Hitchin's respected Judi Billing shares her take on the dreadful events in Ukraine with a powerful, personal and scathingly honest must-read article.

The Dreadful Prospect of War

I have been asked to write a piece about my reflections on waking up on Thursday morning to the dreadful news that Putin's Russia had invaded Ukraine.

So without the constraints of a tweet or the need to find an oft repeatable snappy political slogan I am free to write as I feel.

So please forgive what might seem some self-indulgent bits of background to maybe put my thoughts into a context.

My grandparents all had their roots in Eastern Europe.

Paternal ones from the Berlin area of Eastern Germany from which they became refugees and my maternal grandparents in London from an earlier series or wars and pogroms from Poland in one case and Ukraine in the other.

As a child of the cold war I was fascinated by all things Eastern Europe: The defection of Rudolf Nureyev, Yuri Gagarin in space in 1961, the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union itself.

I learnt Russian at school in London and visited the Soviet Union on a school trip in 1966 visiting Moscow, Leningrad and Riga, the capital of Latvia.

I returned in 1985 with my husband David and went to Moscow and Leningrad again – just a few years before it reverted to St Petersburg, but most importantly this time I also had the opportunity to spend time in Kyiv and experience the absolute joy of Ukrainian hospitality, and a sense of dignified chilled relaxation so very different from what we had just left in Moscow.

There we had inadvertently got caught up in a refusnik drama, been followed by almost comical parodies of KGB Officers and only just escaped deportation.

In Kyiv we watched fireworks celebrating a football win for Dynamo and visited an actual market full of local produce being sold by real citizens as small business enterprises. It was lovely.

Since then I have marvelled at being able to freely visit Eastern Germany after the fall of the wall and the Stasi, admire and enjoy DDR design and memorabilia, buy model lime green Trabi's for children and grandchildren, and I had come to complacently believe that the events of the Second World War and the most terrible excesses of the Soviet Union simply couldn't happen again.

But then I woke up this morning and it seemed that any horror is possible when dictators rule, distort the truth and the world order and apparently think nothing of causing death, misery and terror to millions of people.

At the moment I don't know whether, how or when this will end or the scale of this particular man-made disaster.

Like everyone else I have just lived through two years of pandemic and changed forever how I think and operate in my daily life, but for reasons I cannot explain this is even more frightening.

And to make it worse, and to revert for a moment to the sort of political comment you might expect from me I fear hugely that the UK is currently led by a man so lacking in morality, ethics or any version of integrity that he may well try to exploit the prospect of an escalating war to try and turn himself into a hero in the eyes of the public he treats with such disdain and contempt.

Boris Johnson through his dreadful behaviour has become the first Prime Minister ever to be questioned under caution and is for that and many other reasons the laughing stock of much of the rest of the world.

I don't think political leadership is the only important feature of life, but just at the moment I need a little more than our Prime Minister and his appalling Foreign Secretary to give me any feeling of optimism.

Over the weekend I hope to discuss some of this with some of my grandchildren. I desperately hope that they can find ways of helping the people of Ukraine and saving us from more despotic