Paul Wood

Lebanon Abu Hassan puts down his Kalashnikov and reaches into a pocket on his bodywarmer to hand me a small white pill. ‘Here,’ he says in Arabic, ‘a gift. This’ll keep you awake for 48 hours.’ He grins and adds in English: ‘Good sex!’ The pill is Captagon, an amphetamine known as ‘the poor man’s coke’. It can make the user feel invincible and was taken by fighters on all sides in Syria’s civil war; Isis were said to be big fans of ‘Captain Courage’. It has now spread across the Middle East. You might find Captagon fuelling a party in Riyadh or keeping a Baghdad taxi driver awake through a double shift. It is, of course, illegal. And horribly addictive.

At the start of the war in Ukraine, I was given a recording made by the Ukrainian intelligence services. It was described as an intercepted call from an officer at Russia’s nuclear missile base in Siberia to a relative in Kyiv. The line crackles and a man speaks in Russian: ‘I don’t know what I should do… His [Vladimir Putin’s] finger is hovering over the button. Maybe the commander--in-chief knows he’s got no way out.’ The Russian says his base has been given three hours to put its nuclear weapons ‘into a state of readiness’. And – a terrifying further step – he has been told of orders from President Putin to enter the co-ordinates to target Kyiv and two other Ukrainian cities.

Some citizens of Nato countries are in Ukraine to fight. They are members of the new International Brigade the Ukrainians are recruiting at their embassies. The senior official told me that so far around 3,000 foreigners had signed up. A unit 500-strong had already been formed inside Ukraine, he said, ‘ready to go – except there are no weapons’. I thought these numbers might have been propaganda but it appears that the figures are roughly accurate – and more recruits are arriving all the time. There are apparently a number of British volunteers so far. I managed to speak to one of them, a retired major named Ian Cunningham. At the age of 74, Major Cunningham has the distinction of being the oldest member of the International Brigade.

The White House told us with absolute certainty that there would be an invasion of Ukraine this week — instead Vladimir Putin bit off a chunk of Ukraine without firing a shot. Perhaps it seemed to him that recognising the two breakaway territories of Luhansk and Donetsk was a clever move: he had not, after all, ignored the warning that — in Boris Johnson’s phrase — one Russian soldier putting a toe-cap over the border would make sanctions inevitable. But sanctions will come anyway — the issue is only about how severe they will be — imposed because, as Johnson says, there has been a clear breach of international law.

My first visit to Ukraine was in 1994. We drove to a village about three hours south of Kiev. The landscape was flat, fields of wheat stretching out in all directions. You could see why Ukraine had been called ‘the breadbasket of the Soviet Union’. An old man in a flat cap waved us over at the entrance to the village. He knelt down to scoop up a handful of the rich soil. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘the black earth of Ukraine’. He spoke about the artificial famine that Stalin had created in Ukraine in the 1930s, the Holodomor. He remembered armed men coming to the village to seize all the grain. The black earth had been a curse as much as a blessing. At dinner that night, there were many rounds of vodka and a main dish of roast potatoes layered with pork fat.

Shukria Abdul Wahid has nine children, two boys and seven girls. All they had to eat yesterday, she says, were two small pieces of stale flatbread — for the whole family. She and her husband went without. They couldn’t even have tea to quieten their own hunger pangs. The gas bottle used to boil water ran out long ago and there is no money for another one. She tells me it is unbearable having to say ‘no’ to her children all day when she doesn’t have a scrap of food to give them. ‘They are very little. They do not understand the situation, they do not know what’s happening in Afghanistan,’ she says. ‘So they just keep begging — “Give us something to eat. We are hungry” — and they won’t stop crying.