Kenya
During Russia’s invasion of Georgia in 2008 I got a close look at Moscow’s troops and their kit. These contractniki were a ragged bunch with rotting teeth, bad boots and homemade tattoos, using weapons and vehicles that seemed like hand-me-downs from a failed state in Africa. I had expected them to be much smarter. Recently my spooky friends told me that Putin’s military invading Ukraine was now a modernised, well-trained force. Instead it appears that Moscow’s generals have stolen the diesel, supplied the mechanised brigades with ageing knock-off Chinese tyres and sacked all the dentists.
I haven’t visited Luhansk and Donetsk, but I bet they are a version of the Black Sea city of Sokhumi, which Russia seized for the Abkhazians who rebelled against Georgia in the 1990s. The thing that struck me about Sokhumi, apart from the strange resemblance inhabitants bore to members of Boris Johnson’s family, was that there were more donkey carts and cattle than cars. In Abkhazia, entire towns had become forests of oleander, silent but for cicadas, random gunfire and bored youths effecting handbrake turns in battered Ladas. It was like a zombie movie, deserted since the Abkhazians had ethnically cleansed all Georgians. In the aftermath, nothing was left in this illegal state, except peasants in their villages, eating yoghurt and honey and drowning their sorrows in chacha brandy.
The Ukrainians can’t be cleansed from their own homeland – so I wonder if Ukraine will become like Somalia. The Somalis thought nothing of losing a thousand men to kill a handful of American special forces in the Black Hawk Down battle of 1993. In Mogadishu I watched the clan militias firing dozens of rocket grenades at overflying American helicopters, which brought them down in swirling balls of fire.
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