2022 in which he referred to his neighbour as “a colony with a puppet regime” which has no historical right to exist.
And yet to wake on the morning of February 24 to images of Russian tanks and armoured vehicles making for the Ukraine capital Kyiv, was still a huge shock. Of course, even then, Putin insisted this was was not an invasion, but a “special military operation” to root out the “Nazi gang” that the west had installed in Ukraine as part of its dastardly plan to encircle Russia.
The operation would take a matter of days, we were told. And yet, 12 months on, the fighting continues and Ukrainians and Russians continue to die in their thousands.
