The year ahead
Instead of predictions (ever a dangerous game), a lot of recommended reading. Plus media coverage of our ice skating event.
I am too risk averse to make any grand predictions for 2024, but I have been reading a lot this week (a nasty flu gave me a whack just after we finished our ice skating event last Friday which left me in bed over the weekend). I would like to share with you those pieces I found helpful in shaping my own thoughts about the world going into 2024, looking at Ukraine and beyond. In no particular order.
First, this powerful thread by Alexandra Prokopenko, who worked in Russia both as a financial journalist and later for the Central Bank before leaving the country. I find her commentary on the real state of Russia’s economy to be some of the most informed. I have heard her on several Meduza podcast episodes, but those are in Russian. Alexandra makes a series of arguments illustrating why Russia’s war economy isn’t a sustainable answer to Russia’s economic woes, as the war-spending overheats everything else leading to the unavoidable consequences of that. She has a new piece in Foreign Affairs, Putin’s Unsustainable Spending Spree. One thing was always true of Putin and his circle — they don’t really understand economics nor do they care much for it. Which is exactly what the broader west’s concept of long-term peace in Europe through international trade failed. Dictators like Putin care more about waging war and rewriting future history books and maps than they do about trade and economic prosperity. You can be sure he says to himself the vast majority of the Russian people always lived poorly, so they should anyway be grateful they live today not so badly. They have internet and warm apartments and even cars. What more do they want? And the oil and gas and natural resources. What Putin and his team have done is taken control of large swaths of Russia’s economy. What trade is left, they have their hands all over it.
There is a new book out soon, by WSJ chief international affairs correspondent Yaroslav Trofimov. I have pre-ordered and am really looking forward to reading it, as I have been a consumer of Yaroslav’s reporting from Ukraine on the ground for sometime now. More on Yaroslav’s website here. Interestingly, the book cover art was created by a Belarusian artist, Rufina Bazlova, whose work I first got to know during the protests in that country in 2020. Here is her website. Beyond the cover, I think the book will be very insightful and full of fresh insights into how things have played out within Ukraine since Russia’s invasion.
Joshua Yaffa, another journalist whose pieces I always stop to read, has a new one in the New Yorker this week (shout out to Christopher for highlighting this): What Could Tip the Balance in the War in Ukraine? in which he asks some of the tough questions. I don’t in general like this genre of 3D chess because retrospectively, it is an impossible task and we so often get so much wrong. There seems to be at this point a general acceptance that the west (meaning U.S. and Europe) will not provide Ukraine with enough military aid to win decisively, and there is also some kind of consensus that Putin has little reason to want to come to the negotiating table now. Put those two thoughts together and you have a pretty bleak scenario from the point of view of Ukraine. Add on top of that domestic political trouble, because the new draft law on mobilisation (which has interestingly been largely void from western reporting) is causing real upset, in addition to elections which will not be held. The whole picture, is well, not great. I would also throw in two cents and disagree with Russia expert Stanovaya who says Putin does not care about the map. I think he very much does care about the map. This is a man who isn’t even online. Of course he cares about the map. Maps are what go into history books.
What one could argue, and I have been thinking about this a lot as Europe itself heads into a very pivotal year in terms of elections, is that land can be won with tanks and land can be won with elections. The latter is I think what Russia will try to do within the EU. But Ukraine? The elevated attacks on Ukraine’s cities and civilian targets show Russia isn’t ready to turn down the heat, if anything, it is turning it up, while temperatures across Europe this week drop well below freezing.
The New York Times had a report this week from Ukraine’s front lines, where the situation is really bleak. I shared it with a Ukrainian and said, oh no, they found a Ukrainian soldier with first name Adolf, just wait till Russia gets its hands on this reporting, to which he replied, who wrote the article? “Robotyne is a village, not a town.” Each of us saw in that article something different. I think the point is the soldiers fighting right now are under horrific pressure, the front line has barely moved since summer, and the statistics show how Ukraine is already having to conserve artillery.
I’ll leave the military commentary to the experts. But the basic facts. They don’t look great.
Turning to Europe, I found this Economist piece insightful, Who is in Charge of Europe?, as it asks a question I hadn’t really thought about a lot recently, perhaps because I sort of personally got used to the idea that no one is in charge? I do not understand the various intricacies of how the EU works inside itself, but I did read the worrying news that Charles Michel leaving his post early may actually allow for Orban (!) to take over temporarily? You literally cannot make this stuff up. These are the shots Putin doesn’t even have to fire. In many ways, the EU is on the one hand too big to fail, on the other hand, it is already failing in so many ways. It has become this beast which cannot get rid of the enemies within, it has become too big to operate nimbly yet cannot actually give membership to those it promised membership to years ago. A promise that can never really come true starts to leave a bad taste in one’s mouth. I imagine that is what the EU tastes like in the Balkans now. And you see it in how the west watches and totally ignores the protests in Serbia right now, because most western politicians are in practice perfectly ok with the devil they know when it comes to autocrats running small countries, despite all the talk of freedom and democracy and flag waving. Clearly, the EU does not have the bandwidth to get better, yet the only thing it can offer is that false promise.
2024 will be an election year across many EU countries, and the results will surprise those who have not been paying attention. That is one prediction I feel confident in making. There have been fascist demos in Rome. They have been covered in horror by liberal German press. But once these things become the “new normal” due to falling standards of living, populist anger, blame the immigrant for everything broken in your home country, inflation, etc etc etc, it is a slippery slope. I tweeted this morning: “One part of the human experience which always amazes is how quickly the unraveling goes once the string is pulled. Expect more of this in Europe 2024.”
Austria will vote in September 2024. The far right are currently polling consistently at over 30%. The far right won a recent election in the Netherlands. Slovakia elected a pro-Russian premier. Poland did the opposite — ousted its far right leadership, but this had probably a lot more to do with domestic issues (the horrors of what banning all abortion meant in practice to Polish women) than the world at large.
And then yes, there is the looming U.S. election, a prospect so grim, I would prefer not to comment on it at all. I think about my eldest being able to vote for the first time, and having a choice between two candidates both older than his long-retired grandfather. My brain cannot comprehend it. I will not be the one to justify to him why his vote matters.
I think a lot recently about what Ukrainians told me about the time leading up to February 24, 2022, how they didn’t see it coming. I wonder if we in Europe will say the same thing about this year. And even if you did see it coming, what would you do differently? Where would you go? These are the hard questions there are no easy answers to. It is one thing to see it coming, it is another thing to know how to fight it, if that is even possible. It is a tricky thing with the democratic process is used to catapult autocrats into power who then dismantle the institutions. Because technically, the voters asked for that. And countries like Austria, you already have many people who live here and pay taxes here and raise their kids here and cannot vote, because citizenship is prohibitively expensive and dual-citizenship is not permitted. So all those people don’t even get a chance to participate.
Yesterday was something called “Fat Cat” day in Austria, meaning by this date the top managers had already earned in 2024 what most people earn in a year. Or something like that. The local news published the top 10 earning Austrian CEOs (all male, no surprise there). All I can say looking at these figures is to see them in €50 Hofer cards. And then I fall off my chair. Unfortunately the whole “giving back to the community” talk hasn’t really taken over in Austria. Perhaps in part because of the crazy high taxes people pay here. These CEOs will all pay 50%+ taxes. Unfortunately, I have seen now in practice how red tape gets in the way of a lot of that aid reaching those who need it the most.
Turning to a more optimistic note, I was really pleasantly surprised with the media coverage of our recent ice skating event. First, the video report which was shown on the local TV news on Saturday evening (you may need an Austrian VPN to watch this), featuring the Ukrainian kids speaking German well! Second, a more in depth piece highlighting some of the ongoing issues I spoke about. Third, I saw this report yesterday evening about overcrowded Vienna schools clearly not coping with the number of new kids arriving who do not speak German. The first step towards addressing a problem is acknowledging that you have one. So this is a positive sign.
Back to the mundane…every day I receive more requests for help. Every day we send out more supermarket gift cards. As long as we have them, we distribute them.
This morning I was even contacted by a Ukrainian mother whose 14 year old daughter was a victim of a hit & run. Her note to me here. I am no lawyer and don’t know what to advise in such situations other than to point towards people who might know.
Sometimes when it rains, it pours.
Tomorrow I have been invited to join a really impressive group for a podcast on the war in Ukraine more broadly which will be filmed and posted online on Thursday. I will share the link when it is public! I am grateful to the media still giving this topic coverage. I know the world is sick of it. The Ukrainians themselves are sick of it. It is like a bad dream everyone is just waiting to wake up from.
In closing today, I would like to thank all of you so much who have continued to support my Substack as paid subscribers. I always felt very strongly about doing this work free of charge, so that it could be read and consumed more broadly. However, your paid subscriptions are the only source of income I have from my volunteer work (which is truly done on a voluntary basis, neither Mario nor I receive any compensation from Cards for Ukraine). Therefore when I have to show my sad little tax returns (my eldest is applying to college in the U.S. and the financial aid process is a special little nightmare in and of itself), the only income I have to show is from this little newsletter. If you appreciate the content and feel you could support another year, I would be most grateful. I will not adjust the subscription amounts for inflation (a businesswoman I am not), but I would appreciate to grow the number of paid subscribers. I will try in 2024 to expand into topics beyond Ukraine and do more news analysis of the kind I attempted to do today. I will also continue to bring the first person stories you all have told me you really enjoy reading.
And it goes without saying, thank you to everyone who has continued to support Cards for Ukraine. We never imagined our work would be still needed today. Sadly, it very much is.