Subtle changes
The war on men in Ukraine continues, some thoughts on this election year in Austria and Europe more broadly.
I am so sorry. I have been having a really hard time finding time to write, and I just spent the past HOUR trying to make my Gmail download one photo. It just decided to stop performing any downloads in Safari. Works in Chrome. Clear cookies. Login again everywhere. Still no luck on Safari but could grab the photo via Chrome. I suck so badly at technology and love it when everything is logged in on my old but beloved laptop forever, and when something goes wrong…I don’t handle it well. Anyway.
I wanted to write today about two unrelated (at least not directly) topics. I snapped this photo as I was being told the story recently of how one young man managed to leave Ukraine. He has been a drug addict for years, and even this is apparently grounds to avoid army service. But he was turned away at the border, and only managed to leave on his second attempt, when a bribe of €4000 was paid (friends in Europe put up the funds). The unofficial price of letting a known drug user leave the country and not serve in an army he would not be fit to serve in anyway. Before that, he was hiding for the past two years in Kharkiv, and a few times was grabbed on the street by the recruitment officers. The storyteller explained they beat the young men, trying to convince them, through the beating, to sign enlistment papers on the spot. This drug user refused, twice. He took the beatings and did not sign. He is now in a European country where he has asked for asylum.
I am told there are men arriving now to Austria. Most European countries, to my knowledge, do not ask how one got here. They do not ask if you ran across the forest or swam across the river, or crossed with papers that let you leave Ukraine, “legally”. A woman told me recently her son, after years of letter writing and lawyers interfering, was finally allowed to leave. Well-educated in the west, working corporate jobs, he felt locked in with his family abroad. He is now able to look for a job and continue his career, but no longer in Ukraine.
I was told recently of a bribe of $7000 paid to release a 24 year-old who was grabbed off the street in a western Ukrainian town. He isn’t even old enough to be drafted (the draft age was recently lowered from 27 to 25), and yet this is the amount his family scrambled together just to get him let out by the draft officers. The videos which circulate online are pretty horrific. The tension is palpable.
Now men (and the women who love them) are asking more questions, as access to government services abroad and online will be cut off to men who have not registered with the draft office. So it becomes a catch-22, you don’t want to register with the military, you cannot do anything: sell property, sign a power of attorney, renew your government-issued ID, etc. There was a full-blown argument in my Telegram group tonight between women talking about the potential consequences of this and will fines be issued, and at what interest rate, and could wives be held liable for their husbands’ fines? It turned ugly and names were called. Tensions are mega-high.
I have spoken with Ukraine families from areas close to the front lines, who after some time in Austria, are making the move to the U.S., realising there is no going “home” for a very long time. The trip over the Atlantic seemed unsurmountable at first. Now it seems like a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity given that no one is going back to Ukraine anytime soon. I also do not have the feeling that many Ukrainians in Austria are returning, something which was quite different over the past two summers. I still remember a pensioner beginning me to pay for his train ticket back to Kharkiv in May 2022 (!) only to text me from there he was suffering sleepless nights sleeping in his garage because sleeping in his apartment was too scary.
It is still so scary in Kharkiv and other Ukrainian cities near the frontlines and the Russian border. I find it hard to read the news, to read the big words from the experts and analysts sitting in comfortable offices in the west while the situation just seems to deteriorate, Russia plans for a forever war, and the U.S. still tries to tell Ukraine what it can and cannot do militarily. Zelensky has now extended his term in office without an election which would have been due. The mood is grim and the online memes are not kind. As one woman reminded me on “X” recently: Ukrainians are not fighting for their government or the generals, they are fighting to defend their country, they are fighting to defend its right to exist. This remains true, but I no longer hold the optimism I had a few years ago about the ultimate end result.
I was at an event recently which felt surreal. Young, well-educated Ukrainians explaining in Ukrainian to an audience of their compatriots about how they managed to register and open a business selling frozen pelmeni and other Ukrainian homemade treats here in Vienna. Which is a very cool story, and everyone who knows anything about operating a private enterprise in Austria knows just what a battle every element of the mind-blowing and tedious paperwork is. I came out after nearly two hours with my head about the explode. Their presentation was so thorough and amazing and yet it triggered my fear of all things bureaucracy. I looked around the room and saw a young audience, roughly 50/50 male/female (unlike most meet-ups abroad which tend to be heavily female), and kind of just shook my head because for some: life goes on. They have studied Austrian rules and regulations and are now passionate about trying to make a go of their business ideas they might have developed before in Ukraine, or new ones they feel inspired to pursue here, now. And yet I thought about all the young people who are back in Ukraine, and continue to fight Russia, against the odds. And I don’t know how to come to terms with the flag waving abroad while not being at home and wonder what the people at home think about all of those sitting under “safe skies”.
This week I spoke with a lovely young grandmother who has full custody of her elementary-school aged granddaughter. They are here alone. Her daughter, the girl’s mother, is back in Ukraine, in the army. She is in Kyiv, thankfully not on the front, the grandmother explains, but still. Just imagine that little girl hasn’t seen her mom regularly in over two years. Now that is a sacrifice to one’s country. Granny was full of energy and love and I imagine the situation is relatively good for all involved, given the circumstances, but still. It made me think back to those kids of my own early 1990s childhood whose moms went away to serve in Iraq and how that affected the kids who stayed back home.
You look around “normal” life here in Europe, the streets are full of tourists from all over now that the weather has improved, the city is buzzing, you do feel a certain optimism in the air, and yet I cannot shake the feeling that it could all be so temporary. To remember what is happening not so far away, where people go to bed at night not knowing what the night will bring, and wake up each morning to read the news of the unlucky few who died in their sleep, in their beds, seemingly at random. And then I think about those who survived but lost limbs. They will never be able to forget. They will always have the before and after. Just like my friend Mama Olya, who too will always now have the before and after her stroke. When she could walk, to the moment she lost all movement on the left side of her body. Perhaps, forever. And she is at an age when we expect such things. Think of the kids. I keep thinking of the kids. Because on the one hand, they adjust to anything, and quickly, and on the other hand, what of this is “normal”?
The other topic I have been itching to write about but not sure how to do it from a cerebral perspective is something I have been thinking about as I visit “public” institutions in Vienna such as hospitals, schools, etc with Ukrainians. I was recently helping a young pregnant woman with her ob-gyn pregnancy check-up in a Vienna public hospital. I looked around the early-morning, crowded waiting room (some patients had brought a half dozen family members with them for some inexplicable reason), and realised not a single one of these mothers-to-be was a native German speaker. Not one. And this is the new normal in so many places today in Vienna. And it is not without consequences, none of them linguistic.
I am often asked recently by Ukrainians about the political posters hung up by the FPÖ, Austria’s far right. They are shocked and it is like being plunged into an ice bath for the first time when they begin to understand who exactly around 30% of the voting population of Austria would like to see in office. The FPÖ candidate for the EU election in June suggested recently letting Orban run the show at the EU, arguing he has the right set of values and priorities. They cynically argue they do not want to disband the EU, just make it more like Hungary’s approach. It makes no sense. But the topics they run on are real in the eyes of those who vote for them.
Some days you look around Vienna, and I think back to how it was even a decade ago, and I realise how much it has changed. It is busier, livelier, definitely feels like a busy, multi-cultural metropolis: not exactly London or Toronto, but certainly a big change from even a decade ago in terms of the visible diversity now on the streets. Today, the groups of school students visiting from the Austrian countryside stand out more than visible ethnic diversity, if that makes sense. So I keep thinking to myself, and I am asked this a lot by Ukrainians eager to understand what might happen post-election later this year, should the far right really form a government, what exactly would they do?
My thoughts, and they are primitive at best, and purely a gut feeling, not backed by any hard facts, is that they will use a democratic election to turn back the rule of law. The past decade has shown, in the area of asylum policies, for example, that it is very hard for individual countries to control the flow of immigration while working under the frameworks outlined by the EU for processing asylum claims. Meanwhile, many European countries are struggling to expand their generous social welfare states to all these new arrivals, many of whom are dependent on these programs for years after they and their families (the wives and children often arriving later) first arrive in Europe.
I can understand why an Austrian who works 40 hours a week for a not so interesting job which also pays just about enough to survive but not much more is upset by large families arriving from non-European countries and receiving a lot of aid in the form of payments for children, basic income while learning the language, subsidised housing, etc. Those who work in the sector in NGOs are careful to point out hard facts. But people vote based on emotions. And the emotions are for many a longing for what used to be (quite literally, MAGA, the European version) and looking for a culprit. Someone to blame.
But fixing the “problem” quickly is not really possible using the existing legal means. So I would expect…I have only whispered this so far in private conversations, scared to say it out loud. I would expect…they, a new far-right government, should they take power in a coalition, would begin to act outside the law if the laws cannot be bent the ways they need them to go. I believe in 2025+ we might see more direct actions and interventions, not waiting for the precedent of court cases and lawyers’ arguments. The kind of actions which make headlines and please those who want to turn back the clock on change they believe has been too much, too fast.
Pure speculation. Something I think about a lot. And once the ball starts rolling down the hill, I can imagine just like in 1938, more people will emerge from the shadows to ave their flags, nodding their heads in agreement, than is polite to say in society today.
At the moment politics is doing as politics does, and everyone is discussing the gossip around the Green party’s nominee for the EU election. The Greens are learning in real time the lesson that even a 23 year-old young woman can have significant personal, character-damaging baggage, the kind that makes you un-electable, and sometimes “attack as the best form of defence” can backfire spectacularly. The entire recent episode makes one wonder who does any due diligence any more, or it is just thoughts and prayers, let’s print a million green posters with the bright young thing making a heart shape with her hands and hope for the best.
Not a lot of recommended reading today. I am afraid between normal life and daily trips to the hospital I haven’t been reading much news lately. I inhaled the first half of Bridgerton (did not like they left us hanging!), I watched against my better judgment Baby Reindeer and still feel traumatised by the experience.
Thank you for allowing our little program to keep going. I do still keep receiving requests, and even though I have to say I am sorry at the moment I am empty, I do know there will be a day when I can send some more grocery cards out, and that gives me hope even when at the moment it seems hard to find. The world feels cruel. I find myself grabbing onto the present harder than ever. Hence, the lack of attention span.
