Found this photo in my camera roll from a spontaneous pre-pandemic trip to Prague. Must have been summer 2019. We found this tiny breakfast place serving only waffles and coffee and each cappuccino was a work of art.
It’s only Saturday but as I have some plans in the works (don’t want to jinx it but follow me on Twitter for updates), and my skiers have successfully and safely arrived in the mountains, I’d like to share with you what I’ve been reading the past day or so because there is just so much incredible reporting at the moment.
China
I caught the first half hour of the opening ceremonies because I happened to be home and my husband happened to turn on the TV. It was completely surreal, the entire spectacle: the freezing cold, empty stadium, Xi and Putin sitting alone (masked and massless, respectively) the masses of perfectly choreographed performers and the stunning but somehow creepy visual effects, the Chinese flag raising by people dressed to represent the variety of nationalities living in China. All I could think of was the concentration camps for Uyghurs the world has known about for years but no one has done anything about because, well, it’s China.
For a more on what has been happening inside China to the country’s Muslims, read this shocking firsthand account. I also remember listening to a series of podcasts years ago, and I still remember exactly where I was when I learned what was happening inside China right now and then understood the western world would do absolutely nothing about it.
One may ask, and rightly so, why let China host these games? Well, no one wanted to host them, and the runner up was Almaty, where the government was shooting live rounds at protestors in January. Of course no one knew that at the time. The Olympics are a spectacle. A spectacle that plays right into the kind of shows authoritarian fascist leaders like to put on. But we know this, from history. And yet…it repeats itself.
I was fascinated to learn there is an economic angle behind the games, namely to encourage Chinese citizens to take up winter sports. A fascinating thread on that idea here, something Austrian entrepreneurs involved in winter tourism and sports should be playing close attention to:
Personally, I haven’t been able to snap out yet of the realisation that my children’s generation will have only one country telling all the others what to do and it will be China. Not the U.S., certainly not Europe, Russia is only having a temporary main character moment on account of Putin’s show of force, which it can’t maintain forever.
China is the future, with all of the good, bad, and downright scary that implies. Listen to this podcast on their “high tech / low tech” zero covid approach. It is absolutely shocking. I keep thinking of a mom I once met whose son already spoke German, English, and Russian fluently and had been spending every summer since a very young age perfecting his Mandarin. They would even fly a teacher over to Austria from China because air pollution had made summer visits to China unpleasant. As one does. Anyway, that kid must be about 18 by now and I am just asking myself over and over, what did that mom know then that the rest of us didn’t? How did she know?
Russia/Ukraine crisis
Joshua Yaffa of The New Yorker on why no one really knows what comes next:
Anne Applebaum in The Atlantic on what drives Putin’s worldview (TL:DR past trauma) and why, in her opinion, he would risk war to defend it:
Jack Crosbie in Rolling Stone on what war really means for the people in Ukraine caught in the crossfire:
Yaroslav Trofimov for the WSJ from the Russian-controlled areas of Ukraine. Eight years of nothingness, frozen in time, at huge cost to those who chose to stay:
Andrew Roth of The Guardian on the old KGB men who surround Putin:
The New York Times (to be read with a grain of salt) on troop build ups and what they might mean. The Crimean information was new to me, and as was pointed out today by Michael Kofman, you don’t keep men in tents indefinitely; morale tends to go south quickly.
Finally, this English translation from Spiegel on what Russians near the border with Ukraine think and who they blame:
Schröder joins Gazprom board
Trump was famous for the Friday evening massacres in terms of news dumps. On Friday evening, the news emerged that Germany’s most infamous ex-chancellor Gerhard Schröder has been named to replace Nazarbayev’s son in law, Timur Kulibayev, on the Gazprom board of directors, which is, quite a big deal for a 77 year old who appears to have proven his unwavering loyalty to the Kremlin. I imagine this will be quite the scandal in Germany as society begins to slowly process what this represents.
In brief
Erdogan has Omicron after visiting Kyiv and therefore won’t be able to meet Putin anytime soon. The Kremlin didn’t hesitate to remind the world where the Turkish leader probably picked up his covid infection:
Macron is due to visit Moscow and Kyiv this week, with Scholz planning to do the same the following week. I am keeping the date February 20 in the back of my head, as that was rumoured a few weeks ago in one of the local reports from the Russian side of the DNR border, and is also the official end date of the joint “exercises” between Russia and Belarus.
On the covid front, one of the advisors to the Danish government has written an op-ed for the New York Times arguing a country’s choice of strategy may actually be less important than its ability to get people to follow along. Just think about how much damage has been done in Austria with the mixed messaging, musical chairs of ministers and chancellors, vaccine mandate that isn’t really a mandate but sort of is, and all we have is meh vaccine uptake, Omicron raging, and neo-Nazis still marching. If there is a solution I would love to hear it.
This really resonated with me:
Two camps, entrenched, neither willing to unclench its fists. It didn’t have to be like this but unfortunately it is where many western societies are at this moment in the pandemic, with no real end in sight.
I wish you all a lovely weekend and do follow along for what I hope may be some interesting updates next week if all goes according to my very last minute and not at all thought through plan…stay tuned and happy reading.