Four years
I cannot believe it.
Tommorrow marks four years. I really cannot believe it. When I think back to the intense period for all of us volunteers which followed February 24, 2022, in some ways it feels like just yesterday, but in many other ways, like a decade or more. Some things have remained constant. Still no one knows what tomorrow will bring. Still Europe has shown little creativity in thinking about how to best integrate the millions of Ukrainians who now call the continent home. I caught a clip of an Austrian military officer speaking on local TV this week, warning about what an end to EU aid to Ukraine would mean for civilians still living in Ukraine. Essentially, he says that an end to aid would make civilian life inside Ukraine “unlivable” and could result in even further numbers of refugees leaving the country. I was pleasantly surprised to hear this given airtime. So often it is as if everything happening quite literally next door in Ukraine is forgotten or ignored here. This is a good long read in German by Der Standart about the current situation in Ukraine and possible solutions.
This week the Guardian’s Shaun Walker, a longtime Russia correpsondent whose work is always worth stopping what you are doing to read, published a very long read on who knew what in the days and months leading up to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Essentially — the U.S. and UK tried to warn Europe and Kyiv, the latter remained deeply skeptical until the very end. Most notable is a German intelligence official actually flying into Kyiv on February 23 as embassies had already relocated to western Ukraine.
A war foretold: how the CIA and MI6 got hold of Putin’s Ukraine plans and why nobody believed them
As I wrote in a note earlier this week:
I flew out of Kyiv on Feb 10, 2022. Hotels catering to foreigners were empty. Most locals appeared to be going about their daily lives as if they too didn’t believe what would happen. My personal calculation back then was a small article in Russian in which the journalist interviewed Russians in southern border towns who whispered nothing would happen until after Feb 23 (a holiday). Mind blowing about German & French intelligence.
This weekend I wrote on a whim that I would like to get together with other women to go out for a drink and make new friends. The kind of thing you write on social media and don’t really expect much to come of it. I figured maybe I would set up a few coffee dates. I wrote in Russian because in general my experience in Vienna has been that those who socialize in Russian are more open to making new friends than those who speak English or German (most likely as a result of all being far from home). To my great surprise, more than a dozen of us gathered yesterday evening in a chic bar for a few cocktails and really interesting conversation. There were women of a wide range of ages, from Russia and Ukraine probably in equal numbers, and one young woman from Kazakhstan. Perhaps because I am “neutral” in the sense that I am neither Russian nor Ukrainian (I am certainly not neutral when it comes to Russia’s war of agression which has killed so many and upended so many lives), it was so nice to see a group come together and despite everything that has happened over the past four years, for a common language to unite rather than nationalities to separate. By the end of the evening, the ladies were making future plans, what kind of group activities we could do together next time. I was only the facilitator, but it left me with a kind of optimism that has been in short supply of late. Sometimes when everything feels terrible in the big picture, the little picture and the people right in front of us can give us hope and inspiration.
There has been so much this week and yet I don’t really feel confident in my views on any of it, from the Epstein stuff to AI taking away our jobs (or not, depending on who is making the argument), to the Supreme Court vs. Trump and his tariffs, I don’t feel confident yet to say anything which hasn’t already been said. There was an interesting newsletter by the New York Times quite nicely sumarizing how Europe is back to courting China out of necessity, from a rather weak position, on account of the U.S. becoming an ever more unreliable ally.
I did manage to watch the last few minutes of the gold medal hockey game, quite by accident really. As an American who was born in Canada, I would have been happy with either result, and I was genuinely pretty chuffed for the Americans as the celebrated, and don’t really understand all the hate they are getting as result of them taking a phone call from Trump in the locker room (he is, after all, the president, and this would happen in basically any country, irregardless of the president’s politics). It was very odd to see the FBI director there, as if he had nothing better to do, especially while we all witnessed the horrific scenes out of Mexico. I have a close friend who flew out of Cancun yesterday, and called me from the airport, describing army and police all over the highway, and this was very far away from Guadalajara and Puerto Vallerta where there was active shooting inside the airport.
If you need an artsy distraction, I decided to take a chance on Wuthering Heights after hearing so many intellectuals being so very upset about the film straying from the book, while others loved the presentation. I will preface by saying I have never read the book (nor have I ever read any of those English classics — I have an Arizona public school education and in British literature, or lack thereof, it shows. I think I consumed a Cliff notes version of Hamlet in 11th grade and that was that). I also loved Saltburn. Plus I had seen a clip of screenwriter and director Emerland Fennell saying the color red in the film represents death. So I took the plunge, and I was so glad that I did. The film is like a visit to a very intriguing museum exhibit. It sucks you in and you just kind of run with it. It is art on the screen. The plot is somehow secondary. I loved it.
On Netflix, I also recently watched a Polish show whose title, Lead Children, turned me off at first, but I then gave it a chance, and I am glad that I did. It is very well acted and tells the awful true story of industrial pollution which was buried under the communists in the 1970s. The story is set in Poland, based upon a real female doctor who dared stand up for the sick kids, but I can imagine there were so many more stories like that all over the world, and probably, frankly, still are in places we don’t read about.
I think that is all I have today. A little light, I know, but perhaps better like that than going on about things I don’t feel strongly about. Lately I feel a bit like my head is in a haze. End of winter malaise perhaps, although we are not experiencing anything like the New York blizzard at the moment. I am watching the videos in awe. Our snow melted faster than it fell, and it is now pouring rain outside like London in November. The only saving grace is the days are growing longer, and with them, the promise that spring and eventually summer will soon bless us with their strong sunrays. I caught them for a minute today while waiting for an appointment, and stood there, just trying to absorb a tiny drop of vitamin D, and with it, a little bit of optimism.
Thank you for reading. I very, very much hope one year from now I will not be writing a post with the word ‘five’ in the title.