A CHARITY worker who has spent years bringing Ukrainian children to Southampton has told of her upset at seeing Russia invade.

Kathy Olsen an organiser at Chernobyl Children's Life Line Southampton, had brought thousands of children living in areas affected by the Chernobyl nuclear disaster to the area for respite and fun.

But now Kathy, 52, finds herself worried for the future of adults she met as children.

She said: "The future’s uncertain so its hard to imagine.

"We’re worried about our friends in Ukraine and Belarus.

"Our next group of children would have been from Ukraine but that doesn’t look possible."

She fears children she met - now adults - may now be left fighting Russian forces.

Kathy said: "I’m quite upset. No one over 16 is allowed to leave Ukraine, so they have to fight, you can’t imagine it.

"When you're 16, 17, 18, you're just a kid really.

"It makes you wonder how we'd deal with it in Britain."

It comes as a Southampton academic said Russian president Vladimir Putin clearly intends to install a pro-Russian regime.

Dr Kamil Zwolski is an Associate Professor in International Politics at the University of Southampton, and Jean Monnet Chair of European Security Governance.

He said: “There have been two narratives that have been prevailing for the past few years.

"One narrative is that the West has made a mistake, NATO shouldn’t have expanded and should have been disbanded with the Warsaw Pact and Russia should have been accommodated.

"NATO continued to expand even though Russia was promised it wouldn’t.

"That’s one narrative that Russia has been ignored and pushed around, which is both a popular narrative in Russia and with some Western security experts, and there is certainly some truth to this.

"The security system created for the Cold War was not disbanded at the end of the Cold War and continued to expand towards Russia.

“The other narrative is that Russia has been growing increasingly authoritarian because it hasn’t much experience with democracy and its historical grievances, with Putin declaring that the dissolution of the Soviet Union was the greatest tragedy of the 21st Century.

"This is what he meant, he wants to rebuild Russia’s past glory.

"Now it seems to me that this second narrative is becoming slightly more credible.

"Putin reassured everyone that the soldiers accumulating outside of Ukraine were just for military exercises, then broke that promise.

"He then said he was sending just peacekeepers to Donbass but then broke that promise. So it would seem there’s a broader geo-political agenda.

“I don’t think there’s any ambiguity that the primary objective of Russia is to take control of the capital of Ukraine, remove the current president and government and install a pro-Russian government.

"It wants to demilitarise Ukraine and force it to declare neutrality.

"These are minimum objectives however and it’s the question that is Ukraine all that Russia is interested in.

"These official statements from Russia might not even be good for 24 hours, let alone days and weeks. I think the best case scenario right now is to minimise Ukrainian casualties.”