Your emotion is palpable through your writing, as is your sadness and difficulty in dealing with the conflict between a peace loving and caring psyche and the uninvited impulse to 'hate' the Russian soldiers who invade your homeland - something that is contrary to your very being for you recognise that, as are your own soldiers, they are just pawns and victims, as are all who have to endure and suffer war.

It is perhaps easy for me, in Australia on the other side of the World, to say but I don't believe that there are any "shoulds" that can legitimately apply to your situation. Indeed, I feel it to be extremely important that you are gentle upon yourself.

There is little I can offer in practical help beyond moral support and voicing my concerns on social media and elsewhere and giving what little I can to help with humanitarian efforts.

I am 75 years old now and grew up playing on bombed-building sites in England in the early 1950's - the result of German bombing in WWII. Seeing the images of the devastation of Ukrainian cities reminds me of the broken, open-sided buildings in my town, with furniture still in place and the clear sense that one was viewing someone's home and doing so almost like a voyeur because it seemed so wrong.

So, I haven't endured the direct reality that now encompasses you and your fellow Ukrainians. However, I do empathise with the hurt, the pain, the bewilderment, the sense of loss, the questions that afflict you all.

I am not alone. There are millions that empathise and wish to do what they can but as do I, many of them, I'm sure, feel that they too are only pawns in a horror and atrocity that is caused not by ordinary Russians or Ukrainians but by demagogues, dictators and conscienceless egotists who somehow so often obtain positions of power which they then use totally for their own benefit. They do not care who they hurt, maim or kill. They speak of patriotism but betray it with every decision they make that harms the populations they are sworn to serve.

My one hope is that enough of the World population read and empathise with stories such as your own and refuse ever again to promote these apologies for human beings to positons from which they can wreak havoc and destruction.

I sincerely will that you and your loved ones, as well as all Ukrainians and Russian people who oppose the brutality and waste and horror of this invasion, come through it safely and have a decent future.

It is a terrible sadness that only through a horrendous invasion & arbitrary killing and destruction have most of us come to see what has been developing in your part of the World.

I hope that we never forget. I also hope that all freedom loving people take action to stop it getting worse and ensure that Russian forces retreat and that Putin is called to account.

I can't pray for you because I can have no belief in any 'God' who would allow such atrocities to occur. However, I will think of you and, along with many others even as far away as we are in Australia, do whatever I can to see that your plight is not ignored or forgotten.

Take care and be safe.