Every Child Killed Is Another Reason To Defy Putin's Tyranny

‘Abhorrent assaults on soft targets only increase the sense of outrage’

- Tim Newark

VLADIMIR Putin may dream of restoring a Russian empire, but his true legacy will be killing children such as 10-year-old Polina, shot alongside her Ukrainian parents by Russian soldiers as they fled to their family car.

Or the six-year-old girl whose bloodied mother was pictured outside an ambulance clutching the child’s pink hat, as a distraught doctor said “show this to Putin”.

Russia’s president likes to pose as a hard man, but his troops are increasingly bombing civilians in their desperation to speed up a faltering invasion. He likes to boast of his mighty army but they’ve made surprisingly slow progress in what was expected to be an overwhelmingly swift blitzkrieg.

Under the delusion they’d be seen as liberators by Russians in Ukraine, they’ve been shocked by the level of resistance from the Ukrainian army.

Let down by their own poor logistics, Russian tanks have run out of petrol and the invaders have been getting lost while Ukrainian drones pick them off.

Facing the humiliation of a botched invasion, this is when Putin is at his most dangerous.

He is no doubt ordering his generals to raise the level of bombardments on civilian targets to dent their morale.