Collateral damage
Panic from Washington and its direct, negative impact on Ukraine, wisdom from Finland's president, tanks on TikTok, Austrian govt wavering on blocking NS2, a warning about Navalny's safety.
This afternoon I am thinking about Kyiv. After the White House dropped some Friday night bombs, warned Americans to “flee” Ukraine as soon as possible, and prominent Americans even went so far as to tweet out Russia’s supposed exact invasion plans for this weekend (madness), people in Ukraine are understandably pissed off, and I’m sure a few not so secret old billionaires in Moscow are having a chuckle. Moscow continues to play chess, while Washington is still screaming at its checkers board.
Yes, Russia has amassed an unprecedented amount of of military power near Ukraine’s borders. No doubt about it. But the west, particularly the US, is spreading panic, evacuating embassy staff, issuing warnings “Poland will let you in!” (when did Poland ever not let in Americans?), and this is having real repercussions on the ground in Ukraine now. So Russia got to fire shots without even firing them against Ukraine’s economy and government: Washington did the firing on Russia’s behalf.
Now insurers are not sure if they will continue to insure commercial flights flying over Ukrainian airspace. KLM was the first airline to say it would stop flights to Ukraine, others will surely follow. The Ukrainian authorities have been quick to say their airspace will remain open, but of course with all this anxiety commercial airlines won’t take on the risk, and air routes out of the country will essentially be shut this week.
And not a single shot has been fired. Yet.
Biden and Zelensky are due to speak by phone as I type this. It will be their first call this month. I sure hope Zelensky conveys to Biden in no uncertain terms the on the ground repercussions of the hysterics out of DC in Ukraine. There is an increasing sense of abandonment in Kyiv, as locals see foreigners pull out, look around and see calm, but then open the internet and see panic:
This weekend I’ve also been thinking about ancient history. As much as people like to argue this is about NATO expansion, hatred of the EU, regret over the Soviet Union falling apart, I think this whole personal grudge Putin has with Ukraine goes back, as crazy as it sounds, centuries. If Kyiv is really the birthplace of the Kievan Rus, and thereby the birthplace of the Russian people, then one isolated, powerful old man wants it for himself and for his legacy. A thread:
This weekend I also finally learned about to do timeframe searches (say, past 24 hours) on TikTok using key words in Russian. I was able to find for myself those tank and helicopter videos you see certain accounts sharing all day every day on Twitter. So, what did I learn?
First, there are trolls posting the same videos on multiple accounts and doing us the favor of adding dates and locations. That means the Kremlin wants the world to see these videos. Otherwise, they would have been deleted as quickly as the pro-Navalny protest videos got taken down last winter.
Second, there are of course real people posting videos of military equipment passing them on trains, highways, or flying over their heads. This has continued this weekend, and what surprised me was how much is on the move in central Russia, in areas nowhere near the Ukraine border. I will not be posting the videos myself because reporting troop movements is still a crime in Russia, and I don’t want to get any normal people in trouble. But many of them are shot in tiny villages and towns, by who appear to be very real people surprised to suddenly see a dozen military helicopters or airplanes flying overhead on a Saturday afternoon. There is plenty of propaganda to consume if you search in Russian using key words like “tank” “army” “war” “Russia” “Ukraine” etc. Also plenty of propaganda footage shot by Belarusian state media on the joint military exercises in Belarus currently underway.
The TikToks have been used by observers to put together maps of current estimated Russian military locations, and they are indeed very scary.
As the world tries to guess what exactly is inside Putin’s head (how crazy is that; he must be loving all the undivided attention), I really enjoyed this article on Finland’s president who is said to know Putin best. He notes that Putin “respects the one who is fighting back”. He has observed a change, and is worried about Ukraine:
I’m not entirely sure what is happening now is fighting back, per se. Scholz is due in Kyiv tomorrow and Moscow on Tuesday. Germany has been awfully quiet this weekend.
Austria’s economics minister Schramböck went on Sunday TV to say that OMV has invested too much money for Nord Stream 2 to be sacrificed (I paraphrase), so all clear where this is going, despite Schallenberg’s impressive show of visiting the frontlines in eastern Ukraine this past week. It was sadly rather predictable that five European companies who invested a collective €9.5 billion in Nord Stream 2 and central European countries highly dependent on Russian gas imports would be a road block to any NS2 sanctions, no matter what happens in Ukraine.
Another situation I honestly hadn’t given much thought to until today was what happens to Navalny in Russian prison should Russia actually invade Ukraine. One of his closest colleagues, Maria Pevchikh, tweeted out today a dire warning about the risk to his life should an invasion occur:
No one knows what will happen vis a vis Russia and Ukraine and anyone who claims to know is lying. That much we can all agree on. I still continue to think Putin would be absolutely insane to go after Kyiv, but that doesn’t mean anything and it doesn’t mean he wouldn’t try. I did think to myself last week that the airport appeared rather vulnerable. I hope rational minds will prevail and the Kremlin might decide to just enjoy this moment of full undivided world attention for what it is. I hope.
In other news, it seems like Austria’s vaccine mandate is wobbling, as it should be, given that things look much different now than they did in the middle of the Delta wave in November. From this recent Politico article on Austria, the only EU country still going ahead with a national mandate:
“In November, the world truly looked different,” said Gerald Gartlehner, an epidemiologist with the Danube University Krems, citing the severity of the Delta variant that was then dominant and the high number of hospitalizations it caused.
“At the time, I believed it was a reasonable idea, because you somehow had the feeling that otherwise, we would stagger from one lockdown to the next,” he added. “But in the meantime, a lot has changed.”
Omicron is running through the population so fast a certain amount of natural immunity will build up in those not vaccinated, and the political cost of pushing a mandate may be more than the ÖVP can withstand. If they want to win back far right and right voters, they may have to kill the mandate.
The concept itself wasn’t so much a problem as their crazy plans for enforcement. Rather than simply using the central ELGA database and sending people fines by post, they want to set up random police checks. Austrian public life has already sadly turned into one random check after the other, pandemic theater, with no justifiable public health argument anymore now that Omicron is indeed relatively mild for most people and vaccines don’t prevent infection (but do greatly help of course to prevent severe disease).
Am absolutely pro-vaccine, but very much anti-government involvement in every step of our daily lives and turning ordinary citizens into document checkers. That is a trend I fear will be hard to undo. Not to mention the crazy wanna be Canadian truckers now having taken over Vienna’s Ring Road both Friday and Saturday.
Everyone is pissed off and the 2G checks plus non-stop testing are not stopping the spread of anything.
Our Omicron curve will be like most countries. The virus will burn through and then a certain amount of immunity will be here (how long it will last, we don’t know). I know it is hard mentally to accept a new, more risky reality after thinking we lock ourselves away for a few years and then we emerge safe. Life just got less safe. But we have to keep living. Happy to wear masks and all of that indoors in public spaces. Less happy to have a QR code scanned at every step of the way. That’s how I see the whole thing at this point.
Happy rest of your weekend and thanks for reading!