Three years ago, I woke to the thunderous dawn sounds of missiles striking Kyiv. I found my colleague Kate on the balcony of our rented flat, smoking a cigarette as she listened to munitions hitting her home city. “Did you hear that?” she asked. “It’s started.”

Since then, I have spent many months reporting on the cities destroyed by Russian weapons, families ripped apart by war, refugees forced to flee occupied homes, ordinary people risking lives amid the horrors of the front line, and children stolen on orders of the Kremlin in its genocidal efforts to crush a nation.

This war really started eight years earlier with Russia’s theft of Crimea, another sad milestone of history I witnessed. Their decision to mount a full-scale attack failed due to the resilience and resistance of Ukraine’s people, symbolised by the President’s refusal to flee.

Moscow expected Ukraine to fold in days with their troops welcomed – and that any residual fighting for freedom would be abandoned quickly by their democratic allies. It has taken three years, huge financial cost and the spilling of obscene amounts of blood but finally – as Russia launches its biggest drone attack on Kyiv to mark this sordid anniversary – Vladimir Putin’s expectations of Western weakness are being borne out by the behaviour of a patsy United States president.

Donald Trump’s posturing over the most lethal war on European soil since the Second World War is both disturbing and a disgraceful betrayal of democracy.

He has handed armloads of diplomatic gifts to a war........

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