These days, my morning routine is dictated by events in Ukraine.

My wife, Yulia, is Russian by birth and by passport, but she’s part Ukrainian and has a Ukrainian last name. She has family there — aunts, uncles and cousins, mostly in Odessa. We were married there in the autumn of 2008, and we both have fond memories of this beautiful old port city with its faded architectural glory.

Not to mention the generosity of its citizens. We had planned a very simple wedding: a ceremony on a beach, dinner at a restaurant afterward. But then we met a man who owned a lovely small hotel and restaurant on the water, and after a couple of days hanging out with him, he suddenly announced that he wanted to throw the wedding at his place, and entirely at his expense.

And he did: a complete stranger who we’d known for all of four days closed the restaurant for us and served a four-course meal with unlimited wine and — of course — vodka for the 30-odd people in our wedding party. He also put up my wife and me in the best suite in the hotel. It’s little wonder we love Odessa and Ukraine.

We also have a close friend named Olga, a scientist like us, who was living and working in Moscow but who is Ukrainian. She caught one of the last trains into Ukraine before the invasion, in order to be with her elderly mother. Until a couple of days ago they were in her hometown of Kharkiv, the country’s second-largest city, and currently the focus of one of the most brutal assaults by the Russian army. They just made the dangerous journey to another city which is safer… for now.

Every morning I wake up, make coffee, and brace myself as I turn on the computer. I pull up the BBC’s website to see what new horrors have occurred while I was safely asleep on this peaceful island thousands of miles from the nightmare currently unfolding in Ukraine. Then I check in with Olga, terrified that she might suddenly have gone silent overnight.

We share news, rumors, and greetings from mutual friends who know I’m in contact with her. We even exchange some grim humor; this morning I sent her a tweet about a woman in Kyiv who took down a Russian drone from her balcony by hitting it with a jar of pickled cucumbers.

The other day Olga said she realized, “I don’t react to the explosions and bombings unless they make the windows tremble.” Like others, she has adapted quickly to the realities of war. Other changes are subtle. Olga almost never swears — like most cultured women from Russia and Ukraine, she just doesn’t use those words (my wife has sworn a total of three times in the 20 years I’ve known her). But she’s been swearing a lot in the past few days.

In Odessa, Yulia’s relatives wait to see what the future holds as the Russian army closes in on this key port city on the Black Sea. She talks with her cousin Andrei, who has no option to leave because his aging parents — Yulia’s aunt and uncle — are housebound and incapable of going anywhere. They all hide in the bathroom when sirens go off. (Why the bathroom?” I asked Yulia. “No windows”).

Yulia’s own reaction to the invasion is shame and anger, and despair at the number of Russians who have bought into the government’s mendacious justifications for the war. This includes a couple of her university friends, who tell her that she’s been brainwashed by western media and that they’re celebrating the invasion.

They repeat ridiculous claims from Russian television about, for example, Ukrainians bombing their own apartment buildings and blaming it on Russians. Russian media is entirely state-controlled, and this week the Russian parliament passed a law mandating up to 15 years in jail for anyone “spreading false rumors about” the war.

So the government that is prosecuting this war completely controls the message on television, and yet many Russians somehow believe that the information they’re being fed is objective and trustworthy. There is the internet, of course — but to access alternative sources there, you have to be able to read English or some other language, which most Russians can’t.

If there is any truth to the claim that Russians have been discriminated against in parts of Ukraine, it is likely that much of that conflict can be traced to extremists on either side. Whatever the case, nothing justifies the invasion of an entire sovereign nation. One that — not surprisingly — looked to the north and didn’t like what it saw in Putin’s kleptocracy, and that would much rather be aligned with the prosperity and democracy of the West.

Of course, the United States, having invaded both Iraq and Afghanistan, has little room to hold the moral high ground. But one bad act never justifies another; and anyway, many of us protested both those wars — and we suffered little or not at all for that expression of free speech. That’s not the case in Russia.

Many Russians share Yulia’s view that this invasion is shameful, and many have courageously risked jail and personal ruin to protest it in recent days. It’s difficult for us to imagine living under a regime that locks up or even kills those who dare to express dissent, but that’s the reality for Russians today — a reality that Putin clearly seeks to impose upon Ukraine.

A few days ago, Yulia took the Russian flag that we own and painted something on the white stripe… let’s just say it was an instruction to Vladimir Putin to do something biologically impossible to himself. The desecrated Russian flag now flies under the Ukrainian trident, which vexillologists will recognize as an insult, a sign of inferiority and submission. I sent the photo of the two flags to Olga, who replied “Perfect!” and forwarded it to her friends.

Now in my seventh decade, I grew up at a time when the Second World War was still very much a raw memory; my parents lived through the Blitz in London, and my childhood was full of stories of their experiences in that greatest of global conflicts. Despite the Cold War that followed, and various localized international crises, we in the West have been fortunate to enjoy a period of relative peace and prosperity for many decades now. But this war is, without doubt, the biggest crisis of my lifetime, threatening as it does to spill over into Europe and even to the world at large.

Understandably, the West is too terrified of the possibility of nuclear war to take on Russia directly. The major question now, of course, is whether Vladimir Putin is sufficiently insane to exercise that option even if it meant — as it would — mutually assured destruction. I asked our friend Olga how she thought this would end, and her answer was the typically concise summary of a scientist: “1) Someone kills Putin, 2) the button won’t work when pressed, 3) everything goes to hell.”

Olga is one of the kindest and most compassionate human beings I’ve ever known. She’s smart and cultured, she laughs easily, and she would unhesitatingly help anyone who was in trouble. So for me, this woman, this friend, is the face of the Ukraine war.

But there could be countless others. Here’s one more.

Like everyone else’s computer desktop, mine is host to a variety of background images that vary according to mood and whim. Mine has seen sunsets, mountains, our dog in various states of cuteness, and once in a while an artistic image from one of my wife’s occasional modeling gigs. But right now the desktop background is a photo of a 10-year-old girl.

She’s very pretty, with dark eyes and light brown hair that’s streaked with pink. The girl’s name is Polina. Or rather, was Polina. She died last week when Russian soldiers fired into the car in which she was riding together with her family, attempting to escape Kyiv; her parents were also killed together with her younger brother. Polina had the sad distinction of being one of the first recorded child casualties of this war.

In the photo, she’s holding her hands out to show something which I can’t identify because the image is cut off at the bottom. She’s smiling, her face the epitome of innocence, of youth, and of potential. But now her future has been buried along with her small body.

My wife Yulia grew up in the Soviet Union, and so she understands the Soviet mentality well. To her, there is no doubt that Vladimir Putin does indeed want to restore the glory of the former USSR, and have that as his legacy years from now; and no amount of carnage, no number of murdered children, is going to stop him from pursuing that goal.

Polina was one of his first victims. But before this is over, innumerable other children and their families will have been robbed of their lives and their futures, and all because of an aging despot and his fevered dreams of empire.

Phil Clapham is a retired whale biologist who lives on Maury Island. He is a frequent contributor to The Beachcomber.