Sandra Chapman: What can we learn from war in Ukraine?

When this ghastly war started I failed to understand why the US, UK, Europe and NATO couldn’t put a stop to it.

Himself, also a newspaper man during his career, who is very good on politics and who saw this newspaper through the darkest days of the Troubles, attempted to put me right.

We have had long debates about the whole thing, I now understand why the big four cannot intervene by sending troops to the stricken country even if they wanted to. But maybe I’m looking at it from the woman’s point of view – if something isn’t right, change it.

Putin, it is said, holds the one card that frightens the rest of the world and no, we don’t want to do anything that would send this lunatic into a red mist, enough to see him ordering up the nuclear weaponry. There are all sorts of reasons why we have to hold back and hope the brave Ukrainian soldiers win the day. But I’m not optimistic. Meanwhile, husbands, fathers, sons, nephews and uncles fight on not knowing when they will see their womenfolk and the children again, if ever.

Our Troubles here – I remember them even as a child – got worse as I got older. The IRA had no scruples even in the early days. So it doesn’t surprise me that over 6,000 people in Northern Ireland ‘have opened doors to refugees of the Ukraine war’. Ours has been a different war, but war it was when even the unborn died. Every innocent life lost here meant a home with an empty seat and family left to pick up the pieces.

It may even be worse for the Ukrainian people when, and if, Putin is defeated. The people will be returning to a country devastated by this awful war. Who will rebuild what has been lost and when will restoration begin? This is no ordinary disaster. Whole families may never be re-joined again.

Putin has a lot to answer for so why couldn’t rules of non-engagement adopted by the big four mentioned earlier not have been set aside? Himself had lots of answers for me on that one. But surely rules can be changed when there is justification? There could well be another Putin in the making somewhere else. We don’t appear to be prepared for any such eventuality and we should be.

My late father-in-law – an Englishman - fought with the Middlesex Regiment during the Second World War. Often he didn’t want to talk about the horrors of it all. But each Remembrance Sunday he donned his medals, wore his poppy with pride and went to the local church service. Sometimes we went with him. Hitler was mad and bad and eventually defeated but my father-in-law never expressed hatred. His generation had lived through the First World War. He always said it takes just one man to be mad and bad enough to start one and he has been proved right.

When the IRA tried to bomb Belfast into oblivion in the 1970s his offices in the city were badly damaged. He never expressed hatred but I imagine he would have been more vocal about Putin, the ogre who spares no one in his war not even children and babies.

Southern Ireland, according to Fine Gael’s European Affairs spokesman Neale Richmond, says it is ‘responding to changing public opinion in the face of Putin’s war machine’ and `could join Nato in the long term’. Surely wishful thinking. I doubt if NATO even knows where Ireland is on the map.