The Russian Invasion of Ukraine finally kicked off this week with the troops rolling in to capture Chernobyl, which seemed somewhat of an odd place to want to capture, it's like if the Chinese launched a war against Japan and their first strategic target was weird island with the thousands of cats living on it. Anyway I guess it made sense in a way because it's not like anyone in NATO wants to risk bombing them there, it's bad enough when a drone accidentally hits a school or hospital, let alone striking and restarting a nuclear meltdown. And besides, the Russian military emblem is a two headed eagle so perhaps the military were hoping to see one of those birds in the wild.

Anyway, the newspapers got to work quickly, especially the people who write pun-based headlines for the tabloids. They were 'Russian' to get the jokes 'Putin' to the banner headlines. As to the other papers, The Times and the Telegraph have had some wonderful maps and the Sunday supplements have some cracking goulash recipes. The BBC of course has an article about African American haircuts and whether school dress codes are institutionally racist and I'm imagining that the Sunday Sport has a special report on Ukrainian asylum seekers, although all of the girls featured will be 18 yer old blonde bombshells.

Unfortunately though in the real world it's real bombshells at play and the mayor of Kiev told residents to stay safe by going into the Subway although how a 12" sandwich is supposed to help during a war is anyone's guess. That's the wrong type of sub! And what should the west's reaction be? It's quite a moral dilemma, millions could die but then a protracted war could push up the price of petrol by 20p/litre. Sanctions are of course going into effect and it has been suggested that Russia should be cut out of the SWIFT global bank transaction system, crippling their economy for years. Another response has been to ban Russia from being allowed to compete in the Eurovision Song Contest this year, especially after rumours that Vladimir was planning up to sing either "Don't Stop Me Now" or Boom-Bang-A-Bang. It's also been decided that the Champions League Final will not go ahead in St Petersburg as planned although we're all in trouble if they choose to play the match in the Sudetenland. There's also talk of removing access to western internet services like Amazon or Netflix (or as as it's called in Russia, "Njetflix") or possibly Twitter where as of the time of writing Vladimir Putin is still a free member. Steve Bannon and Donald Trump of course got banned from Twitter for being bad people but Vladimir Putin is literally trying to launch a 3rd world war and yet that's apparently ok. Talk about a war of words eh?