Freezing

This week I am thinking about the millions freezing in cold apartments in Ukraine, as well as Greenland, Iran, Venezuela. "Davos" is next week. It all feels surreal and frankly, rather scary.

This past week the headlines have been so shocking, one after the other, including the latest today (Trump writing on his social media platform threatening new tariffs on a list of EU countries if they do not agree to sell Greenland), that it feels like it could not get worse, and then, inevitably, it does. All at rapid fire pace.

I am incredibly concerned (and I say this without the empty-worded cynicism of certain EU mouthpieces) about the humanitarian situation in Ukraine at the moment.

“There is not a single power plant left in Ukraine that has not been hit,” said Ukraine’s recently-appointed minister of energy, Denys Shmyhal. On January 15, Ukraine could only meet two-thirds of its electricity needs, as the power generation capacity dropped to 11 gigawatts—more than a fivefold drop from its pre-war capacity of nearly 60 gigawatts. The problem is especially acute in Kyiv. “In some cities and regions, preparations (for winter) were a failure,” Shmyhal told the parliament. And Kyiv, he said, “was not prepared at all”. As I write this, nearly 70 apartment buildings in Kyiv remain without heating, and emergency power outages remain for most of the day.

This quote is from the Substack post below, written today. My TikTok feed is full of very alarming videos of Ukrainians now living in apartments, with small children, with inside temperatures of +10C and colder. The forecast is for the bitter cold front to remain until the end of January. Russia of course knows this. It is as if the weather, and Trump, are both handing undeserved gifts to Putin.

I'm in Kyiv. The energy crisis here is an emergency

The authorities in Kyiv have asked those who can leave, to do so, at least temporarily. But not everyone has a relative in village to pack up the car and drive to. I worry so much about what will happen when people cannot take it anymore. Let’s not forget, it’s not just heat, it’s living without electricity and often water for most of a 24 hour cycle. And while many trying to remain positive, this current winter phase, from the perspective of ordinary Ukrainians, is more challenging than any point prior during the war which has now lasted nearly four years.

This is bloody cold weather even with heating and electricity. These are just a few of the many harrowing personal stories I came across this week:

Europe has been incredibly silent about all of this, focused on the security emergency that are Trump’s very real threats to Greenland. Austria went even further, closing its last arrival center for Ukrainian refugees, something they had planned for a while, and essentially a political game of Vienna being fed up with always taking more than its fair share of refugees in vs. the rest of the country. Die Zeit published a long article on this, and I particularly like the quote in the article (link below) from my friend and fellow volunteer Jenia, who described the situation as two cars heading towards each other at full speed with no brakes: Russia quite literally freezing Ukrainians in their homes in the middle of a very brutal winter vs. Europe quietly shutting its doors and claiming to be “full”. Gift article (in German) here:

Willkommen war gestern

When I spoke by phone with the journalist, Simone Brunner, who wrote the article, I explained that you need money to be able to even think about fleeing cold cities in Ukraine now. You have to be able to afford train tickets, or gasoline, and to afford to stay in a hotel or rent an apartment. There are no more volunteers waiting on the border. There are no more open doors. Leaving Ukraine right now is really, really difficult. Many who stayed did so because they could not imagine life without their husbands (men aged 23-60 are still not allowed out unless they have a military exemption). Or they care for elderly parents who refused to leave. The reasons are many and complicated.

Those who wanted to leave and could leave did so years ago. And now, many of those who thought they would wait it out, that the war would eventually be over, must now be at their breaking point, and yet, there is nowhere to go. This feels like a humanitarian crisis unfolding in slowmotion in real time. I am having visions of Ukrainian moms and kids and elderly arriving, again, in winter, at the train station here in Vienna, and again, no one will be prepared for them. Local officials here have set up 20-30 beds in a Vienna church hall. I’m sure you will agree, that is not a plan. That is something to tell the press. There is of course, no outrage, because there is so much awfulness in the world right now that no one has time to worry about what might happen, because terrible things are already happening all around us.

I personally cannot look at the videos from Kyiv of little kids going to bed fully clothed in hats and jackets and shoes. It is just too much.

In the worst kind of irony, the annual let-them-eat-cake gathering of the world’s most influential “leaders” will take place in Davos, Switzerland this week, starting on January 19. Zelensky reportedly will not only attend, but claimed a peace deal could be signed next week. The thing is: Trump has other things on his mind now (Greenland, and, to a lesser extent, Iran), Russia has no incentive to stop now while it is reportedly making territorial gains as well as having crippled Ukraine with the hits to the power networks. I listened to a Russian language podcast this week which tried to guess which cities the Russian army might try to take now in order to grab more before any potential negotiations, the theory being if Ukraine is prepared to give away all of Donetsk oblast on paper, there is no need to seize Kramatorsk/Slavyansk by force, and instead Russia might focus on the city of Zaporizhzhia.

I spoke this week with a couple who only left Zaporizhzhia recently (I was shocked when I heard where they are from), and they did so to access medical care in Austria (the wife has some serious, rare health problems which could not be treated in Ukraine). They were given housing in a Lower Austrian village where the nearest store, bus station, and doctor was a 2km walk in one direction. They only managed to move to a Lower Austrian town with proper public transport when their landlord (i.e. the one paid by the state to provide refugee housing) took pity on them and offered them another apartment.

When I mentioned all of this to another Ukrainian this week, that a family had stayed so long in a city which is permanently just a stone’s throw from the front lines, this other Ukrainian, an elderly woman in her 70s from Kyiv, said with a straight face: “everyone out east is waiting for Russia”. Meaning in some of the cities and towns near the front, those who chose to stay and did not move to other, safer parts of Ukraine, or to Europe, were essentially waiting for the arrival of Russia. I had never considered this before, but it is true that many people are now living in Mariupol as part of Russia who survived the absolute horrors of what Russia did to their city.

This same elderly woman managed to pivot to the fall of the Soviet Union, how traffic police in Moscow back in the early 1990s had then lectured her and her late husband, who had driven to Moscow with Kyiv license plates, that Crimea was really Russian. She then pivoted to her neighbor in Kyiv who died last year in her 90s, a Jewish woman whose entire family was murdered by the Nazis in Babyn Yar. She survived because she was hidden by a Ukrainian family. The woman outlived everyone, including her sons who died of covid. I thought about that story this week, as I saw the photos and videos of freezing Kyiv apartments. I think about the elderly who cannot walk down stairs on their own (no electricity also means no elevators). It is somehow incomprehensible the amount of suffering we humans are capable of inflicting upon each other. All because of the mad dreams of a few old men obsessed with what the maps will look like when they die. Wanting to leave their mark on history for centuries to come. The neverending, unsatiable lust for power. I will never be able to understand it, but I see a lot of similarities in Trump’s behavior and Putin’s.

I read somewhere this week (cannot remember where) a post by a parent whose child was in Zoom school (because the ICE raids in Minneapolist have even shut down public schools now) and while live on video, ICE stormed one of the children’s apartments. This kind of stuff sends chills down your spine (I would be legitimately frightened if I lived in the city or any other ICE chooses to target) because it is exactly reminscent of the terror of the 1930s in the Soviet Union. The knocks on the door in the middle of the night, pulling parents out of their beds, their kids would never see them again.

I then read reports about brave Americans protesting, and I have very mixed feelings, because in modern Russia, at least, it never worked. Today is the five year anniversary of when Navalny returned to Russia, and essentially, flew to his own death. He knew the risks.

White Americans who speak unaccented English (the ICE guys are talking to people to listen if they speak with an accent) will assume they are safe, and the woman who was murdered by an ICE agent, whose young child is now an orphan, well, “she must have done something”. That is the story they will tell themselves. So for now, it seems, this violence on America’s streets will just become another horrible new reality, not unlike the school shootings everyone has somehow “gotten used to”. I haven’t been following the ICE story closely probably because it is really painful, so I will just leave it at that. Those living in wealthy neighborhoods will assume it will not happen in their neighbourhoods, and will see it as “retaliation” for all the fraud that was uncovered primarily by ethnically Somali communities (many of whom are U.S. citizens). For now, Trump is getting away with it.

Trump himself seems much more concerneed with foreign affairs, clearly feeling emboldened after he showed the world what he was capable of with Venezuela. For an American president, he seems to have little regard for how things actually are inside America. With the exception of the Fed, but that I will leave for another day.

I highly recommend this excellent, forty-minute listen by The Daily on decades of Venezuelan history, and why it is not going to be so simple as simply handing the keys to the kingdom over to American oil companies:

I would also recommend this episode on Iran, about the origins of the protests, the unprecedenly brutal crackdowns by the regime (murdering an uncounted number of their own citizens, including with snipers).

And now, finally, to Greenland. My personal opinion is that yes, Trump really does want it, and he is going to use whatever bully tactics he has up his sleeve to take it. This of course implies a scenario which the founders of NATO never envisioned: that one NATO ally would be poised to attack another. This below, by Almut Rochowanski, is very good on Europe. I would imagine by now there are more European leaders who take Trump’s threats seriously, although there are probably a fair number who think it’s just noise. Someone found an old tweet from 2019 in which Trump talked about needing Greenland, so I think it is fair to say he has had this idea for sometime (like Putin and his maps), and he probably senses that this is as good a moment as any, and Russia must be absolutely thrilled; NATO self-imploding is something even Putin couldn’t have dreamed of asking Ded Moroz for.

Greenland, Trump and the Europeans

It seems totally bonkers that next week a tiny Swiss village with ridiculously overpriced housing for the second half of January will be host to leaders facing questions as insane as, are we going to let America, the largest economy in the world, a nuclear power, take Greenland by force, or buy it, or are we, Europe, where decisions are made very slowly by 27 nations, known for our wobbling, going to stand up againt them? I think we know the answer. I saw the photos from protests today in Copenhagen in support of Greenland, with sweet kids waving little Greenland flags, and I understood their parents probably dragged them there by bike with good intentions, but you know what they say about good intentions. Europeans are doing what Europeans in functioning democracies do: expressing their opinions through peaceful protest. But it would be crazy to presume this will have any impact on what will actually happen. Ultimately, I think Europe has yet to show its cards in the sense of what it can actually do to defend Denmark’s position. I cannot envision a scenario in which Europe can actually stand up to the U.S, Russia, and China (who will surely let Trump get away with it for very obvious reasons — Taiwan and Ukraine). So we are back to 19th century imperialsim, with internet, drones, AI and nukes. The insane egos of white male power-hungry leaders remains a consistent theme. As much as we evolve as a species, we somehow still manage to circle back to universal themes which have guided our human existence since the beginning of time.

I came across this video of Greenland’s leader tearfully describing the intense pressure she faces from Trump, and it is rather heartbreaking. The U.S. tabloids had a field day with these photos the immediate cigarettes in the parking lot shared by the Danish and Greenland officials after meeting with Vance and Rubio earlier this week. I cannot imagine the pressure they are under. One final thought: the “experts” who keep quoting international law need to understand that a law is only as powerful as it is enforceable. Trump seems to understand this very well. I don’t have an answer to the question: who is going to stop him, and how? Will Congress try?

To end on a positive note — this week we at Cards for Ukraine were able to distribute another 50 grocery store gift cards worth €50 each to Ukrainian families across Austria. The lovely photos and words of thanks have already started to flow into my inbox, and it makes me very happy to know we were able to do one tiny but meaningful good deed amidst all the terrible things happening around us. Thank you.

This week the priorty was to send cards to pensioners and moms with children who had not received aid from us recently. The cards went out to addresses from Burgenland to Tirol, to big cities and small villages.

And finally, thank you to those of you who recently signed up for paid subscriptions. I really do appreciate your support! I love writing this each week, but it is time-consuming, and it helps to know that it is valued by readers, too.