NAFO doomposting hours

Following Russia's invasion, I got caught up in the same waves of emotion that washed over most western publics, and I say that with no regret. After relentlessly battling the prevailing cultural winds these past few years, I was relieved to feel a sense of solidarity for once. Most of us were revulsed by the gratuitous aggression, allied with an underdog whose bite proved surprisingly fierce, thrilled by a former comedian's unexpected rise to his nation's occasion and consumed by a weirdly addictive loathing for Vladimir Putin. Kyiv's repelling Russia's clumsy invasion of the capital was exhilarating. Like so many of you, in those early months I read about Ukraine every day.

I don't any more. I bet most of you don't either. Why, as grotesque as 7 October was, I sensed in our collective pivot to the Middle East this autumn an odd undercurrent of gladness that now we could plunge up to the neck into a different story.

I'm no foreign policy wonk but I do know something about stories, and observers of international news constitute an audience, a readership. From the off, this story had a spectacular opening chapter, a classic hero – personified by Volodymyr Zelensky, but more crucially the Ukrainian people – and as wicked a villain as Shakespeare could have contrived. To begin with, too, our tale was punctuated by riveting dramatic events: the outrageous slaughter of civilians in Bucha; the triumphant sinking in the Black Sea of Russia's grand warship the Moskva; the gratifying liberation of Kharkiv, as the once-intimidating Russian army beat a humiliating retreat; the sly and, for Putin, infuriating bombing of his fancy bridge to Crimea.

For us observers, this is supposed to be a David and Goliath story. But David and Goliath is a crap story if the giant wins. The big bloke pummels the little bloke? Predictable, a bit disheartening and not really a story at all, just the way the world works. Besides, a western audience wants to see the good guy win, both to mete out justice and to enjoy victory by proxy. Sophisticated literature often resolves with more complexity – with bitterness, irony or tragedy – but that's one reason literary fiction is less popular than the commercial kind. Most people prefer happy endings. Any bestselling thriller writer would subject the Ukrainians to plenty of nail-biting adversity, but Zelensky would finally triumph, reclaiming all his nation's occupied territory, including Crimea.

They're running out of young men, not because the young men won't serve but because they're dead. Ukrainian women are being sent to the front lines.

Shut it down a woman might die

Hundreds of thousands of men dying?

Sitting back and giving Ukrainians just enough weaponry to keep fighting to the last man and woman, only for the country to finally end up where we always knew it would, is not just immoral. It's murder.

Your leaders knew from the start