Putin’s big bluff

My first visit to Ukraine was in 1994. We drove to a village about three hours south of Kiev. The landscape was flat, fields of wheat stretching out in all directions. You could see why Ukraine had been called ‘the breadbasket of the Soviet Union’. An old man in a flat cap waved us over at the entrance to the village. He knelt down to scoop up a handful of the rich soil. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘the black earth of Ukraine’. He spoke about the artificial famine that Stalin had created in Ukraine in the 1930s, the Holodomor. He remembered armed men coming to the village to seize all the grain. The black earth had been a curse as much as a blessing.

At dinner that night, there were many rounds of vodka and a main dish of roast potatoes layered with pork fat. It was so dense that I struggled to finish it.