I washed up in Central and Eastern Europe as an itinerant travel journalist in the blistering summer of 2015 … I remember Mr Vlad ‘Action Man’ Putin was still, daily, baring his chest and his teeth after annexing Crimea.
Mr Putin was obviously emboldened by his new war of attrition.
After all, he’d got noticed by raising his manly shaven head above the world trenches – and nobody had blown it off.
He was like a farmer in the city, land-grabbing wherever he wanted and boasting he was only taking back what was historically Russia’s.
Not many had died in the Crimea anyway. So, apart from three protesters and three soldiers, not much damage done. In Putin’s mind.
Me? I was out there to report on the big damage the little man had done to Crimea’s once-booming travel industry.
Crimean Peninsula was regularly described as ‘the diamond suspended from the south coast of Ukraine’. It was one of the world’s top destinations, accounting for about a quarter of Crimea’s economy.
But now tourism was dead on its Lilo in a pond of lilies.
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A few months later I was invited by a group of business people to look at tourism in neighbouring ‘Little Big Country’ Slovakia, another victim of greed behind Russia’s twitchy iron curtain.
On August 20, 1968, 200,000 Warsaw Pact troops and 5,000 tanks had hit Czechoslovakia to destroy what was being described as the Prague Spring — a liberalising of a communist country. But they were no match for the Soviet tanks.
Within weeks of arriving in Slovakia, I felt at home in this once tin-pot little country of shell suits, leaky Trabants and hard liquor. And I stayed there for fifteen years … in fact ‘til my liver inflated like a back street Russian balloon shop, and I remembered the NHS.
I flew back to the covid greyness of the UK and took the cure.
Slovakia had grown around me and when I flew home – July 6, 2021 – the Trabants and polyester suits were being rapidly replaced by BMWs, Armani and posh eating houses.
A few months later Russia’s dogs of war gathered and howled as missiles and bullets rained down on Kiev, a city I’d got to know well.
I hope to return later this year to the Slavic ‘states’. But I know I will be going back to regions filled with fear and loathing.
I wanted to share two stories that in some ways express the true human cost of Russia sending its dogs of war to mark their horrific territories for its resurgence.
