(Image: Stefan Rousseau/PA Wire)
ALL war is horrific. Perhaps in our love of war stories, of our brave men who fought in the first and second world wars, we glorify it, but the sheer horror of it is being felt on a daily basis by the civilians of Ukraine.
A couple of years ago, the British people generously welcomed Ukrainians fleeing from those horrors into their homes.
Now it is barely news that another 33 civilians have been killed by a Russian glide-bomb attack on two buses at a stop outside a dental clinic in Kramatorsk. It follows the previous day’s killing of 22 civilians when a Russian missile reduced a five-storey block of flats in Pryluky to rubble.
These are terrorist attacks. Russia is unable to capture the Donetsk region by military means so it is using terror to waste the landscape and force the civilians to flee.
Even in the capital Kyiv, many civilians are regularly sleeping in underground shelters and train tunnels to escape the bombardment, their ordinary lives blown apart by Russia’s unnatural greed.
And this is in Europe, in a country that would be on our holiday lists if it wasn’t a battlefield.
Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband was in Ukraine yesterday rightly reminding the Ukrainian people of Britain’s support, and urging the US to allow Ukraine greater use of the Starlink satellite service so its missiles can penetrate deeper into Russia.
That, though, is a partial answer. It won’t stop the fighting. It will only rain down terror on Russian civilians.
The most powerful person in the west is the US president. How can Donald Trump see the pictures of burning buses and yet still try to chummy up to Vladimir Putin in the hope of profiting when the Nordstream gas pipeline reopens?
This war is not just horrific. It is absolutely obscene.