Mick Hartley

Talking of Zelenskyy: we should never forget his significance as Ukraine's leader. David Patrikarakos:

As information warfare has evolved, 21st-century state leadership — for autocrats and democrats alike — has evolved alongside it. When Putin, clearly chafing in his role of cuddly despot, made the decision to try to conquer Ukraine outright, he made many mistakes, but chief among them was to underestimate Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskyy. This was probably fair enough; his career before taking office was as a TV comedian. But in that lay his strength. Zelenskyy did two things. First, as so many soldiers on the front told me proudly, he didn’t run. Second, he used his professional experience to devastating effect.

In the months following February 24, Zelenskyy became perhaps the most televised man on Earth. He used humour, pathos and bathos to make Ukraine’s case, and in so doing, he created a new form of wartime leadership. He became master of what I call “digital statesmanship”: his output was short, to-the-point, informal — designed not for oratorical flourish but to go viral. And as a result, he influenced the war on the ground more than any Ukrainian general; his messaging made Ukraine’s case for a steady supply of weapons impossible for Western leaders to ignore. Zelenskyy did something remarkable: he transmuted Ukrainian soft power into hard power. Putin, meanwhile, has become little more than a polished Saddam.

Not sure about "polished", but it's a fair comparison: the same chilling brutality, of a man relishing his power.

“Sooner or later,” wrote Graham Greene in The Quiet American, “one has to take sides, if one is to remain human.” That is perhaps the final lesson of these nine years. Wars are squalid, messy things. Right and wrong can often be hard to find. But as Dominic Sandbrook eloquently argued this week, that is not the case with Ukraine. In Ukraine, a clear right faces off against an unalloyed wrong. There, they are fighting not only because it is right, but because they have no other choice. The Ukrainians — and by proxy the West — never sought this war, but it came anyway, and against it there can never be any retreat.