It is not the most pressing question to emerge from Russia’s onslaught on Ukraine, but I have nonetheless found myself wondering – what will happen with the word ‘erasure’ following this war? Ukraine’s heroic president Volodymyr Zelensky used the e-word last week. Russia, he said, is out to ‘erase our history’. The Putin regime and its marauding forces want to ‘erase our country, erase us all’, Zelensky cried, aptly, given the vigour and bigotry with which Putin has mocked and violently undermined Ukrainian sovereignty. Putin clearly sees Ukraine as a joke nation that can casually be erased from the map.
