EDITOR’S PERSPECTIVE: Dmitri won’t be cheering Chelsea

HE was a happy man. One who had maybe struggled due to circumstances beyond his control, but was okay. That was then though, this is now. Things will have changed for Dmitri.

Dmitri was from the Ukraine, you see. He had moved to St Petersburg to be with the love of his life. They had just had a baby. He proudly showed us the picture.

He had asked if we liked vodka. Not the stuff we get over here. Proper vodka. Skilfully prepared and flavoured. If I didn’t like it before I certainly did after I’d sampled a few of his creations.

We had happened upon the restaurant in which he worked while wandering the streets just a few yards from the Hermitage in Palace Square.

We were met by Dmitri — “call me Dimi,” he said — who introduced himself, went off to see the chef when I informed him I was vegetarian, came back with recommendations, told us all about his life and served up several different vodkas — I remember the honey and black pepper being particularly nice. Several others followed and I remember them less. What I do recall is his genuine pride in what he was doing, his care for us as customers and his obvious love of his family and his new life in St Petersburg.

There had been problems before between Russia and the Ukraine — notably the former’s 2014 seizure of the latter’s Crimea peninsula — and he talked about those, but he surely couldn’t have foreseen what is going on now.

The best-laid plans in life can be suddenly ripped to pieces — an accident, a fire, flood, perhaps — but this wouldn’t have been on his radar.

Where is he now? What is he doing? Are his family okay? Is he at war? Is he even alive? I doubt I will ever know the answers to any of those questions, but he’s almost definitely not serving up vodkas made with love to foreign customers in a restaurant in the centre of St Petersburg.

War always hits the poorest the hardest. They’re the ones left without homes, with families ripped apart, no money, food or water, all hopes, dreams and ambitions gone, desperately clinging on to the only part of faith, hope and charity that can truly help them now.

Meanwhile, in a parallel universe Oscar nominees receive goodie bags containing over $200,000 worth of gifts just for turning up at ceremonies and ask people to give what they can to the Ukraine cause,  multi-millionaires use experts to shift cash to avoid paying tax, and apologists for Chelsea FC, whose players, supporters and owners have long been a byword for immorality, plead for their club’s survival and attempt to shift the blame elsewhere. Like their owner isn’t part of Dmitri’s problems. The problems of  hundreds of thousands like him who have had their lives ripped apart.

Chelsea, their replica shirts worn by hundreds of thousands, a mirror of the corruption of a world turned upside down beamed into our living rooms every week.

Dmitri? He probably doesn’t have a living room now and if he does I doubt he’ll be chanting the name of Roman Abramovich and Chelsea FC.

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