Piskaryovskoye

2 years, 4 months, 2 weeks and 5 days — the Siege of Leningrad, 1941-44 — claimed the lives of around 800,000 of the city's encircled inhabitants. 

When it was finally lifted on January 27, 1944 the Axis forces were driven back having themselves suffered losses in excess of 500,000. 

My visit to the Museum of the Great Patriotic War in 1984 and shortly afterwards to the Piskaryovskoye Cemetery with its vast array of mass graves just outside the city opened my young eyes to the scale of the suffering and devastation in this corner of WWII. It was a part of fairly recent history that I was then only vaguely up to speed with. 

That anything even remotely resembling this horror could be repeating itself now in Ukraine (a land which lost 3m to the Stalin-induced famine of the 30s and a further 8m to the subsequent war) is almost unfathomable, all the more so perhaps as Putin is a little beast from St Petersburg. 

People in Mariupol are said to be collecting snow for drinking water today. 

The suffering in this part of Europe apparently comes in cycles, each new one underpinned by, justified by, the previous.