No dramatic updates from Vienna. Just more of the same. The slog through the octopus of bureaucracy that so often lacks rhyme or reason continues for many Ukrainian families in Austria. One man wrote me yesterday to thank me for the Hofer card. His mother has been in a wheelchair for 12 years. The man told me the authorities in Bad Ischl froze his mother’s social payments (which would have been just over €200 per month — not even enough to buy a month’s worth of food at today’s prices) until she can provide written confirmation of the amount of her pension in Ukraine: €60 per month. Yes, you read that correctly. It’s all just surreal. Stupid and cruel and surreal.
Another resident of a Vienna dorm wrote me to ask about a 19 year old girl who is an orphan and studying online at a Ukrainian university. Her application for Familienbeihilfe (child benefit, paid to all under the age of 24 in full-time education) was rejected. They want to appeal. I give the the phone numbers of some NGO lawyers.
What drives me bonkers in all of this is there are NGO and government employees being paid fair salaries (at least by Austrian standards) to help these refugees and instead it so often feels like every single case is scrutinised and nit-picked and questioned and for what? For €60 or €100 per month? The amount of financial support is already less than what anyone can actually live on at today’s prices. People are still going hungry here amongst us.
I took a poll this weekend in my Telegram group to see how many families actually received the child benefit. The law was passed to include Ukrainians in child benefit payments in summer; back then it made splashing headlines as if the government was actually doing something for once. However, implementation has been very slow. Of those polled (random selection, addresses across Austria), 40% of families who applied still have not received any money. These are hundreds of Euros families are waiting on, as the payments are back-dated to a family’s registration date in Austria. Of course the good news is 60% of respondents have been paid, but that still leaves thousands of families waiting, more than half a year after these legal changes were announced. We helped mothers file the first applications in a group meeting on August 15.
What to read?
A Moscow diary: fear, loathing and deep denial by Max Seddon of FT. (Little trick to get around FT paywall. Copy the title of the article and paste it into Google. It will open for you.) Max has great connections and is a long, long-time Moscow resident. This article so well embodies the mood I sense from some (limited) interactions with Russians abroad recently. Sad, but not sad enough to act. Rather change the subject and talk about something else. Drinking champagne, but it’s not like before. Anger, frustration at the world “not understanding them” “treating us all the same”. A detachment. A sort of permanent state of depression.
Roman Abramovich has a lot of kids. The Guardian reported he transferred billions of dollars worth of assets to his children just before sanctions were due to hit him. I read this after I wrote my last post about wishing the monied-men and women in exile would get together and plan a new Russia, and realized how stupid and naive I was to think they would think about anything other than preserving their own wealth. Which got me thinking about billionaires in general, and how short-sighted they are to limit their own interactions to yes-men and “advisors”, totally removing themselves from interactions with ordinary people, thereby missing this HUGE opportunity to really leave a mark for the history books by solving real, global problems.
So perhaps it is far too soon to hope for any kind of pan-Russian-in-exile solution. However, I did come out and say it yesterday: Putin does not look well and I would not be surprised if he doesn’t survive 2023. I never had that kind of optimism before. But seriously, how much longer can this go on for? We were remembering over New Year’s with my Moscow friends watching that December 31st television speech during which Yeltsin resigned and then a few hours later, Putin, a new face to nearly everyone, wished Russia a happy new year 2000. That was a literal lifetime ago. And after an initial decade or so of economic growth, the last decade has been a literal downhill slide, and the war in Ukraine has only accelerated that process. Even if (some) Russians don’t care about the war (this is surely true, many do not care, until it touches their own families, and even then, this does not automatically lead to them taking to the streets), their economic wellbeing is declining, measurably, with every year Putin continues to sit at the helm. I find myself wondering who is going to take all this collective discontent and bottle it, do something about it. Who dares have a vision for what is left of Russia after it blows itself up. Because the senseless war in Ukraine is Putin’s Russia’s own slow death at its own hands, as well.
Time is not on Ukraine’s side, a Washington Post op-ed by Condeleezza Rice and Robert Gates, argues time is on Russia’s side, and military aid to Ukraine must be accelerated, now. I wonder if the world will listen. I still do not have the impression here in Europe leaders really realise and acknowledge the collective danger we are in. What happens if the war spreads further. I would wager many still naively think you can negotiate with Putin. Just turn the clock back. I look at Hungary, I look at flash points in Kosovo, I look around and wonder what happens if you light a match. And then I try to block it out. Because thinking about those “what ifs” leads to you imagining yourself packing suitcases, all those thoughts Ukrainians themselves surely tried to block out pre-February 24, 2022.
Tinder in the trenches: How war has changed love and sex in Ukraine, also by the Washington Post. Which makes complete sense, because when everything is not normal, why would relationships be normal? I know couples who have managed to get divorces from Europe, I know women trying to get alimony payments from spouses in Ukraine, I know women who went back to live Ukraine to get married as their male partners could not leave, you hear all the time of women who went on Tinder and met local guys here in Europe and in the back of your head you wonder how long it will all last. I know women who have already been proposed to here in Austria by local men, and yet neither can speak the other’s language anywhere close to fluently. Life goes on. Marriages, divorces, births, deaths. Just yesterday I received a text: “My daughter is here with me now. She is seven months pregnant. She will have a baby girl. Could you please send her a grocery card?”.
CNN on the Ukrainian post office bringing vulnerable pensioners their money across war zones.
Prof. Timothy Snyder on Russia’s Eugenic War.
Makiivka and Bakhmut: The Impact of Russian Casualties by Lawrence Freedman.
The Economist on Ukraine’s women snipers and Elon Musk’s Starlink.
The Guardian on a rehabilitation centre in Ukraine for wounded veterans.
Theater at the edge of war an American theater critic on Ukraine-inspired theater in Poland.
BBC from Bakhmut, on the ceasefire that never was:
I just received a Telegram message. A photo of a young man in a wheelchair sitting in front of that dorm in Vienna’s 11th district. He and his mother just arrived to Austria. Could I please send them a grocery card? There is a Penny across the street.
And so it goes.