Jen Stout (2024) Night Train to Odesa.

It’s over three years since Putin’s tanks sat on Ukraine’s borders. The world watched and wondered what he would do next. Jen Stout, Night Train to Odesa Covering the Human Cost of Russia’s War is an antidote to the moron’s moron, Trump's blather.

The American President after brow-beating President Volodymr Zelensky and promising to end the Ukrainian war in a day has scheduled a meeting with Putin in Siberia. His press conference is cringe worthy. Clearly he can’t remember any Ukrainian cities. He calls them ‘prime ocean-front properties’. He’s sure his power of persuasion will convince President Putin to return them to Ukraine in a ‘fair deal’. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c0e99yqv332o

‘What the Russians have done was unforgivable,’ Masson, a former pacifist, serving on the front line said. ‘And yet people called for “negotiations”.

‘Would you tell us to sit down with Bin Laden? Russia is a terrorist.’

‘I have only hate left. No human feelings.’

Jane Stout is indeed stout-hearted. Like Trump’s mum she is working class and comes from the Scottish Isles (population around 22 000). She speaks Russian (but not Ukrainian) and is a freelance reporter and writer.   

Her journal has four sections. Part One. Russia to Romania. November 2021—March 2022. Her instinct to help makes thinks better and clearer by reporting what’s happening has her travelling to the border where so many women and children fled when Russia invaded. Men were left behind.

You may remember the Tory scum Party dithered. Using a possible terrorist threat to delay any of these refugees arriving on British shores.

Stay or go?

Within Ukraine the same questions was being answered by the returnees.  Those that fled but returned to their hometowns.

The refugee’s dilemma. ‘Get Out, Get Out,’ the Ukrainian government tells them.

But with the state pension around 2100 hyrvnias [about £50] a month.

A flat in Dnipro about 16 000 hryvnias and around 2000 in unilities.

Many returned because they ran out of money.

Stout also reminds us that the vastly efficient rail network, widely used, was largely built, like much of the infrastructure by Soviet slave labour.  

Part 2, Odesa, Khrakiv, Dnipro, April-June 2022. ‘I have hope. But I have no idea what comes next.’ A mother and son struggle to understand why people in places like Moscow are so stupid—we could say the same about the American’s who believe anything the moron’s moron Trump tells us—but they refer to Russian propaganda.

A list of things people won’t abandon. ‘I won’t abandon my dogs’.

Pen Ukraine. The war is about values on which modern civilisation is built.

Russian torture cells and bodies of mass killings discovered.

Perception is reality.

Part Three, Lviv, Kyiv, Frontlines, October—November 2022.

Reconnecting Kharkiv to its past—it’s Ukrainian past—is a political task.

Among the buckled metal, rasping little birds and a wee courin timorous beastie, which happened to be the author. The mouse unfazed.

She highlights others artists and writers like Volodymyr Vakulenko, who buried his books and journal before being killed. His elderly mother told by the Russians, he’d been taken into custody and was still being processed, when they knew he’d been summarily executed to free Ukraine from fascists and Nazis.

Part Four, Donbas. February—April 2023.

An Alsatian dog that follows her around. She pets and falls into its gaze. It reminds her or home and the collie dogs they had on her croft and she used to sleep with when she was wee.  

Epilogue. Two extraordinary women (like Jen Stout) but killed by the Russians. Vlada Chernykh call sign ‘Aida’ part of a drone team. So much of the front-line fighting is now done be drones, rifles are almost redundant.

Novelist and reporter, Victoria Amelina, killed by a missile strike.

Read on.

Unleash the Beastie! https://bit.ly/bannkie