Rhodes on killing civilians, speaking the truth and the knock on the door as a weapon of terror

Am I missing something? At a time when Putin's army is lobbing cruise missiles and cluster bombs into cities, the biggest headlines are reserved for Joe Biden's suggestion that Putin must go.

Some of President Biden's behaviour can best be described as odd; the sudden embracing of strangers, the long, drawn-out handshakes with US soldiers, the repeated losing of threads in his speeches. But when he suggests that Putin should be removed from office, Biden is talking the plain, honest truth. Putin's Russia is not a normal country but a so-called kleptocracy, driven by theft and corruption. Putin, by any reasonable yardstick, is a war criminal. How does such a state, led by such a person, ever seek readmission to the civilised world?

The wickedness goes on. Reports of Ukrainian civilians being abducted and spirited away by Russian soldiers are entirely par for the Kremlin course.

In 1990 I interviewed a woman called Henryka who, 50 years earlier, as a 12-year-old living with her family in Russian-occupied Poland, heard a knock on their farmhouse door. Two Russian soldiers told them to pack their bags. “I can still smell them,” she recalled, “the smell of the tar they used to blacken their boots. Everywhere in our village was the same. Mother was so brave. We were so shocked, terrified and cold that we didn't really think what was happening. We were just dazed.”

They were among two million Poles deported to northern Russia in 1940. She, her mother and older brother were slave labourers, felling trees and chopping logs for the Soviet war effort. They endured slavery for about 18 months until Nazi Germany invaded Russia. Then, the Poles were granted amnesty and Henryka's family spent six years in Iran and Uganda before Mother returned to Poland and Henryka chose to settle in England.

Half a century on, she recalled a time when individual rights counted for nothing and half of Europe lived in dread of that knock at the door. By the time we met in 1990 we all assumed such a travesty could never happen again in our continent. But then nobody had heard of Vladimir Putin, or a place called Mariupol.

The knock on the door is once again a weapon of terror for a Russian army. Stalin would be so proud of Putin.