My God, the last 14 days...
Two weeks ago, I was sitting in my office in Kharkiv, and had just gotten through mocking the Western media for saying Russia was going to invade Ukraine on 16 February. A few days later, after the Western media claimed Russia had already invaded Ukraine (by rolling uniformed troops into occupied Donbas to replace the disguised forces who had been pretending to be Ukrainians), I posted an article mocking this as well. Frankly, the notion that Vladimir Putin would be stupid enough to invade Ukraine -and thus begin a long and bloody war he hasn't got a snowball's prayer in Hell of winning, with very little to gain even if he somehow does manage- simply seemed surreal to me. A canny head of state who was clever enough to rise from rural schoolboy to spy to capital deputy mayor to dictator, had to be savvy enough to know there's no version of that scenario where he or his country wins, right?
And then the war began.
The last time I wrote (the last time I had both a moment to sit down and a stable internet connection, really) was 4 AM on Sunday morning, the beginning of day 4 of the war, and I haven't even really covered the days leading up to my departure for Poland. Truth be told, there isn't much to tell, though it sounds more consequential in print than it really is, so I'll print it.
First, getting drafted into a foreign army is a hell of an experience.
I spent the first two days of the war never quite sure if I was better off in my apartment (which, by virtue of being on a low floor with no walls facing toward a combat heavy area, was comparatively shielded) or the basement below, which was being used as a de facto shelter. I opted to believe my apartment was safer, but still went down to the shelter from time to time to see if an extra pair of arms and a strong back (well, "strong" compared to the little old ex-Soviet ladies who seem to make up 75% of Industrialnyii's population anyway) could be of use. It was during one of these trips to the shelter that the Ukrainian Army came through, rounding up every able-bodied male because what was described as a "full detachment" of Russian infantry were moving West on Moskovskii Prospekt. I didn't know how big a "detachment" was (it later turned out that it was the equivalent of about a platoon and a half in the US Army) but they weren't asking questions or names, or checking passports. AK's were handed out, and men were herded out and told where to point them.
And yeah, I was one of them.
...As I've said before, this wasn't my first experience with two way gunfire, but not being able to understand the orders of anyone around me made it absolutely otherworldly.
Have you ever been in combat?
Have you ever had your first language lesson by immersion in a foreign tongue?
Yeah, imagine having your first language lesson by immersion, in combat.
Anyway, after trading fire once and watching a lot of Russian corpses drop because they weren't expecting fire to come from apartment windows behind curtains, the NCO leading the Ukrainian Unit that rounded us up decided that a man who couldn't speak enough Ukrainian to understand orders or read reports (let alone relay them) was a liability rather than an asset, so I was released.
And by "released" I mean I was basically told "get the fuck out of here, Yankee."
So I took the time to give some basic guerrilla training to the rest of the men in that particular shelter (how to turn a molotov cocktail into a fragmentation grenade by duct taping an unused can of aerosol deodorant to the end opposite the fuse, with nails driven through the tape to provide extra shrapnel when the aerosol explodes) and went home to check the news. That was when I read the reports I mentioned in my former article, about the arrival of thermobaric artillery, and that was what made the decision for me that it was time to get out. I have no problem fighting for MY country, the US; or for my children's country, the Philippines. But to stick around and fight for someone else's country, is a bridge too far. The hardest decision, strangely enough, was not leaving behind the city that had become my home for the past year, or leaving behind friends who did not know from one day to the next if they'd live or die. It was leaving behind the collection of books I'd had to move Heaven and Earth to bring back from China.
But there was no way to avoid it.
So on Sunday morning, my girlfriend and I made a mad dash for Kharkiv Station, and that's when the real nightmare began.
Out Of the Frying Pan...
My life wouldn't be my life without bad timing. So of course, the first day when there was heavy fighting INSIDE the city of Kharkiv, was the day we were trying to drive across the city. We were fortunate, mostly. Though we encountered both Ukrainian tanks and Russian MRAP's, none of them were close enough to each other to be shooting at each other, but we rounded a corner once and found ourselves facing into a wall of AK-47 fire, which means there was something else less than 200m away behind us (no idea what). I didn't know if we were facing the Russian line with our backs to the Ukrainians or vice-versa. I'll confess I can't recall how we got through.
Once we got to the train station, we were told that scheduling and ticket sales systems were both down. The procedure for the trains was "they come when they come, they leave when it's safe, and getting on is free, if you can." The platform was not that crowded, because not many people were willing to risk leaving the illusion of safety in their homes, to drive through a warzone, to get on trains to an unknown country where they had nothing. As for me, I knew war, and I knew the experience of landing clueless and unconnected in a foreign country, and I wagered we had better chances with the latter.
In retrospect this might have been a bad move, but I digress.
After sitting on the platform with explosions rocking the entire city (we later found out the only Russian incursion had been six armored cars, and they were quickly destroyed with no survivors among their crews but the Russian artillery added some random and indiscriminate shelling to increase the fear factor and try to make the city surrender), we boarded a train to Lviv. The going was slow, we had to slow to a crawl often to avoid battle zones, and we were scheduled for a two minute stop (basically a smoke break) in Kyiv.
It goes without saying, this two-minute stop turned into knuckling down for several hours amid air-raid sirens as the Russian Air Force gave us a little "full-contact air show." Finally, we were rolling again and got to Lviv, nearly 24 hours after we got on the train to Kharkiv.
Lviv, was, a fucking, zoo.
In the first 3 days of the war, 750,000 refugees fled Ukraine, and every single one of them passed through Lviv, a city with a population of 720,000. Those numbers should serve as perspective.
The station was such a packed, chaotic mess that I felt like I was back in China. Nobody spoke a word of English and while I had been studying a little bit of Russian, I surmised this was the wrong time to be heard speaking Russian in Western Ukraine, so my girlfriend did all the talking. We managed to find that trains across the border were few and far between and that most people were either taking busses to the border or taking taxis to points near the border and walking. As regards the bus, we witnessed three stabbings in ten minutes by people scrambling to get on the bus (in all three cases the stabbers were speaking Turkish, interestingly), and we were each carrying a heavy bag so walking twenty to thirty kilometers didn't seem like a wise idea. We opted to take our chances with the trains.
My girlfriend warned me we might need to bribe our way onto the trains, and I answered that was fine. I had 25,000 Hryvnias in my pocket (a little under $1,000 USD at the exchange rate of the time) so I wasn't worried. I won't burden the reader with the entire ordeal and all the misinformation and misdirection we endured (we were scammed out of 4,000 Hryvnias by a man with Central Asian features and a shirt with Arabic writing on it and nearly got in his car before I told my girlfriend "something is fishy about this, let's stick with the train;" the man was later arrested for Human trafficking). Suffice it to say we finally managed to bribe our way onto a packed, congested, train to Poland. We had seats, but getting up to walk to the bathroom through the labyrinth of people piled on the floor was a thirty-five minute process one way.
Seven hours later, we were not yet at passport control. Considering Lviv is only a few kilometers from the border, this gave me pause. I finally got Google maps to load and found we had taken a question-mark-shaped route that took us halfway back to Kyiv on a curve leading up to Chelm, Poland. Passport control was a cursory affair. Basically, women's passports were not even checked and men were checked only to make sure we were not Ukrainian citizens trying to desert the country and avoid military service. After getting on the train at 13:30, we finally arrived in Chelm, at half past midnight.
...On Tuesday, 1 March: day 6 of the war, and exactly one year since the day I arrived in Kharkiv in the first place.
So This Is Poland
I will say this for the Polish border authorities. They went out of their way to be accommodating and welcoming, seeming to understand that everyone on the train had been through Hell. There was hot coffee and soup waiting for everyone once we cleared passport control on the Polish side, and free transport to a sports center that had been converted to a shelter. At the shelter, the cots were... well, as comfortable as mass produced fold-out cots can be expected to be, the blankets were warm, and there was food. And the food was actually good.
In fact, the cafeteria even had a supply of pet food for those who brought animals with them, which I thought was quite a thoughtful touch.
But it was only a place to crash for one night, because we had to be cleared out to make room for the next train load of refugees. Refugee shelters for the second night were scattered all over the place. At this point, since we did have some US dollars with us (and my girlfriend had a Polish bank account with some Polish money in it left over from her days as a university student in Warsaw) we opted to stop taking up space in the refugee system and hop a train to Warsaw to rent a place of our own.
The Warsaw skyline was decked out in more blue and gold than a cub scout banquet. Every skyscraper that had adjustable colored lighting was arrayed in Ukrainian blue and gold, and everywhere that the Polish flag flew, there was a Ukrainian flag beside it. Billboards with the Ukrainian crest and messages reading "Russian Warship, go fuck yourself," in Polish of course, were everywhere. But regardless of everyone's support, we needed to exchange Ukrainian money, and fast. And that's where we ran into a problem. NO exchange kiosks, ANYWHERE in Warsaw, seem to be accepting Ukrainian Hryvnias now. I had a month's pay about to hit my US account on Friday, but we had about $300 worth of Polish money to last until then, and an apartment here costs about $500 per month, if you're okay with a studio that's falling apart.
So...
My girlfriend called up her old friends in Warsaw and we, with bags in tow, spent three days bouncing from friend's couch to friend's couch, waiting on my paycheck to hit the bank so we could make the deposit on a rental flat. We finally got one on Thursday and were told they couldn't turn on the internet until Monday. The result? I have lost about a week and a half of work and one client.
But my neighbors have lost homes, relatives, and an entire city.
I didn't think it would come to this. Vladimir Putin has always been a bastard, but I always thought he was a rational enough bastard to realize that starting a major war was a bad move. Even without a single humanitarian bone anywhere in his body, I always believed he had enough brains to know where his own self-interests lay.
And this, was a huge, HUGE miscalculation on his part.
It caught me completely off guard. Not because I thought Putin was Human enough that he wouldn't do this, but because I thought he was sane enough to know what the consequences will be for him.
Then again, those consequences are somewhat contingent upon having a vertebrate in the White House, aren't they?
Who Benefits?
And here, in the background, I see Joe Fucking Biden.
Three weeks ago, Biden got NO respect. Even his own party was turning on him. Now, it's dangerous for anyone in America to criticize him. Why? Because he has managed to keep the "Trump was a Russian puppet" myth alive (despite Trump being the only man who kept Putin from invading sooner) so persistently that to even utter the name "Trump" right now is enough to make the entire media complex frame you as a "Russian sympathizer."
And all of his spineless, toothless gestures of "support" and "solidarity (which in truth do exactly fuck-all to actually help the people of Ukraine, or their troops who are fighting for their country and which, in fact, merely embolden Russia by reaffirming that he will continue to talk much and do little)," are held up in the Western media as if they were on par with the Feeding of the Five Thousand.
"How dare you criticize President Biden?! Just look at all the blue and gold ribbons his wife has decorated the White House with! Just look at how stern and strict his speech against Putin was! Why, he's the Champion of the Ukrainian People!"
By promising to support Ukraine in an invasion and then throwing them to the bear, he created an ongoing Humanitarian crisis, gave America a ready-made bogeyman to rally against, AND buried his political opponents by the myth of association with the aforementioned. Add in that he suddenly doesn't have to worry about anyone in Ukraine spilling the beans on his son's dirty dealings at Burisma (since most of those who knew anything are now either dead or homeless) and it was a big win for him.
But behind Joe Biden, I see the hand of his boss; Xi Jinping.
What is China getting?
For one thing, America's security promises look less and less meaningful right now, between the surrender in Afghanistan and the "We're with you all the way! ...Buh-bye now" approach to Ukraine, and this makes Southeast Asian nations feel less like they can rely on the US to protect them from China. For another, they're getting real-time, first-hand intelligence about what the Biden Misadministration's response (or lack thereof) will be to a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, or Vietnam, or Mongolia, or the Philippines, or a nuclear strike on Japan (like they have threatened on multiple occasions).
But most importantly, China gets the propaganda value of framing the US as the party who pushed for the war (and if one ignores the fact that Joe Biden is not the United States, they're not wrong), as well as the opportunity to set themselves up as a "peace broker." China is, at this very hour, attempting to arrange for Chinese-led talks between Ukraine, and their invader: Russia.
The Ukrainians are going to win the war. The amount of broken and shattered Russian military hardware lining the roads right now makes that abundantly clear.
But at what cost? It will take decades to rebuild after this war, and while Russia will almost assuredly be billed for a war indemnity, they're quite frankly too broke to pay it.
Russia will lose thousands of troops (at time of press the Ukrainian media is already reporting the deaths of some 5,000 Russian troops and the capture of well over 1,000 more, and that is on day 12 of the war), and their economy will be decimated by sanctions (the West finally managed to come up with some economic weapons they weren't already using and the Ruble has gone from 88 to one US dollar, to 128 to one US dollar, in the time since the war began). Their country's reputation will also be shattered, when they were only just beginning to finally shake off the stigma of the Soviet Union.
Europe will have to readjust its fuel market to account for no longer having Russia as a supplier (which the US could offset if that stupid sonofabitch Biden hadn't torpedoed the US's oil industry).
Southeast Asia will have to adjust to a world in which the US is too focused on Russia to do anything to protect them from China.
Indeed, the only winners I see here, will be Joe Biden, and his Chinese master, Xi Jinping.