'MR TRUMP, WAKE UP! UKRAINIANS ARE THE VICTIMS'

IT started out like most others these days in the Ukrainian capital - air raid sirens at around 11pm followed by a few distant explosions.

- John Marone

But the hollow booms of anti-aircraft missiles got louder, the bright white flashes on the dark horizon more frequent and the buzz of drones like a swarm of giant mechanical insects much closer. My daughter and I had our usual Saturday outing, consisting of an afternoon at a shopping mall recreation centre where they don’t close during missile warnings, and some sunshine in our local park. It’s simple fun in a city that now often appears bland until the Russians attack.

We turned in for the night, as curfew starts at midnight and the English-language Mass at our church begins early.

I'd arranged her bed away from the window to protect against the falling fiery debris of shot-down drones, which have taken the lives of so many Ukrainian children no different than my own as they slumbered seemingly secure in their family flats.

On this night, the night before Donald Trump's so-called peace talks with Ukraine were to restart in distant Saudi Arabia, we felt anything but secure in our beds.

Blast after blast broke the nocturnal silence some as distant echoes, others so close that the window glass of my flat shuddered in its frames.

White flashes of light accompanied the louder explosions, giving me a perhaps unreasonable sense of hope that one of the Iranian-made Shahed drones had been eliminated as a source of danger.