A criminal long before now…

Our mission wages on and the intensity with which we have been working at has not slackened off.

While the attention of the world’s media might have turned to Putin’s arrest warrant, our eyes remain fixed on the ground below us. We have found well over 100 pieces of ordinance and almost all of those have been rendered safe.

We have been working relentlessly to detect, unearth, and neutralise as many explosives as we can.

Scenes from the minefields

I WILL describe a few of operations that we have been involved in…

The team and I were called out to a suspected minefield.

We knew there was a vehicle destroyed there, and it was initially believed to have been a Russian truck.

However, as the team stepped cautiously towards it, a closer investigation revealed that it a Ukrainian vehicle had driven over some of sort of anti-tank device. It had been destroyed – as had all of the occupants.

Also, along with state emergency services, we have been looking for submuminations. These are small weapons that are distributed across the landscape when the larger warhead detonates. They can be both deadly and hard to detect.

We had found the carrier so knew that there were likely to be cluster mines around. And there were. We found a number of them, marked them out, and performed controlled detonations.

We also inspected a 220mm uragan rocket to see if it is viable – and it was.

It was found just beside somebody’s garage. This is typical of what we find. The world of war and domestic life are totally intertwined.

Familes have nowhere to run.

Putin’s arrest warrant.

PUTIN’S criminal actions began on February 24 last year when he started making his way towards Kyiv, his troops leaving utter devastation in their wake.

At that point, any nation of the world who valued fairness and freedom should have stood up and made him accountable.

They should have done the same the moment the mass graves were discovered in Izyum – of which, by the way, it is certain many more will be found.

And the audacity Putin displayed earlier this week with that ludicrous staged visit in which he beheld ‘beautiful Mariupol’ – a city he levelled at the beginning of the war, killing tens of thousands of
civilians.

The warrant for his arrest could have been issued on many other grounds much earlier in this war.

An army unconstrained

THERE have been many allegations made towards the Russian Army.

Speaking from a historical perspective, in the last 100 or so years there has not been much change in the way the Russian army has operated.

Yes, they have modern weapons systems, but they are incapable of keeping the same sort of discipline shown by professional armies of the west.

I can testify to this lack of discipline myself.

When walking through a forest outside Kyiv, where Russians paratroopers – who are among their most elite soliders – had been based, we came across trenches full of stolen vodka bottles.

You have to ask yourself how effective could these men have been when they were all drunk?

How could they keep their discipline and behave properly when they were all stumbling around full of vodka?

And, though drunkeness does fully explain the horrors that have been committed upon the people of Ukraine, it does form part of the picture of the terror that has been reaped upon the civilian population.

An axis of evil

AND to top this whole week off, Putin met with Xi – the Chinese dictator. I fear we may be witnessing the second spawning of the axis of evil.