Your Excellency, Mr Andrey Lopukov,

In Malta you represent your country, Russia, in place of your President, Mr Vladimir Putin. I am hoping that for the last fortnight you have been receiving calls morning, afternoon and evening from our President George Vella and from our Prime Minister Robert Abela to tell you exactly what the Maltese people think of the very person you are representing.

In case it is still not very clear to you, let me spell it out. Your president is an abhorrent, despicable, evil man whose aim clearly is to emulate those other evil psychopaths in power before him, namely Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin.

Mr Ambassador, I cannot understand how you can go to sleep at night after your president has given orders to bomb innocent Ukrainian civilians as they are trying to crawl out of their villages for safe cover. How can you go by your day knowing that your president has instructed snipers to shoot children as they pass by them? How can you look at your president smirking at television cameras, knowing that he’s shelling maternity and children’s hospitals?

What would you do Mr Ambassador, if your own children were being born in a world which immediately crashes on top of them and your minutes-old babies are buried under the rubble? And what is your view on the Russian army’s extreme use of violence against civilians? Have you read the reports of tanks deliberately ramming into houses, of mock-executions, of people taken as hostages, of sexual violence? Do you realise that your president is creating monsters out of his own people? Do you ask yourself what is the point of all this?

Are you, like me, watching the news at the edge of the sofa and asking yourself what you would have done in the place of innocent Ukrainian families? Each time you sit down for dinner with your family does it cross your mind that, up to a fortnight ago, those same Ukrainian families were, like you, sitting at their own tables talking about school, work,  holidays and now, because of your president, all they have is a measly suitcase and stitches and wounds?

Are you watching journalists and photojournalists trying to relay the wreckage, the massacre, the pain and the suffering of the country under attack? Many of them have been covering conflict around the world for decades but they are all writing the same thing: that they can’t believe this act of uprooting and wiping away of humanity is happening in 2022, that what they are witnessing is hell on earth.

Have you seen the images of the mother bent double over the body of her lifeless teenage daughter, the same age as mine? Or the one of the father rushing into a hospital with a dead toddler, the age of my nephew, in his arms? Or the photo of a middle-aged man and his bicycle sprawled on a bridge after he was shot dead by Russian snipers while cycling out of hiding to try and get some supplies? Or the image of a wounded pregnant woman, heavily in labour, being carried out on a stretcher as your army bombs the hospital? 

Are you okay with your president’s threats of nuclear bombing? Or are you yourself brainwashed too?- Kristina Chetcuti

Are you, like me, despairing and trying but failing to make any sense of this? Or do you believe what your president’s propaganda is telling your own people in viral video clips – that these are nothing but Ukrainians staging blooded scenes by recruiting ‘crisis actors’?

Surely, you are aware that your president’s strategy has always been disinformation? Some Russian citizens have only access to state television propaganda, so they only get to watch manipulated fake news but you, on the other hand, are based here in Malta and you have access to all the world’s media.

In your daily report back to base do you tell your counterparts in Russia that they should not be jailing people who dare to speak out against this war?

Are you okay with your president’s threats of nuclear bombing? Or are you yourself brainwashed too? Do you want to see another Chernobyl? Are you conscious that your barbaric, unscrupulous president is trying to justify future chemical or biological attacks by citing fictional ploys against him? You should be aware because your president used the same false justifications for brutal bombings in Syria. It’s his pattern and you are tacit to it.

What sort of world does your government want to occupy? A world bombed, destroyed, burnt and crippled with warfare-induced illness? What is the point?

Don’t you, Mr Lopukov, admire the resilience of the Ukrainians? They are stepping out to protest even in areas now under your Russian control and their determination knows no bounds: one elderly Ukrainian woman smashed one of your costly drones with a jar of fermented tomatoes, others bravely walk in front of your armed Russian soldiers bearing their blue and yellow flags.  

Mr Ambassador, your president is a barbaric sadist. The world needs to rid of him now and there is no one better placed than those representing him to tell him that. He needs to know that, in the end, beauty always triumphs over the ugliness of evil.

Watch that Ukrainian refugee playing the piano passionately, beautifully at a train station on one of the borders, or the 11-year-old boy who walked all the way to Slovakia by himself and was taken care of by strangers along the way, or the war volunteer couple who got married on the front to cheers of their fellow warriors.

If the president and the prime minister of Malta have not already told you all this, now you know.

Your Excellency, make sure that you relay all this back to your president and,  on my behalf, tell him to f*** off now.