This morning got off to a rough start; apologies for the delay. Husband threw out his back and I was his chauffeur this morning to the doctor. Thankfully, it’s nothing requiring surgery. I keep telling him the spasms are like contractions and he keeps telling me no I don’t really understand the level of pain and I just smile.
I’m happy I sent out a lot of stories to you all yesterday, as today’s news simply put feels like a lot of noise. On the Russia-Ukraine front (no pun intended), Boris Johnson has apparently decided he can stay in office if he flies to Kyiv and tries to look patriotic in a naive attempt to hope the British public will then forget about all those parties.
Before Johnson starts to look like a modern day hero, the British tabloids are doing a fabulous job of reminding readers just how much Russian money is parked in the UK.
The Americans are now threatening to punish Russia if it rejects dialogue, whatever that means. I am now unfortunately convinced Biden’s own team (Nuland) is a major part of the problem. It all feels a lot like American muddling around the world over the past few decades. Which made me even more annoyed with myself for voting for the geriatric president. This is why we need a new generation of leaders. This is why we need new people, and new advisors. This is why the Democratic Party establishment and its stranglehold on power is truly part of the problem, but I digress.
Interesting report out of Estonia that the country (via its foreign ministry) reportedly been enabling Lukashenko to bypass crude oil import sanctions, which is rather ironic given Estonia has taken to lecturing Germany very loudly on how it should show more support for Ukraine.
Speaking of Germany, Letter One, and investment company owned by Mikhail Fridman and his other Russian oligarch partners, is calling for a delay to the IPO of Germany’s Wintershall Dea, one of the five European partners in Nord Stream 2. Letter One cites bad market conditions for Russian issuers at the moment.
So Putin’s war games are already having a real impact on markets and thereby on these same western companies who have so happily jumped into bed with him. Fridman was one of the first Russian oligarchs to move as many of his assets out of Russia as possible, and diversify his investments. But he still has assets in Russia, and to that extent, just like any other Russian oligarch: if your assets are in prison, you have to make friends with the guards.
For more on Fridman and his investor pals and how they made their fortunes, read this on the TNK-BP sale to Rosneft. Of note is Fridman is of Jewish heritage from Lviv in western Ukraine, and has funded the new Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial in Kyiv. Fridman is not a buddy of Putin, but has to maintain some kind of working relations as he still holds major assets in Russia. It is so important and so often forgotten that things are not black and white but rather a million shades of post-Soviet grey.
Meanwhile, on the ground, if you read Russian, read this report from just near the Russian-Ukrainian border in Russia’s south. There are rumors about things perhaps starting up after February 20, but who knows. It’s all gossip at this point. Interesting that a few kilometres before the actual border the FSB take over and people aren’t allowed in.
«Торговли никакой, никто ничего не хочет покупать… А что война? Ходят слухи, что она начнется после 20 февраля. Кто говорит? Да все говорят. Но нам плевать, потому что своих проблем хватает», — жалуется продавец промтоваров в селе Куйбышево (Ростовская область), которое находится на границе с самопровозглашенной Донецкой народной республикой (ДНР).
“There is no trade, no one wants to buy anything… So what a war? There are rumors that it will start after February 20. Who says it? Everyone says it. But we don’t care, because we have enough of our own problems,” complains a seller of household items in the village of Kuibyshevo (Rostov region), which is on the border with the self-declared Donetsk National Republic (DNR).
I really enjoyed this report by BBC on mining for bitcoin in what looks like the middle of nowhere, Kazakhstan. I wish I better understood “mining for bitcoin” but I am intrigued by the concept. There have been more calls of late to ban trading in cyber-currencies altogether, including from within Russia, but I have my doubts: I’ll believe it when I see it, etc. Cyber is too hot of a topic and too fascinating for too many in Russia and many other countries with (relatively) cheap electricity.
Back to Austria, more Schmid chats are emerging and they get even more ridiculous with each batch. Benko aka real estate developer, new co-owner of Selfridges as finance minister? Why not, right? It’s just so ridiculous. Almost as ridiculous as making white-male-lived-his-whole-life-in-Vienna-100%-Austrian Sebastian Kurz integration minister way back when.
The worst in all of this: the lower politics stoops, the more people will just pull back, find it all disgusting and pointless, and that leads to people losing faith in democracy, low turnout, and eventually, to new, less democratic systems because it just opens the door for more authoritarian forms of government when people give up and stop feeling represented by their elected leaders.
In a tiny regional election of really zero significance, the newly formed “MFG” antivaxx single issue party in Austria got 17% of the vote and is now in the local parliament. Austria’s vaccine mandate is alive but only on life support.
No one knows what to do about the covid rules anymore. Honestly, I wish they would just drop them all. They don’t curb the spread and they drive everyone bonkers. Like, keep the masks, forget everything else. Or force vaccination, but not by checking at every shop I go in. Tie it to your health insurance. Why can’t the state refuse to insure those who are not vaccinated? There has to be an easier, less invasive way than having a QR code scanned at every cafe or shop you enter. I don’t need big brother to know where I was this morning. It really bothers me, this invasion into our privacy, and I’m sure I am not alone.
I keep thinking of an octopus growing tentacles that soon strangle us all. If I had known what Austrian bureaucracy meant in practice, and what it does to a national mentality, I would have never moved here, I would have kicked and screamed to find an alternative. But I didn’t know. I was sold on more affordable housing than London and nice green parks and good public spaces and the schools aren’t that bad and the food is great and yes you can even ski in winter (reader, I don’t ski and have zero interest in learning).
It took me nearly nine years and a global pandemic to fully understand the depths of the bureaucratic mentality problem here, as well as an educational system (not teachers, system!) rotten almost beyond repair. I don’t think there is an easy solution.
But I will no longer swallow things just because “that’s how it is…Austria…eye roll…LOL what can you do”. Because there is right and wrong, there is fair and unfair, there is normal and not normal, and the moment we stop correcting for that is the moment, in my opinion, we lose our humanity. I fear Austrian society right now is very close to losing its humanity.
I will start with baby steps. Like emailing people a second time who ignore me. Like asking for explanations when teachers hand out grades that mathematically don’t add up. When people are discriminated against just because, I will speak up.
As a middle-aged white woman who speaks German with a Slavic accent (and this is apparently part of my problem but I refuse to accept this as an actual reason for there to be any problem because what the actual fuck kind of racism is that), there are probably severe limitations to what I can achieve, but I want to show my kids through my own behaviour that when people treat you unfairly you have to stand up for yourself, unless you have a very good reason for shutting up (say, you are about to be thrown into prison in an authoritarian country).
Anyway, that’s what’s on my mind this morning. A bit all over the place. Thanks for reading and sorry for the delay. Luckily on the covid front the rest of us are all still negative and the covid patient feels absolutely fine with no visible symptoms.