This morning I got a message from a friend and former colleague who was on a bus to the metro. “Some small plane crashed in a field next to the road. Sorry I didn’t get a snap for you.”
It was just before 7am and I was already working. She was referring to the 25 or so armed drones that attacked Moscow today. Most were shot down, others left hanging in trees or cables, or in the case next to her - was confused and fell to the ground.
For weeks, slightly before the attack on the Kremlin, Moscow has been under geolocation jamming. Trying to order a taxi or use GPS is a nightmare. But it’s an inconvenience and minor price to pay. As a colleague told me in January - “God help them, I mean, not all of them are nutters and it must be awful living under such conditions.” This was when the lights were put out in certain parts of Ukraine by missile strikes. A tricky food delivery pales in comparison.
This morning’s attacks are nothing compared to Saturday’s killing of 2 teens in Belgorod (pre-2014 Russia). They’re nothing compared to the 14 killed when Ukraine’s air defence mistakenly shot down one of their own helicopters. And nothing compared to the 2 innocent people killed in Poland when a Ukraine air defence missile went astray. I can list only a few of the deaths caused by errant or direct strikes by attacks on either side back to 2014, and they all outweigh the inconvenience of a couple of dozen drones roaming around Moscow.
As with the Kiev-ordered murder of Daria Dugina, the attack on Alexey Navalny’s friend Zakhar Prilepin and the drone strikes on the Kremlin, reporting of it in Irish or UK or US media will all have caveats. “Alleged”, “Kremlin claims” etc. A Russian missile strike will be stated as 100% confirmed, until you scroll way deep down and find that it’s a Ukrainian official reporting. Does that bother me? Not at all. It’s always been this way. And it’s nothing compared to those who died and continue to die since 2014, and before.
Moscow reacted as everyone knew it would, chatter, gossip and business as usual. Terror attacks, for that is what they are if we mirror the words of Kiev, are nothing new in the Russian capital. March 29, 2010, I was in Malta and our club President, Joe Cauchi, phoned to see if all was ok with my “people” in Moscow. I turned on BBC news and nothing, went onto Russian news and there was a bombing in the Moscow Metro. And then a second. Tim’s Granny was meant to be passing through one of the 2 stations where Al-Qaeda linked women blew themselves up. Over 40 were killed, officially. Life went on, but Muslim women covered fully are now treated with suspicion as they are in Tel Aviv.
January 2011, I was driving one of my tennis players, she’d flown back in from France, when the traffic stopped. We were headed to Moscow city centre for a meeting with one sponsor and her phone rang. Her Mother’s voice was loud enough for the neighbouring car to hear. Was she okay? Is she out of the airport? Does she need help? Domodedovo, where I flew out of this past Saturday and where we were coming from that day, was hit with a bomb attack that claimed 37 lives. It was aimed at foreign citizens, but killed 29 Russians, a Briton, German, 2 Austrians, a Tajik, Kyrgyz and Uzbek. And Ukraine’s wonderfully talented Anna Yablonskaya, who’d just landed from Odessa to collect an award for her work. Sadly her work was part of the 390k plus Russian-language books pulled from library shelves in Ukraine’s Chernigov region last week.
Attacks on Moscow are nothing new and always in the back of one’s mind.
Lindsey Graham’s apparent delight at killing Russian citizens during a weekend meet with Vladimir Zelensky came up again today. Some media pointing out that his claims of being misquoted were false and that this is another US-NATO effort to destroy the country. All today has done, is knock the demolition of Ukrainian military stores overnight from the front page headlines in Russia. Nobody here thinks for a second that the drone attacks will merit more than a passing “Kremlin claims” mention in London or Dublin. And it doesn’t matter.
Pentagon spokesman John F. Kirby said the US works hard to avoid civilian casualties. “We’re investigating this. I’m not going to get ahead of it. But if we have significant – verifiable information that we did take innocent life here, then we will be transparent about that, too. Nobody wants to see that happen,” he said.
“But you know what else we didn’t want to see happen. We didn’t want to see happen what we believe to be a very real, a very specific and a very imminent threat to the Hamid Karzai International Airport and to our troops operating at the airport as well as civilians around it and in it and that is another thing that we were very concerned about.” Two years on, nobody has been brought to justice.
Malika and Sumaya were 2 years old. They never had the chance to live before a US drone strike obliterated them. At 2 years old, I was sitting on my Grandad Moore’s knee near Tallanstown in County Louth. A few miles North, a month before, the Ulster Volunteer Force launched attack after attack to drive up conflict, killing 8 innocents and 4 of their own (bomb they were carrying blew up). 22 days after my birthday, on November 29th, one of 2 bombs exploded in Dublin Airport, killing a local worker and injuring 10 more.
20 days later, and 20 minutes from where I was celebrating my 2nd birthday, the Red Hand Commandos killed 2 and injured 20 with a no-warning car bomb in Dundalk. Immediately afterwards the group attacked Silverbridge in nearby Armagh with guns and bombs, killing 3 and wounding 6. I had my Noddy car and didn’t know the dangerous times I was living in. I could have been like Malika and Sumaya, playing or with my parents in a shopping centre, only for my life to be ended in a flash of TNT.
Yet nothing compares my life experience, or this morning’s madness, to what the poor people have suffered on either side of the divide in Ukraine since 2014. And nothing compared to what the people in Donbas and Ukraine have suffered since last February. And nothing compared to what the people in Belgorod, Bryansk and Kursk have suffered since last March. And none of the above can even compare what the innocents in Yemen, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Sudan and other countries suffered and suffer because they’re strategically located or resource rich.
For the armchair heroes and heroines in Dublin, London, Washington and Moscow, it will not be their children suffering in trenches. Not be their homes getting blown up. Not be their lights going out. The drums of war beat louder and louder as NATO now look to expand into the Asian-Pacific region. Whatever madness was let loose on our planet with flawed climate change theory, with lockdown and vaccines, with mass migrations, with trans issues, with dividing us all into categories and creating screeching, bickering blobs of pathetic humanity. Whatever madness it is, I am lost. For me, shouting at “them” is reserved for sports, because afterwards we can go for a drink and chat. I thank the heavens I am safe. I thank the heavens that those close to me are safe. Because I do not, as the CNN report said, want to be in a “hospital identifying remains and separating them into coffins.”
That Lindsey Graham is a fake,,, His brain should be used as a mine detector,,, We need peace not anger no killing. Unfortunately society is brainwashed to hate and divide Alan thank you again