In 1966, when I was 12, our family travelled by road across Europe during the summer school holidays. From London to Moscow to Rome and back: wreckage from World War II—barely two decades before—was everywhere. Bombed out buildings, destroyed bridges and roads. Ruined, abandoned farm buildings and factories. Everywhere. A hideous legacy across Europe, at a cost of millions of lives. I learnt the Cyrillic/Russian alphabet and basic vocabulary. One word I learnt, in the wake of World War II, was the word for Peace … a word I became familiar with across many years in Russian poster and graphic art. And in many other languages. Peace. МИР. It is the same word—and spelling—in both the Russian and the Ukraine languages. МИР. A word Vladimir Putin seems to have never learnt.