It feels like a death in the family, Hannes Dressler said at the Rotary Club of Johannesburg New Dawn meeting this week in his talk about his personal perspective on the war in theUkraine.
War? What war? Who said anything about a war? That, he warned, is what life in Moscow is like at the moment. Any mention of a "war" in the Ukraine could land you up in jail for 15 years. Tell that to Cyril, seemingly as inure to the reality as Russia is.
Hannes met his wife, Katya, during his seven years in Moscow prior to coming to South Africa and says their two children are half German, half Russian.
"We're in shock, in denial, we can't believe it actually happened," he said. Rationally you realise that things will never be the same again, but you know that there is no way back.
His colleagues at SAP are still being paid, but there are no more sales and they have nothing to do.
Katya's mother is still in Moscow and they're doing everything they can to get her out. Although she initially resisted, Hannes said, she now says she feels like she's surrounded by zombies. Russians have now started blaming the West for their hardships and that Putin was right to protect them.
Despite the invasion of Crimea in 2014, few people anticipated the invasion of the Ukraine, Hannes said. No bullets were fired there and the anticipation was that the same would happen in Eastern Ukraine in the Donbas region which is already heavily under Russian influence.
In geopolitical terms it serves America's interest to have a slightly weakened Western Europe, and the unity which Nato and the EU has displayed in confronting Putin has caught the world by surprise.
Up until very recently citizens had a very good life in places like Moscow and could walk the streets, cycle and move about freely ... as long as you didn't talk about or think about politics too much.
The accusation that Ukraine was supposed to be a neutral buffer between the West and Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union and that it was nevertheless in talks to join Nato, doesn't in any way justify the invasion, he said.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has underestimated the reaction to his invasion, Hannes said. Europe stood firm, all the big corporations pulled out of Russia almost immediately and about 3.8 million people have fled from Ukraine. Putin is under pressure, because if he loses, it'll be his end.
Although the Ukrainian troops are outnumbered, the Russian soldiers taking part in the invasion are poorly equipped and meeting stiff resistance.
"It's scary that Putin still has access to the black box with the red buttons and the West will have to intervene if there is a mass slaughter using chemical weapons."
President Volodymyr Zelensky, a former stand-up comic and TV actor, is proving to be an inspirational leader and rallying his troops by not fleeing the country.
People still live in hope that the hardships the Russians are facing will lead to an uprising against Putin.
He said South Africa will eventually choose trade with the West over support for Russia.
It was a lively meeting with a few notable visitors, amongst them honorary member Carin Holmes, who's now living and working in Zambia where she says she's been quite lonely.
Although Christoph Plate was not a visitor, it was the first time we've seen him in Parkview in quite a while and of course honorary member Nick Bell was there as well, almost but not quite singing the Rolling Stones song The Last Time, as he and wife Hillary return to the UK next Wednesday which means we won't be seeing him in person for a while.
Nick was the speaker at the previous meeting, talking about his experience in the Anglican Church and Rotary.
Nick said he'd been a minister in three churches and a Rotarian in three clubs and found many commonalities in running a church and being in a Rotary club.
He told the club he had grown up in Oxford in a working class family (his father worked in the Morris car manufacturing factory), but with access to a privileged education.
His plans to become a vet (he studied Zoology at Durham University) were sidelined after he went to meet the England cricketer and anti-apartheid campaigner David Sheppard in 1968 in the East End of London to gain work experience. Sheppard had gone off to Downing Street to oppose the MCC tour of South Africa in 1970, which was eventually called off because of the apartheid government's refusal to allow the coloured cricketer Basil D'oliveira to tour.
He trained in Nottingham and served his first ministry in the working class area of Oldham in Lancaster, before going to Bricket Wood in Hertfordshire and then to Luton, a car manufacturing city, for 14 years.
Nick says he started out with one black person in his congregation (who eventually left!) in an area with a 30% minority population.
By the time they left, they had a fully multicultural congregation and a Shona speaking priest.
The Vicar of St Mary's in Luton traditionally became a Rotarian and so he came to Rotary in 1990, joining the Rotary Club of Luton. When he and Hillary retired to the seaside town of Sheringham in Norfolk, he joined the Rotary Club of Holt (average age 77) where he is also chaplain to the Holt Rugby Club.
As in the ministry, networks and partnerships drive Rotary, he said. He cited a project he had tackled with the vice-chancellor of the University of Luton, a committed Christian who was also the manager of the Luton Mall, where they set up a Christmas tree in the mall and got people to write prayers on a piece of paper and stick it to the tree. It became known as the Christmas Prayer Tree.
Instead of the E.M. Forster jibe of "poor little talkative Christianity" he prefers the philosophy of "random acts of kindness and senseless acts of beauty" of the American author Anne Herbert. In Luton they started feeding people and would organise an annual braai in the middle of the town to feed people, where different people from all over produced different kinds of food.
In his new club the emphasis is for obvious reasons more on dementia, which is overtaking cancer as the main cause of death, yet for every £1 spent on dementia, £7 is spent on cancer.
Partnerships, practical help and purpose form the cornerstone of both Rotary and the Church, he said.
A perfect example of this is surely the partnership (with a purpose) of New Dawn with Woodside Sanctuary and the 5 Cees to treat them with Easter eggs and other goodies at Easter time. Judy Symons has been spearheading this drive for many years and every year it has brought joy to many people, obviously the main purpose.
Please bring Easter Eggs and any kind of toiletries for goodie bags to the next meeting or make a donation either in cash to Judy or myself or via the club bank account (FNB 62217422609), which you must please reference with your name and EASTER.
Next Week: Remember, there is no meeting next Wednesday morning, but a pizza evening at Parkview Golf Club on Thursday, starting at 6pm. They'll only fire up the pizza oven if enough people attend, so bring yourself, your family and friends along for an evening of fun and fellowship.
A Thought for the Week (in a world of colourless politicians): Meeting Franklin Roosevelt was like opening your first bottle of champagne, knowing him was like drinking it. - Winston Churchill (1874 – 1965)
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