Like everyone, I watched the footage from Ukraine on Thursday morning with absolute shock and horror.
On an ordinary morning, the people of Ukraine should have been waking up to breakfast and the commute to work or school.
Instead, they woke to the blare of sirens and a state of emergency as Russian tanks rolled across their borders.
The pictures of bombed-out apartment blocks and families sheltering in underground stations as bombs fell above them were chilling.
In the capital Kyiv, just 1,500 miles from Edinburgh, its three million people should have been deciding what to wear that day or what to put in the kids’ packed lunches, instead they were making life and death decisions – flee or stay?
For many, there was no choice. For them, life now is forever changed. The impact of Vladimir Putin’s war is likely to change our lives too.
It is hard to believe this is happening in Europe in the 21st Century, the bloodshed and tanks and bombs seems like something from our past, not of the here and now.
I couldn’t help thinking how this could be any city, anywhere – any mother anywhere. It was surreal and chillingly reminiscent of Hitler’s invasion of Poland and it made me want to weep.
Why is it that the powerful few in the world can wreak such havoc on the many who, for the most part, lead normal, peaceful lives and who wish no ill on anyone else?
Where is the humanity? Have we learned nothing from the mistakes and the horrors of the past?
My heart goes out to every single person in Ukraine, and to the Russian mothers and fathers who will lose their soldier children in this madness.
Nobody wins in war. Everyone has a price to pay. Today, we do not yet know what the cost of this needless war will be. We will soon.
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