Last night I watched the International Space Station fly over. Its orbit had taken it over South America, crossing the Equator, and the Atlantic to overfly the West of England, seemingly directly over where I stood, watching, the Sun’s bright reflection outshining all the stars visible on so clear a night.

Aboard ISS are both American and Russian space people able to look down as they tracked over Europe until to the West Country eye the reflection of the Sun’s light faded as the ISS overflew Poland. On they passed over the lethal skies of the sovereign state of Ukraine, the land laid waste over the past four weeks by the vile hand of the Russian dictator Putin, outdoing the C20th excesses of Stalin. As they look down from their height above the world’s skies, do the space people debate or only stare and weep?

ISS’s track flew on to cross India where political self-interest has failed to condemn the awful excess of Russian war-mongering. In Ukraine this last week a ninety-five-year-old survivor of the Buchenwald WW2 concentration camp was shot dead. Golda Meir, the fourth Prime Minister of Israel was born in Kyiv, the city that was long established when Moscow was little more than a village.

The year 2022 will forever be in the books of history as a notorious and unforgivable year.