Spare a thought for the Russian squaddie

Britain’s greatest war poet Siegfried Sassoon was well aware of the idiocy of those who cheered the deaths of soldiers. ‘O German mother dreaming by the fire/ While you are knitting socks to send your son/ His face is trodden deeper in the mud,’ he wrote in his World War I poem Glory of Women. His verse dealt with the hypocrisy and callousness of civilians who failed to recognise the cruel reality of war. We appear to have barely learnt a thing in relation to the war in Ukraine, as we celebrate all too readily the deaths of those on the ‘wrong side’.

On Twitter now – and throughout the media – there is a thirst for videos of Russian tanks and armoured fighting vehicles (AFVs) being blown up. Commentators take self-indulgent delight in the latest daily tally of Russian equipment losses. Yet while we all surely want Putin to be defeated, we should stop and remember the cost of war: Russian sons, brothers and fathers – most of whom are blameless; some of whom are merely conscripts deceived about the nature of the operation they were sent on – are dying in their thousands.