Dispatch 003: War Kids
The impact Ukrainian conflict is having on young children; growing border crisis; and other news + updates from around Eastern Europe
Top Takeaways:
I recommend following Geopolitical Futures below. They are a good methodical counter to the mayhem that is the Twitter news cycle ↓
Ukrainians still hold control of their main cities of Kyiv, Kharkiv and Mariupol.
Russians appear to be making the most ground in Mariupol to choke Ukraine off from access to the Sea of Azov.
Putin has placed Russian nuclear forces on high alert. Some speculate he will place nukes on Belarus’s territory to further threaten West.1
Russian markets will get hit hard Monday when financial sanctions take effect.
Racism rears ugly head in Ukraine as African medical students are turned away from transit to EU-Ukrainian border.2
From my Ukrainian colleagues:
In Kyiv: We are patrolling the streets…looking for Russian sabatuers. They wear Ukrainian uniforms, with Ukrainian insignia to infiltrate our lines…they’ve even posed as medics.
In Chernihiv (north of Kyiv): We’re just waiting for the bombing to stop, but word is Belarus is sending more soldiers in…and we hear Chechens3 are coming as well.
In Western Ukraine: Families from all over Ukraine at settling in here waiting to figure out if they should try for the border or enlist to fight…it’s splitting many families apart…we welcome all Ukrainians…the feeling of unity, togetherness we’ve had has never been higher, but we need help.
War is always fought against children.
The EU estimates that over 7 million Ukrainians have been displaced as a result of Russia’s invasion in the past week alone, many of them children who should be in school, high school or college.
As if covid causing Ukrainian children to learn remote like the rest of the world wasn’t enough in 2020-2021, this will undoubtedly have repercussions on the psychological, emotional and social development of an entire generation that we’re barely beginning to understand.
War harming Ukrainian children is nothing new.
Since fighting broke out in the country’s eastern Donbas region in 2014 over 176 children have been killed as collateral damage - many via landmines placed on or near their schools and playgrounds. UNICEF estimates 430,000+ Ukrainian children already experienced psychologically damaging PTSD in just the isolated Donbas conflict between pro-Ukrainian and pro-Russian forces alone.
While it is still in the early days of the conflict, it is reasonable to assume there will be few (if any) children left unscathed by this conflict.
Early reports suggest at least a handful of children have been confirmed dead in the early days of the conflict, most gruesome instance being an apparent missile strike on a kindergarten in Kharkiv leaving 33 children wounded.
While the bulk of the fighting takes place in Ukraine’s largest cities, Kyiv and Kharkiv, life in smaller towns and villages for children is far from normal.
Schools have been let out on indefinite holiday following the start of hostilities as most schools have been converted to bomb shelters, field hospitals and ration centers.
“The very little ones have gone off to live with grandma or grandpa in the villages and on the farms, while the older children over 18 have gone off to fight” Natalia, my former Peace Corps counterpart in Zolochiv in Western Ukraine tells me.
Some families are heading to the border, but many are starting to reconsider.
“We still want to try for the border, but right now there are tens of thousands of families squished outside waiting days to be processed by border guards…we are trying to busy ourselves with making camouflage netting, preparing rations for soldiers, and helping the displaced Ukrainians who come to our town,” one of my former students tells me.
As word spreads of clogged railways and borders, more displaced Ukrainians are settling, at least temporarily, into Western Ukrainian towns and villages for the time being.
This refugee spillover doesn’t bother people in Zolochiv. “We’re ready to help them, feed them, house them - whatever they need we will give it. We’re all in this together,” Natalia tells me.
If you’d like to donate directly to Ukrainian families please DM me on Twitter or email me and I will set it up.
Aid agencies are great, but they take a lot of money off the top.
Further Reading…
A great piece by Yale History Professor, Timothy Snyder, who has spent decades studying Eastern Europe, the growth of fascism and Ukraine’s conflict. I think this can help put things into better perspective than the Twitter 1-2 second news cycle.
George Friedman, CEO of Stratfor, a geopolitical forecasting firm, predicted Putin’s move to reclaim Russia’s buffer states of Ukraine and Belarus nearly a decade ago in his book The Next 100 Years . Interestingly, he did not predict this move until the 2030s, or 2040s. If you’d like to understand the general outline of geopolitics for the next century, this is a good place to start.
Friedman’s premise is simple: Geography creates the fate that countries must live out, and its leaders merely announce it to their peoples. Stratfor did a series of short videos looking at the geopolitical challenges of Ukraine and Russia that I think are worth a 2 minute watch. Here is Ukraine’s, followed by Russia’s:
This will be focus of tomorrow’s dispatch, however: (a) Racism does exist in Ukraine (b) it is unlike American overt racism in that many Ukrainians, mostly older USSR generation, have rarely if ever encountered someone of African descent outside of Ukrainian medical student world (c) Many younger Ukrainians are much more tolerant and multicultural (d) African medical students have studies in Ukraine since Cold War years as an attempt by USSR to create USSR sympathy from Africa’s professional and upper class (e) Some of the best teachers I worked with were Nigerian medical students who helped partner with Peace Corps summer camp programs (f) Ukraine, in general, failed miserably at looking out for its international student population with India, China, and African nations filing grievances with Kyiv on lack information/support. More tomorrow.
Chechnya is a part of the Caucuses controlled by Russia notoriously used by the Russian military as shock troops unafraid of committing human rights abuses; Ukrainians dub them “Putin’s Orcs”