Dzieci wojny – Children of war

To Kraków for the opening of Children of War, a temporary exhibition at the Schindler's Factory museum. It tells the stories, in words and photographs and artefacts, of 13 children, all under the age of 11 when war broke out, explaining how it affected them and how they survived, Jew and gentile alike. 

Since work began on curating this exhibition, six of the 13 have died, unable to finally witness their testimony on display at the museum. Three were present at the opening, the eldest being 96 years old. 

A small but particularly moving exhibition, looking at the horrors of war through the eyes of children. Interest in the opening was such that it was the museum cinema, venue for the official part, was crammed to overflowing, and seeing the exhibition was a tight squeeze.

A part of the exhibition – and the direct reason for my presence – was a part dedicated to the Szkoła Młodszych Ochotniczek (SMO - in English, the Polish Young Women's Auxiliary Service School), home to my mother for most of the war. Her army suitcase, filled with her exercise books were on display, which for me serve as a testament to the focus and hard work expected of the pupils.

Left: uniform jacket as worn by girls at SMO, and some of the diplomas awarded there.

The most moving part of the exhibition for me were the drawings made by Polish children who'd survived the war of what they'd witnessed. These were counterpointed by those made by Ukrainian children from Kharkiv illustrating what they saw in the early days of the full-scale Russian invasion.

Another poignant moment was the testimony of the daughter of two Jews who had been saved by Oskar Schindler by inclusion on his famous list. Mother and father fell in love in the camp, survived the war and settled in Israel. Their daughter, born there, was forthright in her condemnation of what her government was doing to Palestinian children in Gaza.

I would like to acknowledge the splendid work carried out by Alicja Szkuta in keeping alive the memory of the SMO, which educated over 1,000 Polish girls in Nazareth from 1942 to the end of the war. All three of my Saturday Polish school teachers who taught me Polish language, literature, history and geography in the 1960s and early '70s – Pani Skąpska, Pani Szkoda and Pani Wolańska – were alumni of the SMO. The knowledge they passed on to the British-born generation of post-war Poles has been invaluable in maintaining our Polish heritage in the UK.

I would also like to thank Beata Łabno, curator at the Schindler's Factory museum, not only for putting together such an emotionally compelling exhibition, but also for recommending and reserving for me one of the most memorable night's accommodation I've ever enjoyed – in the guest rooms inside Wawel castle itself. But more on that in the next post... 

There are many things that Poland is good at, and running world-class museums is among them, Children of War runs as a temporary exhibition at the Oscar Schindler Factory museum until 30 August 2026. I highly recommend it, a reminder that the youngest suffer the most when two sides go to war.

This time last year:
Ten grand a year

This time two years ago:
The ephemeral pleasures of materialism

This time three years ago:
W-wa Zachodnia modernisation – a long way to go
(Three years on: still not finished)

This time four years ago:

The Wilderness and the Garden 

This time five years ago:
Back in Aviation Valley

This time six years ago:
My flight to Rzeszów – delayed

This time nine years ago:
English as she is used in Europe

This time ten years ago:
Where asphalt is needed – Nowy Podolszyn to Zgorzala

This time 15 years ago:
I cycle to work along the cyclepath along ul. Rosoła

This time 17 years ago:
First apple 

Przemyśl, and a reminder of Putin's presence

The second leg of the road trip, from Białowieża to Przemyśl, was a stark reminder of the evil that lurks beyond Poland's eastern borders. I got the impression that things had greatly changed around the Polish-Belarusian border since my bicycle journeys to these parts in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The clampdown is in place. Traffic is light. Quiet stretches of river border are monitored by banks of cameras mounted on high masts. No-entry signs proliferate on forest roads that lead to newly fortified border. Military and border-guard vehicles are much in evidence. This is not an area one wants to hang about in.

South of Włodawa, however, the Polish-Belarusian border gives way to the Polish-Ukrainian border, and the atmosphere of quiet threat subsides. The front line between democracy and dictatorship now lies over 1,100km (800 miles) further east, where each day Ukrainian soldiers face down Putin's army that threatens us all. 

Simon Davies is a Liverpudlian business owner who decided after Russia began its full-scale invasion to deliver humanitarian aid to Ukraine. We met him as he was on his way to make what would be his 13th delivery. With a Transit van and trailer packed with clothing, food and medical supplies, Simon parked up for the night to stay at the same hotel that we were in. We chatted a long time over beers. Today, he crossed over the border into Ukraine. 

Listening to his stories filled me with amazement at how much change for good a single-minded person acting consistently can make. One snapshot. In the van was a large bundle of drill-bits used for brain surgery. These are made of titanium and diamond, and cost £1,200 a pop. The surgeon who donated them to Simon said that with proper sterilisation they can be used indefinitely; the NHS, however, mandates that they be single-use. For emergency front-line surgery, such niceties can be overlooked.

Simon's Facebook page says he made it OK to Orikhiv after unexpected hassle at the border. Orikhiv is in the Zaporizhzhia oblast, on the southern front. According to The Economist, (10 March 2024) "Orikhiv is a ghost town. Every single building has been damaged or destroyed. Soldiers say there may be 1,000 civilians left out of a pre-invasion population of almost 14,000. There is no gas, electricity or mains water. Air-launched glide bombs have left huge craters in the streets or collapsed whole sections of blocks of flats. In the street in front of a bombed-out pharmacy, orange crocuses are making a defiant appearance." Most of Orkhiv's residents are too old or poor to leave. For them, a delivery of humanitarian aid such as that which Simon has brought all the way over from Liverpool makes a vast difference.

If you'd like to contribute to Simon's superhuman efforts to bring aid to people whose lives have been blighted by Putin's aggression, here's the link: https://www.gofundme.com/f/ukrainian-aid-delivery.

This time two years ago:
The four-day working week

This time four years ago:
First half 2021 health

This time six years ago:
Classic Volgas, Ealing and Ursynów

This time seven years ago:
Memory and Me

This time nine years ago:
Sticks, carrots and nudge - a proposal

This time ten years ago:
London vs. Warsaw pt 2: the demographic aspects

This time 12 years ago:
Serious cycling

This time 14 years ago:
Outlets for creativity

This time 15 years ago:
The day I stopped commuting to work by car

This time 17 years ago:
Look up at the Towers of London

This time 18 years ago:
Wild deer in the Las Kabacki forest

Mutineers' march on Moscow - a turning point

Saturday saw me glued to Twitter. At times like this, following hundreds of accounts that track the Russo-Ukrainian war in detail, is by far and away the best method of staying up to date in a fast-changing situation. On Friday night, when much of Russia is incapacitated to one degree or another by alcohol, Prigozhin's mercenaries struck north towards Rostov-on-Don, leaving their prepared positions. On Saturday morning, they were in the city, the key logistics and command centre for the Russian invasion force. The military HQ was surrounded. By Saturday evening it was all over - Prigozhin had folded; a deal had been brokered by Lukashenka. The Wagner mercenaries who want to continue fighting Ukraine can do so under regular Russian army command; those that don't can seek sanctuary in Belarus.

The day's unfolding events were amazing to witness online; history in the making has never been so present. Knowing too that it was one bunch of evil murderers against another bunch of evil murderers, shooting down Russian high-value aviation assets, made the whole thing more interesting. Each Russian soldier less, mercenary or regular, was one less to hold back the Ukrainian counteroffensive. 

Prigozhin's stated aim was the removal of Russia's defence minister Shoigu and head of the armed forces, Gerasimov. His gripe was not, he suggested, with Putin, but with the corrupt incompetents that had led to Russia's battlefield humiliations. The build-up to the Wagner mutiny was ongoing for some weeks, with Prigozhin videoing his rants targeted at Shoigu and Gerasimov, who he claimed were depriving Wagner troops of ammunition on purpose. Some commentators have suggested that Prigozhin was actually getting the ammunition, but stockpiling it for a coup attempt.

Another interesting take was that Ukrainian intelligence had penetrated Prigozhin's inner circle, persuading him that Moscow was ripe for the taking, and that while Wagner were on their way, the rug was pulled out from under Prigozhin's feet, the supporters he was assured were waiting for him were fictional, and he was forced to parlay. And in doing so, by negotiating with Prigozhin, Putin was shown to the world to be weak. No longer a force to be reckoned with.

A historical parallel; a riposte to all those sceptics across the West who say the Ukrainian counteroffensive isn't delivering results... The D-Day landings happened on 6 June 1944; the Ukrainian counteroffensive is said to have begun on 5 June 2023, so we have a similar starting date. The Allied armies faced fierce German resistance, in and around Caen and Falaise. The breakthrough and the north-eastward dash that culminated in the liberation of Paris, didn't ultimately happen until 21 August 1944. By then, the Allies lost nearly 50,000 soldiers killed, lost over 4,100 tanks and over 4,000 aircraft. Despite having a numerical superiority over the Germans of nearly 3:1. 

But then the Waffen-SS hadn't left its defensive positions in Normandy to march on Berlin in protest at its treatment by the German High Command. Nor had the Waffen-SS been ordered by Hitler to disband and transfer all its tanks and heavy equipment to the Wehrmacht. 

As with the Allies in 1944, Good is on the side of Ukraine; the Russians are the evil party. Good will triumph.

This time four years ago:
Lifelong brand ambassador
[as if to prove the point, I'm wearing the same pair of shoes right now!]

This time six years ago:
How much for locally grown strawberries?

This time seven years ago:
Zamość - the beautiful, must-visit town of Poland's east

This time eight years ago:
Voting closes in citizens' participatory budget 

This time nine years ago:
Beginning of the end of PO [Civic Platform]

This time ten years ago:
Where's the beef? Fillet steak in Warsaw

This time 11 years ago:
W-wa Zachodnia spruced up for the football, W-wa Stadion reopened

This time 13 years ago:
Literature and biology

This time 15 years ago:
Old Nysa van spotted in Grabów

This time 16 years ago:
The oats in the neighbouring field rise high

The Long Review of 2022 (Pt. 1)

It was on 21 May 2017 that I spoke to my father, as I did most evenings. He was in an anxious mood. "I don't like the number 22," he said. He'd spoken of his unusual superstition before - if there's a number people consider unlucky, it's usually 13. "Something bad will happen tomorrow," he told me.

The following day we spoke. "I was right," he said sombrely. "A 22-year old man murdered 22 people on the 22nd of May." The suicide bombing at the Manchester Arena.

Since then, I have become wary of the number 22. At the start of this year, that feeling of unease was upon me; then the rumours of war began to grow ever louder. After two years of pandemic, what could go wrong in 2022? As February began, that number 22 was creeping up on the calendar - then social media began circulating a clip of Zhirinovsky (from December 2021) speaking in the Duma that "on 22 February the world will witness Russia's might". 22.02.22.

It was not to be. The 22nd came and went; the morning of the 24th found me in Wrocław for a conference. Waking up that day (an early start, my hotel was a good walk from the conference venue) I opened my laptop and saw that the invasion had kicked off. Eating breakfast on a barge in the Odra river, by the Hotel Tumski in a state of high anxiety, I was glued to Twitter on my phone. The return of war to this part of Europe after 77 years. How would this scenario play out? Nuclear war was certainly one potential outcome.

Back in Jeziorki, the last days of February and into March would see each day would begin with me checking Twitter to see if Kyiv was still free. It was touch and go. The infamous 40km-long column of Russian vehicles parked alongside the highway south-west of Kyiv looked poised to roll into the Ukrainian capital.

In Jeziorki, just 4,400m from the end of Runway 33 of Warsaw's Okęcie airport, I was worried. Within days of the start of the invasion, I could see NATO transport aircraft landing regularly from my window; ADS-B Exchange would show military aircraft patrolling the skies over eastern Poland, with aerial tankers flying 'racetrack' patterns, refuelling fighter jets (not visible on the radar) on combat air patrols. If Putin were to fire a tactical nuclear missile anywhere outside of Ukrainian territory, a Polish airport such as Okęcie or Rzeszów serving as a transfer point for military materiel would make perfect sense. Months passed; no nuclear confrontation. Has the risk lessened? Russia was brewing up bullshit about a 'Ukrainian dirty bomb', but the world wasn't buying it. The nuclear power stations in Chernobyl and Zaporizhzhia were used as hostages by Russia, cynical as ever. 

For nine days in March, I hosted three guests from Ukraine on my działka - Maxim (18 months old), with his mother and grandmother, while they waited for visas to the UK - something that happened very quickly and smoothly, despite all the negative media coverage.

It was around this time that it became increasingly clear that Putin would not seize Kyiv, that the invasion was badly planned, based on faulty intelligence assessment, and poorly supported with inadequate logistics. Above all, Ukrainians themselves were determined that their country should not fall. The Polish labour market, which for years had depended on Ukrainians to plug skills shortages, suddenly saw 200,000 Ukrainian men downing tools to return home and fight for their country. At the same time, hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian women, children and older men were pouring into Poland. At the time of writing, there are around 1,800,000 more Ukrainian citizens present in Poland than on 23 February. What surprises me is the large number of Ukrainians crossing back into Ukraine from the safety of Poland into the uncertainty of their homeland; shells, rockets and guided missiles are falling on civilian targets, on energy infrastructure; life is fractured, anxious, cold and dark. Yet every day, some 15,000 to 20,000 cross back home.

The horrors of war unfolded swiftly - Russia, unable to conquer Ukraine swiftly, turned to doing what  it was used to doing - bombarding civilian targets, raping, looting and murdering. Bucha and Mariupol have become bywords for Russian inhumanity. Meanwhile, the rest of the world have become more inured to Russian lies. For the Russian government, telling the truth is like sending a tank into combat painted day-glo pink. Putin's lies about a 'special military operation' aimed at 'liberating' Russia's Ukrainian 'brothers' from their 'Nazi' government fell flat almost immediately among all but far-left and far-right fantasists.

NATO, and in particular the US, the UK and Poland, have provided Ukraine with much of the weaponry it needs to push back against the Russian army. But the West has stopped short of supplying modern fighter jets and main-battle tanks. Britain, despite its political woes (see tomorrow's post), has steadfastly backed President Zelensky's government, providing weapons and much-needed infantry training. Visits by Western leaders to Kyiv, despite the continuous threat of missile attacks, has kept the war rightfully at the forefront of minds around the world. 

Every passing month during which Russia hasn't used nuclear weapons makes the threat less likely. An outcome in which Ukrainian troops drive the Russian invader out of their country now looks far more certain than it did even back in summer. The successful thrusts at Kharkiv and Kherson and Russia's inability to capture the small town of Bakhmut after five months suggest that 2023 will see more Ukrainian than Russian victories. 

American made Javelin anti-tank missiles (which rise up from their flat trajectory to strike their targets from the top) and HIMARS rocket artillery have given Ukraine the edge against a foe that has failed to progress technologically since the 1980s. By Ukrainian measures, over 100,000 Russian soldiers had been liquidated by mid-December. The September mobilisation of Russian men resulted in more of them fleeing to Turkey, Georgia or Kazakhstan than going into the army.

And Russia - which had been poisoning the well of social discourse in the West for years - is badly losing the online war for hearts and minds. This is important in the context of the Global South - in time, India, China, Africa, South America and South-East Asia are beginning to see Russia for what it is - a brutal, stupid, corrupt imperialist coloniser.

An optimal outcome will be a Russia that falls apart, leaving a core of Muscovy surrounded by newly independent states that have been under the Russian heel for centuries - Yakutia, Buryatia, Komi, Chechnya and many others. And a strong Ukraine, an EU and NATO member.

How it will all end is now looking a little clearer than it did in spring. We can but hope and watch - and support Ukraine through any number of civilian or military charities. And join the NAFO fellas online to bonk the vatniks.

My father warned me about 2022. He would have been right.

This article by Luke Mogelson from The New Yorker is the best piece I've read so far about the reality of the war. It's a long read, told from the perspective of International Legion volunteers on the front line. Worth your time.

This time last year:
S7 extension Section A walked end to end

This time three years ago:
Eighty-five chains to Hazelwood Station

This time four years ago:
Christmas round-up

This time six years ago:
Derbyshire at Christmas

This time seven years ago:
Across the High Peaks

This time eight years ago:
Derbyshire's rolling landscapes

This time nine years ago:
Our Progress Around the Sceptr'd Isle 

This time ten years ago:
Out and about in Duffield

and...
Christmas Break

This time 11 years ago:
Boxing Day walk in Derbyshire

This time 12 years ago 

Derbyshire in the snow

This time 14 years ago:

Derbyshire in the sunshine

This time 15 years ago:

Derbyshire in the drizzle

Russia's army: not what we feared it was

Within days of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, observers could see that the invading army had many shortcomings. From the strategic (it was prepared for a three-day war, regime change, and being welcomed as liberators) and the doctrinal (the way, for example, tanks or infantry are used), to the operational (truck tyres, expired ration packs, poor wireless communication with the front line) it's clear that Russia's military leadership has (thankfully) failed to its reputation.

The world has moved on in many ways from WW2, when the Red Army seized Berlin. Some of the factors - and differences - were overlooked by Western analysts. Key is manpower. The generation of young men who fought WW2 was born at a time when the average Russian woman had a fertility rate of 7.3. The young men Putin is sending into Ukraine were born around 2000, by which time the average Russian woman was giving birth to a mere 1.23 children. In other words, Stalin had meat for the meatgrinder, Putin doesn't. (Having said that, neither does Ukraine. But the Ukrainian army isn't wasting its manpower like Russia's is.)

We could see outside Kyiv, the famous 40-km-long column, stalled for lack of fuel, less than 100km from the border. Logistics are crucial to victory. Without the 400,000 vehicles that America supplied to the USSR as part of Lend-Lease, the Red Army would not have been able to advance west at such speed in 1943-45. Of that number, 200,000 alone were Studebaker 6×6 trucks, the rest being smaller 4x4 trucks, Jeeps and Dodge Weapons Carriers. Below: a Studebaker US6 2½-ton 6×6 truck... 

...and the most-widely produced Soviet trucks of the Second World War era, the ZIS 5 and GAZ AA (left and right respectively below), outdated, less robust, and built in smaller numbers than those received from America. 

Russian logistics in Ukraine are the result of poor planning, poor training, poor maintenance, poor equipment and widespread corruption. Tanks stuck in the middle of nowhere without fuel, soldiers without rations because the campaign was to be over in three days. Many ammunition supply trucks were destroyed by Ukrainian fire because unloading shells is done crate by crate by soldiers, rather than removed from the truck by the pallet-load using a crane. Manual labour is cheaper, but it takes much longer - giving artillery-spotting drones a chance to locate and destroy their target - thousands of shells.

Russia's infantry-fighting doctrine hasn't moved on from the day of the mass charge against prepared positions. Note the long, curved magazine on the AK47/74 family of assault rifles. It cannot be fired by a soldier lying down - it's meant to be fired by a soldier advancing. But most importantly - the basic infantry unit, the squad, is without autonomy. The squad leader is not allowed to take the initiative - only to follow orders. The rigid top-down command-and-control system has been under strain due to poor quality communications equipment - senior officers have to move right up to the front line to get reluctant troops to advance - and get hit by Ukrainian artillery or snipers. Russia has lost ten generals in two months.

NATO doctrine has always focused on the autonomy of the squad. Like in any democracy, war-fighting should be done on the basis of teamwork and consensus, and not taking (bad) orders from the top.  Ukraine's armed forces - fighting for their country these past eight years - have accepted the NATO way of doing things. This leads to greater cohesion, morale and combat effectiveness. And reflects a healthier society - a network, rather than a hierarchy.

Another major factor hampering unit cohesion in the Russian army is continued presence of dedovshchina - the systematic hazing of recruits and conscripts by their elders. From Wikipedia: "Dedovshchina encompasses a variety of subordinating and humiliating activities undertaken by the junior ranks, from doing the chores of the senior ranks, to violent and sometimes deadly physical and psychological abuse, not unlike an extremely vicious form of bullying or torture, including sexual torture and anal rape. When not leaving the army seriously injured, conscripts can suffer serious mental trauma for their lifetime. It is often cited by former military personnel as a major source of poor morale." 

So - brutal stupidity, and stupid, counterproductive brutality. In close combat, the hazed can take revenge on their tormentors. Who knows where that bullet was fired from. An army formed of soldiers traumatised to the point of insensitivity is easier to order to be brutal to civilians or prisoners of war, which has negative consequences in the memetic war - the global struggle for hearts and minds. Which Russia is losing and Ukraine is winning, with its tractors and cats.

Putin drew back the forces that had been trying to capture Kyiv and reassigned them to the east of Ukraine, without much pause, with the bare minimum of new equipment - but without any of the root-and-branch reforms needed to create an effective fighting force. 'More of the same' is all Putin can muster. Reform of military doctrine means social reform - bullying and corruption are the very basis of Putin's Russia, dressed up in a nationalist ideology that has all the hallmarks of fascism.

The top-down corruption endemic in the Russian army has also played a major part - monies earmarked for research and development, for the modernisation of tanks and aircraft, were spent on villas and yachts. What was spent created a Potemkin army of T-14 Armata tanks and Sukhoi Su-57 'fifth-generation' stealth jet fighters that are only seen on parades. There were meant to have been 2,300 Armatas in service by 2020. Instead, there are now planned to be only 100 by this year; the first regiment of Su-57s is planned to become operational by 2025. [At least the money Germany didn't spend as planned on defence was diverted to social programmes.]

Russia's army, as they say, is "big and modern - just that the 'big' part isn't modern and the 'modern' part isn't big." Nevertheless, Putin has the ability to use nuclear blackmail - and this is a worry - even if only one in a hundred of his warheads work properly.

This time last year:

Long wait for apple blossom

This time three years ago:

Electromobility - the last half-mile

This time four years ago:
It's binary. There's either a God or there isn't...

This time six years ago:
Work on the railway line, work on the golf course

This time nine years ago:
Kestrel on the roof

This time ten years ago:
Definitely worse in Britain

This time 11 years ago:
Miracle on the Vistula

This time 12 years ago:

Collapsing footbridge on Puławska

This time 13 years ago:|
A new dimension to plane-spotting

This time 14 years ago:
One swallow does not a summer make

Russian imperialism

This post is aimed at those useful idiots in the West who either support Russia or who claim they are 'neutral', because NATO is 'imperialist' which makes Ukraine just as bad than Russia. I was angered by a post on Facebook from an old friend who actually stated that Tony Blair is worse than Putin. [Blocked for good.]

Russia is an empire. An empire can be defined as "a political unit consisting of several territories and peoples, created by conquest, and divided between a dominant centre and subordinate peripheries". The difference between the current Russian empire and say, the former British or French empires, is geographic (it is contiguous, not offshore) and historic (the empire was punctuated by a period of being the 'Soviet empire'). But nevertheless, Russia is an empire.

At its peak in the 1860s, the Russian empire stretched well into Europe, with half of Poland, all of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, and (from 1809 to 1917) Finland, within it. But the empire also stretched into North America - Alaska was Russian until 1867. 

Today, the Russian empire - other than ethnic Russians - includes hundreds of indigenous peoples subjugated by Moscow over the centuries, Russified to a greater or lesser extent. Buryats, Komi, Yakuts, Ingush, Kalmyk, Chechens, deprived of their right to govern themselves, their languages and cultures crushed by tsars and commissars. 

Russia expanded eastward, conquering land at an average annual rate of the area of the Netherlands for 150 years. Hundreds of different nations were subjugated to the Tsar's will, and forcefully Russified. Serfdom - abolished in 1861- enslaved 23 million subjects of the Tsar (whilst in America, Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation legally freed 3.5 million slaves - and started the Civil War).

After defeating Nazi Germany, the Soviet empire extended beyond the farthest reaches of the Tsar's domain, with the subjugated satellite states stretching to the Elbe. By the Soviet times, the terms 'Russia' and 'Soviet Union' had become interchangeable in the West, with only purists and experts pedantically using the right term.

Example. I have a copy of Russian Self-Portraits by American photographer, David Attie. Published in 1978, it was a rare glimpse of ordinary people from behind the Iron Curtain. Attie set up a large view camera and full-length mirror in a studio; subjects were invited in to pose themselves and then press the shutter with a remote-release cable. They took Polaroid prints with negatives; the subjects would get the print and Attie would use the neg to print the photos for the book. This contained 84 self-portraits of individuals and groups. And here's the thing: the sessions took place in Kyiv (or Kiev as the book calls the Ukrainian capital). But the words 'Ukraine' and 'Ukrainians' are absent. There's only one mention (in the whole book!) - the Ukrainian Folk Ballet - suggesting cute folksy customs from bygone days. The words 'Soviet Union' and 'USSR' are also absent. Otherwise it's just  'Russians' in 'Russia'. It's as though a Chinese photographer visited Cardiff to take photographs of English people in England, and used them to represent the whole of the United Kingdom.

Russians tend to believe that Ukrainians are just Russians who've gone wrong - comedic bumpkins who speak funny who belong firmly within the Russki Mir. Because these 'Russians' have gone astray, choosing the West in preference to Mother Russia, they deserve nothing less than extermination, say a great many Russians (maybe even as many as one in five).

Who's dying for Russia? It's not ethnic Russians who are bearing the brunt of the fighting in Ukraine. On 6 April, the BBC’s Russian service compiled a list of names and regions of 1,083 of the 1,351 officially confirmed military deaths using official state and regional media sources. There was not one reported death from Moscow, a city of 13 million people, while 93 deaths - 9% - come from Dagestan alone. Buryatia has the next largest number of fatalities, at 52. [More here.] Imagine if in 1914 it transpired that the British soldiers killed at Mons, Arras or Namur were mostly from Ireland, Wales, Scotland or the Isle of Man  or Guernsey - and none were Londoners.

The Soviet Union's collapse was not followed by a period of national reckoning, as happened in Germany or Japan after 1945. There was no remorse, no attempt to describe what had occurred between 1918 and 1991- collectivisation, the Gulag, the Great Terror, the Holodomor - as wrong. Putin's popularity rests on perpetuating national myths - of the 'Great Patriotic War' (no one mention the Stalin-Hitler pact), the defeat of Nazi Germany, Sputnik and Gagarin - and a nuclear-armed empire spanning 11 time zones.

I can't find it now, but I recall reading a piece by an American journalist in Moscow about a taxi ride he took around the city. His driver, on hearing he had an American passenger, began to telling him how great everything was in Russia. When the American began listing the country's many shortcomings, the taxi driver changed tack. "Yes, you're right. It is a shit hole. Can you help me get a visa for the US?" The journalist said, helpfully, that it would be much easier to get a visa for Canada. The taxi driver spat on the floor of his car and said with disgust "I could never live in a country that's not a superpower!"

The British Empire faded away shortly after the crumbling of the Third Reich and the nuclear destruction of Imperial Japan. I can still remember 'Empire Day' at primary school being rebranded 'Commonwealth Day' after 1965, with children trooping around the playground carrying flags of the Commonwealth nations. But Russia insists - to this day - that its imperial sway holds dominion over Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, Georgia and northern Kazakhstan. As well as - and it goes without saying - Buryats, Yakuts, Ingush, Kalmyk and Komi people. Russian imperialists would dearly love to include the Baltic states and Poland into the fold - but fortunately, we are in NATO now.

See: White Fever - my review of Jacek Hugo-Bader's book about Russia's Far East

This time two years ago:
Drainage ditches and the hunters' pulpit
(The pulpit collapsed last year)

This time three years ago:
Aviation the theme 

This time four years ago:
Five closed-off hectares of central Warsaw

This time five years ago
Progress by the ponds

This time nine years ago:
Kaczyński's ignorance, deceit or folly? 

This time ten years ago:
The British electrical plug reigns supreme

This time 11 years ago:
Easter, and the end of Lent

This time 12 years ago:
That Icelandic volcano

This time 13 years ago:
Views of Historic Toruń

This time 14 years ago:
One swallow does not a summer make

Easter everywhere - but not in Ukraine. Lent 2022: Day 46

Lent comes to an end at midnight, the top comes off the bottle of beer and the bottle of single-malt whisky, with some kiełbasa to go with. Very much Easter in a minor key this year; with a war going on across the border in Ukraine. Deaths, serious injuries, bombing and shelling of residential areas - a war driven by evil instincts that over the past several decades we hoped had been eradicated from the people of Europe.

War - the fear it generates, the anxiety and stress, the loss, the anger and the hatred it generates - distracts us from what should be our priorities; fulfilment of human potential.

Peace of mind is necessary for growth; this Lent has been spent under a cloud. Fears of a Russian nuclear strike recede as Western resolve seems to have restrained Putin somewhat, but firing a tactical nuke is still a card he might play. My sleep has returned to normal (I am no longer unable to fall asleep after waking in the night for worry about what's going on).

Easter will not arrive in Eastern Orthodox churches for another week. Because of the computational difference between the Gregorian and Julian calendars, Western Christianity celebrates Easter between one week (as this year) and five weeks (as will be the case in 2024) apart. I had been hoping that by Easter - Orthodox Easter - the war will be over, Putin will have been killed or overthrown, and the murderous invaders will have gone back to Russia. 

There's a week to go, but it looks unlikely that a policeman in his early 30s, named Grytsak (Грицак) will have shot Putin with a handgun outside a white government building with classical columns set among grassy parkland (I had this dream on 25 February this year, though uncertain in which Russian city this scene was set).

Gratitude normally expressed for health and prevention of misfortune now extends to gratitude for not being bombed by Putin; for our Ukrainian neighbours and their brave army to make it through the night.

We can but pray, earnestly, with intent, that this awful, evil war will end soon with the minimum of extra bloodshed or trauma. Until it does, I cannot fully devote myself to spiritual pursuits.

I hope there will be will be another Lent. At this moment in history, I can no longer take that for granted.

This time last year:
Climate vs weather

This time two years ago:
Seven lockdown sunsets

This time five years ago:
Easter everywhere

This time 12 years ago:
Strange days indeed (though less strange than these!)

[link to video of the blog post, courtesy of Nick Morris]

Traitors and useful idiots

The sight of apartment blocks, schools, hospitals and administrative buildings being hit by Russian rockets, bombs and shells has revealed to the world the truth about Putin. It is a truth that those living in his immediate neighbourhood have known for a long time. He is the manifestation of evil in human form; a Hitler, a Stalin, a Pol Pot. An inhuman madman for whom massive loss of innocent life has no meaning. Protests around the world, but particularly across Europe, show that Russia has lost any residual soft power it might have enjoyed. And yet, and yet...

Unrestrained by the intellectual straightjacket of Marxism-Leninism, Putin's propaganda war aimed at the West this past decade has been infinitely more successful than the USSR's. Back then, the useful idiots were exclusively the far left. I remember at the time of Martial Law in Poland, an organisation in the UK called the Spartacist League was actually protesting against the Solidarity trade union movement, on the basis that "an imperfect workers' state is better than no workers' state". Nutters. The British Communists were partially funded through the bulk purchase by the Soviet Union of the Morning Star, the newspaper aligned with the Communist Party of Britain. The paper, then and now is so ideologically turgid that its readership is insignificant. 

The Morning Star website today leads not with the slaughter of innocent Ukrainian civilians but with global climate change. All the British far left can do is numbly repeat the mantra "NATO and the EU should not have been encroaching on Russia".  And funnily enough, this is also the mantra of the British far right. 

The far left are the useful idiots - so hidebound in their anti-imperialist ideology that they fail to see Putin as the arch-imperialist. This is because Putin says he is against NATO, as are they - because they see NATO through an ideological prism, and not as a bulwark protecting Central and Eastern Europe from the return of the Russian imperial boot. Putin doesn't need to pay them to parrot his propaganda - they just do so.

Now look at this semi-literate tweet from George Galloway. Paid Kremlin assets or useful idiot? He names names. Nigel Farage, Christopher Hitchens, Tucker Carlson and Rod Liddle - which of these have taken Putin's shilling, and which simply believe the Kremlin's narrative?

Venal politicians, easily bought by smooth-talking Russians in the West are as culpable as hidebound ideologists. Britain's shabby response to sanctioning Russian oligarch and their assets in the UK suggests fear and shame regarding the ease with which their donations filled party coffers. And their resulting hesitancy to take a firmer stance on Putin's malevolence.

The links between Russia and the Brexit campaign were clear to see to all those who wanted to see, and all those who understood Russia. Putin needed to fragment the West, splinter its institutions. Those who bought into the lie that the EU was 'antidemocratic' need to ask themselves how democratic it is to have one man with a nuclear trigger holding our planet to ransom. Many who voted for Brexit were swayed by arguments coming from Putin's troll farms, polluting Britain's social media, or from figures directly financed by Moscow [when this is all over, I hope the Kremlin's archives will be opened so we can see proof of which figures].

Putin's courting of the West's far right and far left (the latter being cheaper to buy) had been successful for the past 22 years. But now that he has revealed his true nature in a way that's impossible to cover up with lies about 'Ukrainian fascists', 'genocide in Donbas', 'NATO provoked the bear' or 'Eastern Europeans have no right to self-determination', he has cut off that support. It will be interesting to see how the presidential campaigns of Marine Le Pen or Viktor Orban go.

When this is all over, the bought-up politicians and the useful idiots will be called to account. When this is all over, the far left and far right will not have an easy time. And that will be good for us all. In the meantime, let us pray in a focused, metaphysical way, to the Good God for a swift end to the spilling of innocent blood in Ukraine.

Lent starts tomorrow, I shall be blogging about the spiritual and metaphysical; for Russia's invasion of Ukraine, follow me on Twitter (Michael Dembinski@policies4poland).

This time last year:
Chance and luck - can you will the outcome?

This time two years ago:
Define your Deity

This time four years ago:
The Mysteries of Quantum Physics

This time fiver years ago:
Lent starts tomorrow

This time six years ago:
Coincidence and survival

This time nine years ago
The Book of Revelations

This time ten years ago:
Strong late-winter sunshine

This time 11 years ago:
Best pics from February 2011

This time 12 years ago:
Kensington

This time 14 years ago:
End of the line

War

 "What was it like, the atmosphere of those last few days in August 1939, before German tanks and bombers poured into Poland?" I would ask my father. 

"We were resigned to it - wars happen. War broke out in August 1914, then the Bolsheviks invaded in 1920," he replied. Indeed, looking at European history, wars, invasions, uprisings, revolutions, civil wars would punctuate short periods of peace with monotonous regularity.

I was born in the penumbra of war, 13 years after my father and his Home Army comrades were put on trains bound for PoW camps in Germany at the end of the Warsaw Uprising. My mother's experiences as a child deported to a labour camp in northern Russia had an effect on my upbringing. Polish scouts in London, led by men who had fought at Tobruk and Monte Cassino, was paramilitary in nature; we'd drill Polish army drill, sing Polish army songs, and learn fieldcraft.

The Cold War threat of nuclear annihilation was ever-present; I was too young to sense the fear engendered by the Cuban Missile Crisis. Czechoslovakia - the crushing of the Prague Spring - was sad, but at least there was no risk of spill-over. The Protect and Survive era of the mid-1980s, was chilling - there were a few close calls, though we didn't know it at the time. 

The dissolution of the Soviet Union at the end of 1991 heralded what many believed was the End of History - the Evil Empire had crumbled, free-market democracy had triumphed.

The arc of history was tracking upward. Life was getting better. Technology was bringing us new gadgets, opening new horizons and creating a new way of digital living. Had Europe managed to rid itself of the curse of war for good? Serbia, Bosnia - Srebrenica, the bombing of Belgrade - briefly brought back the ghosts of past horrors. But by the middle of the first decade of the new century, with Poland and nine other former Soviet Bloc members inside NATO and the EU, all looked well, even while Putin consolidated his rule over the Russian Federation.

Then we passed a tipping point - and another - and another - and another. Georgia, Litvinenko, Crimea, Syria, Skripal... Obama said 'reset'. The Germans wanted Nordstream 2. And many venal Western politicians were bought by the Kremlin. What have we learnt? Apparently nothing. 

I had been expecting the Russian attack to start at 04:00 on 22 February (22, my father's unlucky number). It didn't happen. The world breathed a sigh of relief - and then 48 hours later it kicked off. 

Today, the world knows what any country once under the Russian heel knows - giving way to Putin only provokes him to further aggression. "You may not think you are at war with Russia - but Russia is at war with you." Until now, Putin has never overtly crossed the West's red lines. He merely pushed the red line ever further and further and further; the West imposed sanctions here and there - but nothing that would halt Putin in his obsessive quest to reconquer lands he sees as lost to Russia as the USSR collapsed.

This time, the world is seeing a European city in flames, Europeans fleeing tanks and bombs - something not seen on this scale since the last weeks of World War 2. The sight of columns of women and children walking towards the Polish border remind me of how my father, his mother and two brothers walked east from Warsaw as German bombs rained down on the Polish capital, panzers approaching from the north and west. My father was 16 then; he died in 2019; few people alive today remember at first hand the horrors of WW2.

Russian oligarch's money has corrupted the British establishment. Parliamentarians, lawyers, accountants, PR firms, estate agents, thought that they could 'civilise' the nouveau-riche Russians, co-opting them as they once had co-opted oil-rich sheikhs and American tycoons. But Putin's oligarchs have strings attached. You are not permitted to be an oligarch in Britain unless you kick back to Putin, and do his bidding. This includes buying up venal British politicians. Don't do as you're told and you wind up as one of the 14 or so Russians who have died in London under mysterious circumstances.

Putin is the quintessential evil KGB villain, brought up in the dark arts of maskirovka, playing by the playbook he grew up with. The playbook of the NKVD - the Holodor, the Great Terror, the Gulag, Katyń. Surrounded by a coterie of yes-men and women, no one dares tell him how futile is his quest to rebuild the USSR. Economically, it has no chance of success. Robbing the country so brazenly is possible only if the people are repressed by brutality. There is no escape - entrepreneurs are shaken down, and so their ranks are thinned out; the same people who would have the resourcefulness to start small businesses in the West just take the view that the risk is too great. Better be an official and live by shaking down citizens - traffic cops, hospital administrators, health & safety inspectors, granters of planning permissions, tax inspectors, university admissions officer. Run this way, the Russian economy could never lift off and hold its own in the modern world.

Failing to turn Russia into a genuinely modern economy, all Putin can do is to wreck the socio-economic systems of other countries. Had Russia made the right policy and political choices, it could have been a powerhouse, driven by foreign investment and innovation. As it is, ordinary Russian look longingly across at former Soviet republics in the EU - the freedom, the quality of life, sanctity of private property based on the rule of law, prospects for the future. This is a threat to Putin; repression can only go so far. 

Trump's election and Brexit were both supported massively by Russia - using all forms of 'active measures'; financially, through their 'useful idiots', and by an online onslaught using social media, the West's soft underbelly. As bombs rain down on Kyiv, the main proponents of Brexit are today acting as the Kremlin's apologists  in the UK - 'the West's fault for poking the bear' (N. Farage). [As an aside, can you imagine an organisation called Conservative Friends of Germany active in Westminster in the late 1930s?]

This time last year:
Yes, there is such a thing as Original Sin

This time three years ago:
London's Smithfield Market

This time four years ago:
Mid-winter in late February

This time five years ago:
Ten years of digital photography

This time six years ago:
Between atheism and creationism

This time seven years ago:
A peek into the Afterlife

This time eight years ago:
The new dupes of Moscow

This time nine years ago:
Late-winter commuting, Jeziorki

This time ten years ago:
My Nikon D80 five years on

This time 11 years ago:
My Nikon D80 four years on

This time 12 years ago:
Nikon D80 two years on

This time 13 years ago:
Nikon D80 one year on

Nightmare echoes of the Holodomor

Agnieszka Holland's film Mr Jones (Polish title Obywatel Jones) is not perfect but it does stand out as an important film for our time. It tells the story of British journalist Gareth Jones, one of the first Westerners to report the scale of the famine set in train by Stalin in 1932-33 in Ukraine.

It is a film that resonates today as journalists and politicians conveniently side-step the truth for the sake of expedience - blinded to it by greed, ideology, laziness or just unwillingness to rock the boat. Parallels to today's politics - though far less murderous - are not lost on the audience.

Trying to tell a story as wide-sweeping and horrific as the Holodomor in a movie two hours and 21 minutes long is a demanding task. It depends on being able to break it down into bite-sized scenes that strung together over the film's length show a continuous narrative unfolding.

One criticism is that the actors portraying the starving Ukrainian peasants did not look starving enough; the emaciation that one sees in the few photos to have made it out of that hell is not evident in the film. But overall, the film's klimat or atmosphere is chillingly nightmarish. The brutal realities of Stalin's USSR, overseen by an army of thugs, informers and murderers, a landscape bereft of sunlight, Moscow a city of architectural monumentalism, dwarfing Soviet citizens. The technology of the time, put to use to invigilate and coerce a nation, is nicely shown too.

Mr Jones draws on history but uses some narrative ploys that undermine authenticity. The film suggests that David Lloyd George was the British prime minister in 1933. "By the 1930s Lloyd George was on the margins of British politics" (Wikipedia). The prime minister at the time was Ramsay McDonald. Throughout the film we see George Orwell writing Animal Farm, an allegory on Soviet communism; a book that was written ten years later (1943-44) and not published until 1945, ten years after Jones's death. It is unlikely that Orwell ever met Jones.

However, Walter Duranty, the British-American journalist, Moscow correspondent of the New York Times is portrayed with greater historical accuracy, being the villain of the piece. Duranty preferred to lie on Stalin's behalf to the Western world, denying the man-made famine in Ukraine. It was an event on a scale of inhumanity and barbarism on a par with the Holocaust.

Music - Antoni Łazarkiewicz - that recurring 12-note piano motif sounds very much like the motif in Carter Burwell's soundtrack for the Coen Brothers' A Serious Man (2009). But the Western jazz of the day, in its full decadence, clashes with haunting Ukrainian folk songs about the hunger and its effect on the people.

The film is truly international in scale, set in London, Moscow, Ukraine and Wales; the dialogue in four languages. Man's inhumanity to man and the contrast between the powerful and the poor is present in both the United Kingdom and in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics - but the latter is in an utterly different world of brutal inhumanity. Agnieszka Holland makes the point that during the Great Depression, many Western idealists, seeing the human suffering around them, looked to Stalin and the USSR as the future - how wrong they were.

Having watched the film in Kinoteka (within the Stalinist Palace of Culture), I stepped out into the colossal marbled hall outside the screening room, amid its massive columns and high ceilings and felt as if I were back in the movie; the purpose of Socialist-Realist architecture was to oppress through scale.

Three nights in a row I had nightmares which touched on this film. I commend it thoroughly, despite some shortcomings.

This time last year:
The Earth is flat

This time two years ago:
50th Anniversary of the Fiat 125p

This time three years ago:
Fidel Castro's death divides the world

This time four years ago:
London to Edinburgh by night bus

This time six year ago:
The Regent's Canal, London

This time eight years ago:
An end to the entitlement way of thinking

This time nine year:
West Ealing - drab and sad end of town

This time ten years ago:
To Poznań by train

This time 12 years ago:
Late autumn drive-time 

War and the absence of war

My generation was born in the shadow of war. It affected our parents in their youth terribly. It was a common topic of conversation among our elders - the 1960s were as close to WW2 as we are today to the mid-1990s.

My childhood was immersed in the memorabilia of war - war comics like Commando, War Picture Library - Airfix Spitfires, Lancasters and Sherman tanks, toy soldiers in 1/76th and 1/32nd scale - photo albums of the Warsaw Uprising, books borrowed from the library about D-Day, El Alamein, Stalingrad; books about those same tanks and planes and battleships that I stuck together in miniature form. Even today I can tell you from memory the horsepower of the Mk I Hurricane, the bomb load carried by a Vickers Wellington, the guns on the ORP Błyskawica, the calibre of a Lee Enfield rifle. All useless information for a boy growing up in West London, but I soaked it up nevertheless.

A boy who grew up into a man who - unlike his father, his grandfather, or indeed a long line of ancestors - never knew war.

The notion that someone could point a rifle or load a mortar with the intention of putting a piece of metal into the body of another human being to sort out differences between nations and ideologies, has  here in Europe become defunct.

Is war the natural condition for mankind? Are we doomed to engage in armed conflict with one another because such is our biology?

For the whole of my life there has been no war in the core European countries. Yes, the Balkans saw a dreadful conflict that they have not totally gotten over. And yes, there's a war going on in eastern Ukraine, stoked by Russia, fought by Russian troops, killing Ukrainians with bullets and shells and rockets. But between the Atlantic and the Dnieper - peace has prevailed.

For four and half of those seven decades, the Cold War meant the risk of bullets and shrapnel was high. But the logic of Mutual Assured Destruction kept war away from the North Atlantic. In 1990, we felt it was all over, history had been won by the good guys and that was that.

As I wrote last month, there are today ever fewer people who remember what it was like to have seen combat in WW2. You'd have to be over 91 today to have been called up to the His Majesty's Armed Forces on your 18th birthday some time in early 1945. If you are in your late 70s today, you'd remember the war from your childhood. But if you are 72 or younger - WW2 would not have affected you. Of course, there was Korea (1950-53); Americans had Vietnam. These conflicts affected drafted men as well as volunteers.

I've spent my entire life in peace, no one shooting at me like the German soldiers who shot at my father, no one rounding me up at gunpoint into a cattle-truck as the Russians did to my mother exactly 78 years ago today. Sixty years old and I've not been to war - how rare is that in the perspective of history? I'm too old to bear arms now - though I'd still willingly volunteer to do so should Polish soil ever be invaded. Would today's young do so?

Across the border, our neighbour Ukraine is being invaded - a seeping pustulent war concocted by Putin as a 'frozen conflict' that's to fester on, unresolved. Young Ukrainians are faced with the dilemma of staying to fight or moving west to find work in the labour-hungry economies of the EU.

Does the fact that Europe has experienced peace for so long mean that it is about to come to an end - or are we in the fragile infancy of a new era where shooting wars have become consigned to history? If Putin can see that investing in troll farms, cyber warriors and state-sponsored hackers is more beneficial - and far less risky - than invading Estonia or Latvia - maybe he'll stick to that. The European Union can be split asunder by stoking the differences inherent in Western society. We should all be aware of that risk and guard against it.

This time two years ago:
Sensitivity to spiritual evolution

This time three years ago:
'Peak car' - in Western Europe, at least 

This time five years ago:
Pavement for Karczunkowska NOW!
[We still don't have one... I walk home in fear of my life.]

This time six years ago:
Until the Vistula freezes over 

This time seven years ago:
Of sunshine, birdsong and wet socks

This time ten years ago:
Dziadzio Tadeusz at 90

Ukraine: Would I stay or would I go?

The war drags on. It's not a civil war between the Ukrainian government and separatists - it's a war between two nations - Russia and Ukraine. Russia is using the formula that 'pro-Russian separatists' are trying to gain independence from Ukraine, to fool the West. In reality, the Kremlin is sending over heavy weapons - including armour, rocket artillery and anti-aircraft missiles, across the Ukrainian border to turn up the heat whenever it feels it can get away with it.

As I had predicted, Putin is keeping the frozen conflict in Ukraine alive. His aggression is costing the lives of many thousands of Ukrainian civilians who have not fled the fighting. And the lives of many brave Ukrainian soldiers, who are getting into harm's way to do what brave Polish soldiers did back in 1920 - to hold back the barbarian tide from the east.

How would I - how would you - react if we were there, in Ukraine, not in the relative comfort of the West, of the EU, of NATO?

Run or fight?

Tough question for hundreds of thousands of young Ukrainian men. Seek a better, safer life in the West, turning your back on your flawed fatherland, still mired in corruption? Or stay and fight - fight for an independent homeland, fight for justice - and, in the long term, a country that could be normal, with decent institutions, on the path to prosperity, a country where people can grow and reach their potential?

Looking at Ukraine from a purely selfish, Polish, perspective - Poland needs a buffer between it and Russia. Long term, Poland wants to see Ukraine succeed, and to succeed it needs to have seen off Putin, built a strong civil society, and an effective state with good laws and honest leaders.

Putin's greatest fear was always that Ukraine - like the Baltic republics, also former components of the USSR - would develop a stronger economy than that of Russia. That Ukrainians would be richer, freer, happier, than Russians east of the border. That one day Ukraine might join the EU, the single market, adopt best practice in governance - and Russians would see that and want some themselves.

It is nearly three years since the Maidan protests resulted in President Yanukovych fleeing to Moscow and the Russian armed forces seizing Crimea. Since then, the conflict in eastern Ukraine continues.

Putin does not understand 'win-win'; rather than trying to beat the West at its own game by developing free enterprise and an open society, it is easier for him to pull everyone else into the mire. From a man who looked beaten back in 2015, with low oil prices and a united West, he is now beginning to look far stronger - by openly meddling in the affairs of other nations' politics. Propaganda based on the the four Ds - deny, distort, distract, dismay - is pumped out daily on RT and Radio Sputnik, internet trolls are visible on the comments sections of influential Western media, pushing the Kremlin's agenda, and hackers are attacking the IT systems at the heart of the West's financial and political infrastructure.

Meanwhile in Ukraine, Putin is pushing in his bayonet deeper whenever he, in Lenin's words, feels mush, and stops whenever he feels resistance. The resistance can be diplomatic, economic (sanctions) and military, and it is the Ukrainian military that are bearing the brunt.

Young men who could have slipped across the border into Poland and readily found work and a better life here. But they chose to stay and fight.

We should, as Poles, be immensely grateful to them, for staying to defend their homeland - and to defend civilisation from barbarism.

We should defend ourselves against Kremlin's propaganda - which, unlike in Soviet times, has no ideological agenda - it is simply aimed at fragmenting Western society and giving Putin more pliant mush into which he can push his bayonet into deeper.

This time three years ago:
Sadness at the death of Tadeusz Mosz

This four years ago:
Oldschool photochallenge

This time seven years ago:
Warsaw's wonderful nooks and crannies

This time nine years ago:
Viaduct to the airport at ul. Poleczki almost ready

Poland's progress: international rankings season

It's that time of year again when nations are scrutinised and ranked according to parameters which determine where global business should locate its activities. Last week, the World Bank published its Doing Business ranking, in which Poland advanced once again (from 45th to 38th in terms of ease of doing business). And EF, a language training company, published its English Proficiency Index, which placed Poland as sixth best (!) in the non-native English-speaking world in terms of its population's mastery of the de facto global language. Poland is among the fastest-improving countries in the world when it comes to knowing English.

Today, Transparency International published its Corruption Perception Index, looking at how corruption is perceived across 175 countries around the world. For the ninth year in a row, Poland did better than the year before, albeit the pace of improvement has slowed down.

This is a clear wake-up call to Ms Kopacz's government not to take its eye off the ball. Although Poland is not slipping, the pace of improvement is far slower than in the first two years of the Tusk administration, when the leaps away from Millerite corruption were most noticeable. Whether you tend to be left-leaning or right-leaning (or, like me, seek balance), corruption is something we can all agree on needs to be extirpated with extreme prejudice.

Look at the graph below which puts Poland into the context of other former communist states. Poland has clearly distanced itself not only from the Balkans and the post-Soviet space, but also from the rest of Central and Eastern Europe. Only Estonia, a country that's more Scandinavian than Slavic ranks ahead of Poland. The distance between the UK and Poland (17 points and 21 positions) is smaller than between Poland and Romania (18 points and 34 positions). And this year Ukraine advanced (marginally) from its dire 2013 ranking, while Russia slipped back. Note the effect that EU membership has had on these countries. And note also the general connection between low corruption and high standards of living.

EU membership has brought huge benefits to Poland, not least in terms of the quality of its public administration, now able to share best practices across the member states, better and clearer (though still a long way off perfection) laws and regulations, and a lack of tolerance to corruption. Gone forever are the days when a well-stuffed envelope can buy you the necessary planning permit from the town hall, or a large banknote can let you off a drunk-driving charge.

Foreign investors are looking for transparency, stability and predictability; when investing with a 20- to 30-year timeframe, a government that grasps, wheedles and wobbles is not going to be a good place to build a factory, warehouse or shopping mall, no matter how cheap the labour or the land.

The quality of a country's institutions is paramount; effective, productive public administrators able to carry out their functions quickly and well is crucial to the citizens' well-being.

So a big thank-you to the World Bank, to the World Economic Forum, to Transparency International and to other institutions, NGOs and think-tanks that take the time to compare countries and rank them. Governments take notice, citizens take notice. Governments that fail to deliver improvements get democratically booted out.

This time last year:
The Transparency International Corruption Perception Index for 2013

Also this time last year:
Poland's rapid advance up the education league table: PISA 2013

This time two years ago:
Life expectancy across the EU: more comparisons