Ukraine

Will Kyiv Build a Monument to Invasion Halted?

Hitler was stopped here by Stalin but will we see a monument to where Putin was halted by Zelenskyy on the road to Kyiv?

It was 1992. As we drove from Sheremetyevo International Airport on the Leningradskoye Shosse, a major highway, we passed, at about 20 km from the Kremlin, a simple monument. Our cab driver told us that it was the nearest point that Hitler’s army got to the centre of Moscow.

It’s known as the Ezhi Monunment.

It comprises three scaled-up tank traps.

It was the point from which the German Army withdrew on 6th December 1941. Operation Typhoon had failed and for the Russians, the Battle of Moscow had been won, or at least the tide had been turned.

When I worked in Moscow in the early ‘90s, the Great Patriotic War was still widely talked about, the Muscovites justly proud of the parts their fathers and mothers had played in it.

It’s a simple monument but it did have an emotional effect on me then, and on the several later occasions that I passed it.

However, there is some dispute about the correct location of the stoppage of Hitler’s advance.

And now Ukraine

This dreadful attack on a free country by a modern day Stalin is disgusting.

The Russians set the heroic defensive example in 1941 in Moscow, and now the Ukrainians have copied it, apparently successfully, although it is still early days with Russia saying that they have halted their advance on Kyiv. Many NATO countries are, however sceptical of this.

So, Putin has been stopped on the road to Kyiv.

And a reverse seems to be under way.

20 km, give or take. That’s how near the Russians have got to central Kyiv.

Putin’s February 2022 speech on Russian history demonstrated some twisted thinking. If he’s so hot on Russian history then it’s a pity that he did not heed the lessons of the Battle of Moscow in 1941. He may feel strongly about defending Mother Russia but attacking Ukraine was the wrong way to go about it.

He says that the Ukrainians are basically Russians. Only in respect of defending their homes and capital city he’s being proven right.

I hope that one day we shall see a monument to the heroic defence of Kyiv on the road outside the city.

A memorial comprising three tanks traps would be really ironic, wouldn’t it?

And let us not forget the other cities of the Ukraine, cities that have been razed.

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