IN HIS review of Julia Nemirovskaya (ed) Disbelief: 100 Russian Anti-War Poems (Star January 7) my old friend John Green raises some interesting questions about poetry and modern warfare.

First, he suggests that it is a weakness that none of the poets in the book are uniformed combatants in this war. But modern war is not primarily fought between professional soldiers. It is waged against civilians. It is fought on our TV screens, in books and through the debasement of language. Homer was not a soldier. Tolstoy was not born when the battle of Borodino (about which he wrote so memorably in War and Peace) took place. The two greatest writers of the Great Patriotic War — Ilya Ehrenburg and Vasily Grossman — saw active service as journalists, not as soldiers.

Second, John points out that several of the contributors to the collection are exiles. Six months ago, many more still lived in Russia (their work was going to be published in the book anonymously), but they have now left the country. As with the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and Palestine — the pain of involuntary exile is central to the experience of this war.

Which is why arguing that some of the poems in the book are Russophobic is like arguing that the poems in Brecht’s Kriegsfibel are anti-German. So many of these poets were moved to write precisely because of their love of Russia and their continuing pride in the achievements of their grandparents’ generation during the Great Patriotic War. As Tatiana Voltskaya puts it, the current “Unholy war / Has tarnished grandad’s medals.”

The only poem that John quotes as evidence of the book’s Russophobia (Olga Andreeva’s Listen up, baby) simply takes characters from well-loved Russian folk-tales — Lazy Ivan, Vasilisa the Fair, the Firebird, Ruslan and Ludmilla — to warn children that happy endings happen more often in books than in real life: “The Learned Cat will yank his chain, / The old blue sea will sigh and wane, / Powerless against the shore / Where the world is sick with war.”

The poets in Disbelief are all “sick with war.” They share a horror, disbelief, shame and helpless anger that anyone should try to resolve political disputes by war in the 21st century. To assert, as John does, that they do not understand the politics of the war, implies that there is something to understand. Whatever arguments there may be about Nato expansion and Ukrainian nationalism, there can be no justification for this war.

Disbelief seems to me to be one of the great collective anti-war statements of our time. Although it is specifically about the Russian war in Ukraine, it is of course also about all this century’s stupid wars — the civilian deaths, the refugees, the dishonest justifications and the absurd propaganda. As Yulia Fridman writes:

“When we had liberated Ukraine from the Nazis, / Poland from Martians, Finland from dog-headed men … We were compelled to raze Estonia from the map, since the ichthyosaurs took over step by step … In Latvia too, we destroyed all signs of life, we had no choice — the West forced our hand! Now all nations are free, they write us from Eden … and Moscow extends from horizon to distant horizon, / from sandstorm to sandstorm in the new global desert.”