Ukraine #5 - Penderyn Distillery chairman Nigel Short
Transcript
00:00So I'm sat here in a restaurant in Keefe, enjoying an excellent bottle of red from
00:09Odessa and reflecting on what has been quite a remarkable day, both of business
00:19and I suppose sightseeing and not a small amount of sadness. Walking past
00:27the memorials in various parts of the city and seeing the Ukrainians sort of
00:37paying their respects to the dead and there were literally thousands of
00:41photographs on church walls and in various squares. I'm just walking through
00:46Keefe and came across this sort of intersection and all that
00:55is to commemorate the dead warriors of Ukraine. So it's all very emotional really.
01:04One thing that just strikes me walking around the centre of Keefe is the
01:11absence of middle-aged men. I'd say 70% of people walking around are women,
01:19obviously some older men and younger men but it's just dark.
01:24You know if anyone thinks that the fact that it's been going on for two and a half years
01:29means it's stopped, they're kidding themselves. I mean these people are really,
01:33really fearless.
01:38Each flag has the name and the age.
01:46Only 24 years old was.
01:49It really does bring it home what's gone on out here.
01:53I've sent some pictures and video back to show that. But you could drive around
01:59the city and walk around the city and on the surface you could think everything
02:02was normal but it's not and there's a definitely a sort of a sadness in the
02:09air, a quiet resolution that they know they've got to win but they know
02:15there's going to be a lot of pain and death before that day comes.
02:19I talked about my reasons for coming and I think today I thought
02:26perspective was really important. You know in the UK we tie ourselves in knots
02:32sometimes arguing about things which in reality are they that important?
02:38Society tends to take very entrenched opinions at both sides of the spectrum
02:45not recognizing sometimes that some of these subjects are more
02:49complex and nuanced than we think and in three or four years is it
02:54really going to matter? Some of the Ukrainians I spoke to sort of hit on
03:01that and said look the day before the war we didn't believe this would happen.
03:05You know the Russians on the other side of the border, they
03:10weren't strangers, there's a lot of relatives back and forth, there was a
03:15lot of cultural interchange over many many years, a lot of family links and
03:20even to the day of the war they didn't believe it was going to happen but you
03:24know Helen said to me today the day before the invasion everything we
03:29thought was important disappeared the day after the invasion. I think we could
03:34we could learn a lesson from that and I certainly as a reason for me coming
03:39you know an unexpected reason perhaps I think perspective is so important for
03:45us to recognize we are so lucky in the UK so lucky in Wales we've never
03:50faced what these people are facing you know on our it's not just our doorstep
03:54it's on our land so you know I'm really looking forward to tomorrow again I'm
04:01hoping to go up to Butcher and sort of pay my respects yeah so I'll sign off
04:09for now and see you all tomorrow