An article in the UK's Daily Mail, marketing a new book on St Petersburg, shows the desperation of the mainstream media to continue to smear Putin as some kind of psychologically demented monster.

Now it's by reaching into his past and claiming that he failed to learn the lessons of the worst siege in history - the siege of Leningrad that his parents luckily managed to survive - and which many people in the West had not even heard about given that it was crowded out by our own WW2 'victim' narratives.

Anyone who's visited the mass graves at the Piskaryovskoye Memorial Cemetery in St Petersburg, as Putin has on numerous occasions, can't fail to be moved by the scale of it and the sheer number of mounds - mounds not marked with the names of the people in them but only the year they died in. 

This article is really scraping the barrel.

The Mail concludes its history lesson about Leningrad and Putin with:

We cannot make any assumptions about how his mental landscape of the world, and of war, was formed, although it is impossible not to wonder. 

Yes, we can certainly wonder.

Like most Russians today over a certain age, Putin was brought up on stories of the Great Patriotic War from parents or grandparents.

This war still means something to them, which is not surprising after your nation was invaded (unlike the UK or USA) and some 20+ million people killed, many in truly horrible ways at the hands of the Nazis and SS Einsatzgruppen. This is not something you forget easily.

There are still Brits alive who can remember the terror of being bombed in 'the Blitz'. Imagine if you had seen your neighbours being nailed to a barn door, machine-gunned into pits or herded into the village church by death squads and burned alive.

We must also remember that millions of his fellow St Petersburgers did not grow up to become despotic war-mongers. 

No they didn't, but then neither did Putin if you actually think about it.

The Mail may regard 'his' wars to secure the enormous and vulnerable borders of Russia and prevent Russia being surrounded by NATO and Sharia-law Islamic republics as 'war mongering'.

But they might think a little differently if they lived in the border regions of Russia today or indeed in the England (yes, the Daily Mail's England) of the past when successive English kings (and Cromwell) hammered the Irish, Scots and Welsh for much the same reasons: To secure their borders from the nationalist freedom fighters (cf Ukraine) of Ireland, Scotland and Wales, stop the invasion threats from France and Spain and to prevent the return of Catholicism.

Irish people still remember Cromwell, the Welsh Edward 1 (who hammered the Scots as well) and the Scots the disaster of Culloden and the Highland Clearances, all at the hands - they might say - of English 'war mongering'.

And those Irish, Scottish and Welsh memories persist after many centuries not just a few decades.

In fact, some later psychological studies found that siege survivors – called Blokadniki – had unusual levels of empathy.

Yes but who would their empathy be with today?

With the suffering of the people in Eastern Ukraine after the 2013 coup or the suffering of the people in Western Ukraine after the Russian invasion in 2022?

It's not a black or white question. But the MSM needs a pantomime villain for its readers to rally against and Putin fits the bill.

But the siege cemented an element of paranoia in Putin's understanding of the world and history. 

The puzzle remains: how could a man with such an intimate knowledge of what the First World War poet Wilfred Owen called 'the pity of war' go on to inflict such a nightmare upon so many women and little children in Ukraine?

Well.

Perhaps Putin's paranoic understanding of history includes:

Churchill, who endorsed the round-the-clock bombing by 'Bomber' Harris that incinerated hundreds of thousands of German women and children in WW2.

Or Truman, who endorsed the incineration and lingering death from radiation poisoning of hundreds of thousands of Japanese women and children with two atomic bombs.

Or the successive US administrations who endorsed the bombing and chemical destruction of hundreds of thousands of women and children in Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam.

Or for that matter the decimation of Native Americans via the punitive Indian Wars and the 'trail of tears', many of whose children now live in trailer parks in the Arizona desert.

I suppose the difference is that 'we' did these and for what 'we' considered, at the time, to be the best and most justifiable of reasons.

And if you want to talk about Wilfred Owen, few people in the past much cared about Owen's 'drawing-down of blinds' when it happened in Germany, Japan, South-East Asia or the tepees of the Plains Indians.

Anthem for Doomed Youth - Wilfred Owen