When I first heard that the Russians had blown up the Kakhovka dam, I assumed that this was an effective tactic to frustrate the Ukrainian counteroffensive. It will surely slow it. But a Ukrainian friend raises an additional possibility – that these are the scorched-earth tactics the Germans used in much the same places 80 years ago. Writing from Kyiv, she quotes a letter from Himmler to the SS commander in Ukraine in September 1943: ‘It is necessary to make sure that when retreating from Ukraine, not a single person, not a single animal, not a single gram of grain, not a single metre of railway track is there, so that not a single house survives… The enemy must be a totally burned and devastated country.’ She thinks Putin’s only tactic is to ‘make Ukraine unliveable in order to force an end to resistance’. This is a shockingly believable thought. The cold comfort in it is that, if the fate of the Nazis is anything to go by, this is the policy of a power facing defeat.
It is a cliché, but true, that the public prefer small charities because they can stay closer to their mission than big ones. A related point is that donors, volunteers etc can get closer too. In Kramatorsk in eastern Ukraine recently, I arrived in a SUV driven (not by or with me) from England and repurposed by the small charity Mission Ukraine as a field ambulance for the wounded at the front. As I got out, I looked closely at the vehicle for the first time. The whole body was painted in battlefield matt-green, and near the right wheel in white was written the name ‘T. Gaisman’. Gosh, I thought, I knew her. Tessa Gaisman was a delightful woman, a former diary secretary for Margaret Thatcher.
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