The voice of the Ukrainian people needs to be heard

There is so much more outrage about what is going on in Gaza than what has been going on for two years in Ukraine. Th sovereign country of Ukraine is being obliterated day by day. But the main focus of the world is on what Israel is planning to do in the city of Rafah in southern Gaza. While concern about the increasing humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza is understandable, the Ukrainian people have been suffering for two years, they have lost their homes, their loved ones and wake every day to the sound of artillery fire and missile attacks. The television news broadcasts each night show towns that are just rubble and smashed buildings. Andrew Harding, one of the best of the BBC foreign correspondents reporting on the war last night interviewed a Ukrainian man standing in his destroyed home, where he still lives, who summed up what most Ukrainians must now be feeling. All he wanted now was "peace, peace", even if it meant giving up some of the country's territory to Russia. Most of the time wars are fought only at the strategic level; in other words, with the war in Ukraine, Putin wants to dominate his neighbour and intimdate them to surrender while Zelensky desperately wants to fight on to prevent defeat and in the background there is the western alliance which sees the war in Ukraine as a way of stopping Putin from marching into eastern Europe. But it's the Ukrainian people who have to suffer while the Big Bosses wage their battles on the global stage. The voice of the Ukrainian man who wants peace whatever the consequences, is drowned out.