With the summer vacation season just around the corner, many Russians will presumbly be glad to stock up on some patriotic flip-flops for their holiday in the sun:
Christopher Miller's piece for Mashable on Ukrainian combatants dealing with post-traumatic stress disorder is well worth a read:
Natalie Nougayrede has written an excellent piece for The Guardian gauging the mood in Poland in light of the Ukraine crisis. Here's a taster:
The train was trundling through the Warsaw suburbs towards the north-west. It was Easter weekend, and many travellers were on their way to family gatherings in the provinces. I shared the carriage with an elegantly dressed young Polish woman, who had studied in Birmingham and spoke fluent English. She now worked in Warsaw as a translator of Polish films. When I mentioned to her that in 2018 Poland would celebrate the centenary of its independence, she smiled hesitantly and said: “Yes … maybe we will get there.”
Nothing paints as poignant a picture of Europe’s history as a journey across this country, whose borders have shifted so many times and lands have been carved up so ruthlessly that it nearly disappeared from the map. It was a key battleground for two world wars, the scene of horrendous crimes, then became trapped for four decades behind the iron curtain. Today, Poland is the continent’s economic growth champion, a genuine success story of post-communist transition. But understandably, it is not free of anxieties.
Russia’s aggression against neighbouring Ukraine has changed almost everything. Poland is deeply concerned about its national security and about the degree of solidarity its western allies are able – and willing – to demonstrate. This anxiety is not limited to the ruling class, or politicians. It is deeply felt by the population. On 10 April, Poland will commemorate the fifth anniversary of the plane crash in Smolensk that killed its then president and 95 other Poles, many of whom belonged to the military and defence elite – a traumatic episode that was made worse by Russia’s refusal to authorise the return of the wreckage. All this explains why the woman on the train made nervous jokes about Poland making it to that anniversary unscathed.
From afar – from London, Paris or Berlin – there is still a tendency to see Poland as something of a backwater, a place of rich culture but essentially an economic hinterland for Germany’s powerful industry, a country of low salaries whose youth stream out in search of better paid jobs (2.2 million Poles live in other EU countries, some 600,000 of them in the UK). One hears western officials comment off the record that the Poles, along with the Baltic people, are a bit paranoid about Russian aggression and too obsessed with their historic grievances. It’s crazy to think Vladimir Putin would attack Poland, say these westerners.
But Poland got one thing right: it never believed in “the end of history”, Francis Fukuyama’s 1989 formula proclaiming the inevitable triumph of liberal democracy over ideology. This scepticism led Poland to push extremely hard for admittance to Nato and the EU, both seen as virtual life insurance policies for the nation. The profound transformation Poland has undergone, sometimes through painful shock therapy, has not only been a matter of improving living standards, but comes from a desire to cement its national security. In 1989, its GDP per capita was around 5% of the western European average. Today it’s 70%.
Nato has tried to send reassuring signals, for example by, for the first time, conducting military exercises in Poland
“Poland is a fundamentally vulnerable country because it has no natural barriers against more powerful countries in the east and west, which was a curse in our history,” says former foreign minister Radek Sikorski. Now president of the Polish parliament, he describes the profound shifts that have occured in his country as follows: “In 1989, all of our neighbours changed, and we found ourselves with benign neighbours”. Russia withdrew its troops and didn’t oppose Poland’s integration with the west. Germany became a friend. In the last 25 years, we have used this historical window rather well – to modernise, integrate with the west and build a new society. But this was predicated on international circumstances that are now being challenged by the first forceful changing of borders on the European continent since the second world war.
Read the entire article here
Good morning. We'll start the live blog this morning with some footage that appears to have been taken overnight in Kharkiv. With the Ukrainian parliament passing a bill banning Soviet-era symbols on April 9, it seems that some youths took the law into their own hands and destroyed three monuments in the eastern city. From the looks of things, it appears that the authorities didn't do too much to interfere either (see 2:05 mins):
We are now closing the live blog for today. Until we resume again tomorrow, you can follow our ongoing Ukraine news coverage here.