I Just Can’t Believe This Russian Invasion Of Ukraine!

As the footage rolled out on the television screen, my hands shot up to my eyes instinctively to cover them. I just couldn’t watch what my eyes were about to tell my brain. Not again. For I had seen the same pictures earlier. They just popped up in the newscast. And because I didn’t know what was coming, I had watched.

They showed a dead person being carried away from a hospital site that had been bombed by Russian artillery. Or by a tank. Next came a pregnant woman in labour, being wheeled away from the bombed building. As she was being carted along, she tried to cover her private parts, which were being exposed as a result of the hurry with which her rescuers were operating. My mind wondered: will she survive? Will her baby live?

But these thoughts were driven away by the next bit of footage. It was a table whose top was soaked red – in blood. Who had lain there? Would he or she continue to live in the world after losing so much blood?

Bad picture after bad picture had appeared on the screen. Walls gutted by shellfire. Cars burnt to cinders and recognised only because their skeletons had not fully melted. And then the fleeing humans – little babies wrapped up in coats, with heads and ears covered by fur hats. Old women with eyes that failed to register anything at all – just walking, walking, and walking. Where were they going? They didn’t seem to know.” So, this was war! Did Mr. Vladimir Putin know that this was what he was going to put on Tik Tok and YouTube for the whole world to see, when he decided to invade Ukraine?

Putin wanted to tell Ukraine that Russia was its master. But did he realise that the Russian “master” was going to define itself to the world as a brute?

On his part, did President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine know that such inhumane suffering was what he was summoning upon his people, when he decided to taunt Russia by flirting with membership of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation? Or did he imagine it was just another film script in which he was cast as the hero, beating an oversize villain and winning plaudits for that? Reality met fiction, translated into actuality: a very weird scenario.

Except that the woman on the bed was trying to bring out a real baby made of flesh and blood; the blood on the hospital table was not “film blood” but the type spurting of which is always accompanied by pain. And the old woman with nowhere to go had once seen someone like her in a war film when she was young. A war film shot in Auschwitz. Or Dachau. Or Buchenwald. Her eyes were telling her the war film had come alive. But she could not comprehend any of it.

Oh humankind: you spent a whole century creating a “balance of terror” to end war; a system which you did not scruple to call “mutually assured destruction” (MAD)! Yet, in 2022, you are acting really “mad”?

Of what use will Ukraine be to Russia, if Russia occupies Ukrainian lands and buildings, but Ukrainians hate Russians so much they want to eat Russians alive? And of what use will Ukraine be to NATO, if its membership creates a war with Russia, that’s ignited by a nuclear fireball?

What happened to “mir-i- druzhba”? [peace and friendship – a Soviet post-2nd World War slogan?] Or the Voice of America motto, “freedom and peace”? They were mere words transmitted to fool the world, right?

Ai! Humankind! How can I explain this nonsense to my ten-year-old grandson? Do I say, “Kwame, the Ukrainians wanted to protect themselves from their neighbours, the Russians. So they wanted to join a military alliance called NATO. But the Russians said that ‘NATO’ was formed to attack them. So if Ukraine joins NATO, it means Ukraine intends to attack Russia. And Russia can’t allow that!”

“So that’s why the Russians attacked the Ukrainians?’

“Yes.”

“You mean Russians and Ukrainians are dying just because each of their governments suspects that the other intends to attack it?”

“Yes!”

“But it’s like me fighting with another boy who says his bicycle is faster than mine! If I do not challenge him to a race, he hasn’t actually done anything to me, has he? Even if he challenges me, I can refuse?”

“Yes – You don’t need to do what anyone else wants you to do! Especially if it can get people killed!”

“Grandpa, how old is the Russia’s Putin?”

“He’s 69!”

“And how old is Ukraine’s Zelensky?”

“He’s 44!”

“Grandpa, aren’t some old people dumb? Why should innocent people die because something inside one person’s head is different from what is in the head of another person? If someone thinks he can ride a bicycle faster than me, I don’t have to agree to race him by all means?”

“No, you don’t!”

“Grandpa, do you think I shall be that dumb when I am 69”?

“Kwame, I don’t know! By the time you are 69, I shall be long dead!”

“What about when I reach age 44”?

“I am sorry but I shall be dead, then, too!!”

“Oh! Hmm! I ask because I would like to prove, when I reach those people’s age, that I can still think like a ten-year-old boy, and not kill innocent people just because of what someone else thinks – in his own head!”

“Attaboy!”

By CAMERON DUODU