I live near the centre of a large city in the UK. I suspect that we here are more likely to be a target if there is a nuclear exchange than people close to Ukraine or Russia.

However, I also think that a nuclear exchange is still very unlikely. Putin is also suggesting talks on the Belarus/Ukraine border.

I'm hoping for/dreading one of those cold war fudges we had back in the bad old days. Some horse trading, perhaps a partition of the Ukraine with attendant population sorting and so on. Negotiations about force reductions and all of that.

It took the US/Alliance army of 180 000 plus air cover a month to render the conscript Iraq army non-operational and to gain some tenuous control of Iraq (or at least the major cities) in 2003. Putin must have had a time-scale of weeks in mind for this operation.

I shall be disconnecting from wall to wall news coverage next week as I do have anxiety issues sometimes. At the end of the day none of us here can do much.