Money and Mobilization
A very open conversation with Austria's refugee coordinator (CEO of BBU) and colleagues yesterday. Putin's unhinged "partial" mobilization (feels like Feb 22 again)
The announcement was supposed to come last night. Partial mobilization in Russia. A friend sent me a photo from a central Moscow Metro station last night, a group of crowd-control police just waiting in case anyone might dare to attempt a spontaneous protest. A friend in central Moscow told me she saw the paddywagons on her walk home. She didn’t know what was happening. She had no idea Putin was scheduled to speak. She caught up with an old friend for drinks. She has been gone for three years. She thought she still had time. This morning, I called her, told her what Putin said on TV, and told her to get the hell out before the borders close. She in turn called a longtime friend, very pro-Putin living in the provinces, has a grown son. The woman was very quiet but mumbled something about NATO and the west.
I have a terrible feeling like I had on February 22. This time I didn’t listen live, but I read enough of the transcript to understand he is even more unhinged now than he was then. Now, after seven months of military failure from the Russian perspective, after decisive recent Ukrainian victories on the battlefield. Now, he will double down on the crazy. How did the Red Army emerge victorious in World War II? By losing far more men than any other army on the planet. He will do more than just partially mobilize. He chooses his words carefully only out of fear of street protests, but the reality will be now the gloves are off. Now a war will be called a war, the referendums i.e. annexation of Ukrainian territories (DNR, LNR, Kherson) into the Russian Federation, will take this weekend. And then all options are on the table, and no I do not think he is a rational actor. Then an attack on these newly annexed areas of Ukraine which they will call Russia from next week will be seen as a direct attack on Russia, and I don’t dare speculate what he might do in response.
I keep asking myself why the CIA didn’t take care of this earlier. Why didn’t anyone in Russia take care of this earlier. Why do tens of thousands of young men have to die on both sides because no one dared remove the psychotic genocidal dictator from power. Because I don’t see anything rational in his behaviour. He is only accelerating his own demise and that of modern Russia as it was known before he launched this mad and senseless war on a neighboring country that was doing nothing more than living its life and minding its own business.
My next thoughts, after all the young men who will die for nothing, are with the refugees who will come, as winter arrives and battles intensify. We, in Europe, aren’t coping with the refugees we have here now. What will happen when that figure doubles? Where will they live? What money will they live off? What will it take for governments in Europe to actually respond and prepare? Will it take crowds of moms with children and pensioners sitting on their suitcases? I fear, yes, it will take that to wake the politicians up.
Yesterday I spent several hours speaking with very nice, competent, and well meaning Austrians working on the refugee response from a state and NGO perspective. I forgot to ask them if I may write about the details of our meeting, so I am going to leave their names out and speak only in broad strokes. In order to prepare, I asked my Telegram chat (already over 1,500 Ukrainians), what would you tell Austria’s refugee coordinator if you had the opportunity? The replies were excellent as they personified a lot of the problems which are commonly discussed but to put it in a real life context of “a mom struggling to buy school supplies and worried about the cost of public transport and getting a job is impossible because…” is something else. You can read the entire thread in large print (my eyesight is horrendous after spending hours a day on my phone for half a year) here.
I tried to bring up as many of these topics as possible: the Vienna dorm where no one gets any money or Meldezettel for months, forced labor at €1.60 per hour in federal facilities, the dubious private accommodation in Lower Austria asking Ukrainians to sign away every cent of their potential income. The lack of a central crisis hotline for real emergencies when local police cannot be counted on to intervene on the side of Ukrainians made newly homeless by Austrian “hosts”, the current/looming housing crisis, the lack of social housing, the lack of leadership, the finger pointing, the bureaucratic run arounds, the work crisis, that once you are on Grundversorgung (benefits) you are essentially prevented from decent employment and breaking out of this closed circle is nearly impossible. That no one can live on €200 per month and many of Austria’s states are not paying out the amounts they should, the drama with school, that mixed age classes of Ukrainian kids learning German are less than ideal and many moms would prefer online Ukrainian school but this is banned under Austrian law which states kids aged 6-15 must attend school full stop no exceptions. We talked about medicine, and lack of translators, and public transport, and lack of psychological resources, and how many, many people are half a year later definitely on the edge of some kind of serious mental breakdown. I said how few have actually received Familienbeihilfe, that they won’t get Klimabonus until 2023. I talked and talked, and you know what I realized on my way home?
Austria has a fundamental problem. The answer 9 times out of 10 is “well in Austria it has to be like this because…”. But lawmakers are elected. So if the law sucks, and is stupid, or the system is broken, instead of trying to work with broken parts, throw out the machine and build a new one. But there isn’t the political will — at least not yet — to do actually make change. Austria so often reminds me of late stage USSR. Too broken to fix, but everyone is scared to blow it up. A shrug of the shoulders and the hope that somehow things will work themselves out without too many people having to put their political careers on the line and get their hands dirty. Of course managing a refugee response is in many ways a thankless job and I walked away with the impression the agency tasked with doing it actually doesn’t control anything: not money, not states, has no army, no generals, cannot order anything. It’s like being sent into battle with nice friendly competent decent people but no actual weapons.
So yeah, that’s a problem. I walked away from the meeting grateful for the time I was given, a bit sad that I don’t think I was really able to convey the raw emotions and suffering of the Ukrainians properly (because in part I didn’t want to come across as yet another hysterical middle aged woman), and with a pretty certain feeling that nothing will change in the short term until we have awful imagines of hundreds of homeless Ukrainian refugees with no money left gathering in train stations. I mentioned the train station too. I said you cannot leave it without any NGO presence from October. That is truly a terrible idea.
I can’t rid myself of the thought that there are people who work on computers and in meeting rooms and there are people who work on their phones in the field with people in pain and the Venn diagrams just don’t overlap much if at all. I feel like a personal punch in the gut every time Oksana calls me and says what happened to her and her kids. I worry about grandpa Yura and his operation. But when you are charged with a response affecting thousands of people you cannot afford to feel every story and still do your job. So that’s tricky. No easy answer.
This morning my chat is going crazy about school, again. The teacher yelled at the Ukrainian kids. The Ukrainian kids feel bullied. They are fighting amongst each other. Kids aged 11-15 all stuck in a class together, it doesn’t work. How to talk to the Austrian teacher who isn’t at all interested in her new students? It breaks my heart but so much of this is also a totally rigid system in need of blowing up and not being tinkered with — its like when you bake a cake and you start adding in substitute ingredient after substitute ingredient and the end result doesn’t resemble a cake at all. A good system needs eggs and butter and when your eggs and butter are rotten or non-existent, your cake will not rise nicely. And when the response is “the law saws” then my response is “this is a democracy they say so then lawmakers should change the law” but if the collective majority thinks things are fine the way they are then “so sind wir schon” which is an inside Austrian joke meaning we really are not so great or kind as we like to think we are. Some of us really are racist anti-foreigner assholes. Just look at the candidates for president…
So this is what I worry about. I had this hope recently that the war might actually end soon. A tiny glimmer of hope. Now I am sad to say I worry we are in for a very long and difficult ride. All of us. This will touch all of us. Europeans can ignore it but the reality will face them on their doorsteps and inside their homes soon. We already see it in our stores. I went in today to buy a whole chicken, saw he costs a whopping €17, and bought frozen nuggets instead. How the Ukrainians are surviving I have no idea. I assume many are already going hungry.
I am sorry to end on such a note but this is my headspace at the moment. I hope I am wrong. I hope some rational people left within Russia will fix this all, and soon. One can always hope. One must not lose hope.
Your description of Austria (politcians AND people) is absolutly correct to the point.
I sometimes think: Hitler was a born Austrian, "successful" in Germany. And in both countries Nazis are still alive. In the open or under the cover. And it's getting worse over the last 2 decades. :-(((
Big hug, Regina Kummetz