I don’t know exactly how long it has been, I can only say that writing this has become a bit of a burden which hangs over me in the back of my mind, and every day that passes that I don’t manage to put any thoughts to paper (screen), it feels like there is even more to cover once I finally force myself to sit down in front of my laptop for longer than it takes to order something on Amazon.

This summer I was lucky in that I managed to go to the beach a few times. My holidays are now over, and I had to literally sit on my hands to stop myself from buying another flight this weekend, so strong is the pull to jump into saltwater as July turns to August. Thankfully, the Ryanair algorithm smelled what I was up to, and increased the price so much that I would have been crazy to click, and instead, I am trying to survive another heatwave without A/C (but with some kind of cooling system, so I am really not suffering, at least not yet).

I snapped this beach shot on a very hot day a few weeks ago in France, where I was hosted by a friend, and after a very hot, expensive, and delicious lunch, where all the customers appeared to be either Americans or Russian-speakers because who else can afford Antibes these days. We walked a few yards over to the “free” beach which offers exactly nothing in terms of comforts, save for a tiny bar with about three tables and five chairs. Personally, I’ll take the rocky Adriatic anyday over the sands of the Mediterranean, but clearly there are those who are happy to plop down an umbrella anywhere, and who can blame them. I was actually surprised by one thing in France — I found their supermarkets, even in the expensive south, to be cheaper than ours in Austria, and not just wine — everything. I was also in some kind of heaven walking through the aisles of a “normal” French pharmacy. For all the talk of European socialism, it was interesting to see just how much we perhaps suffer here in Austria as consumers in a small country with an overregulated market dominated by oligopolies. I really didn’t expect to notice such a difference in the prices of basic food items.

But I digress.

In France I had the opportunity to speak with some people who are still living in Russia, and/or recently visited Moscow. The mood, from all accounts, is bleak. The petrol shortages are real, the attacks on Wildberries’ warehouses continue (Russia’s homegrown Amazon which also acts as a point of distribution for individual sellers, imagine Etsy shops using Amazon warehouses to store their goods), and rumors swirl about more mobilization (I think personally this is likely), and other more far-fetched internet plots (imho) such as a potential run on banks or the introduction of exit visas. For those Russians who managed to leave Russia and get Schengen visas, the process has become very challenging. You have to enter Europe via the country which granted the visa, then switch planes to your final destination, all while not cancelling your fake hotel reservation until the last second, so as not to risk “deportation” for not adhering to the visa rules. None of this was ever a factor a decade ago.

Small sellers turned to social media to explain they had quietly been asked to accept new terms and conditions from Wildberries about two weeks before the attacks began, in which Wildberries said it was not responsible for third party damage to goods stored in their warehouses, and small sellers would not be compensated for damages. Sellers then complained they were not even allowed to try and rescue what was left of their inventories sitting in the warehouses. Today I saw a video put out by Wildberries’ CEO (Russia’s first female self-made dollar billonaire, by the way) calling it an attack on all of Russia, not naming Ukraine but the message being clear.

Russians who did not leave in 2022, not because they supported the war in Ukraine, but most often because the idea of leaving was insurmountable, they owned real estate, worked in professions which were not easily transferrable abroad (a manicurist has a much better chance of starting over vs. a corporate lawyer, etc.), are now starting to feel like the clock is ticking a lot faster. If you think you are leaving for good, your net worth is tied up in your apartment, which you need to sell, and then you have to figure out how to get the money out of Russia, legally, and legalize it in Europe. I was told this is possible via Turkey or Kazakhstan, but imagine for a second the cortisol levels of just making these transfers, your whole life savings, floating from country to country. And then think about saying goodbye to everything you have ever known, learning a new language, figuring out how to survive economically, all mid-age, perhaps also not with perfect health. One person I spoke with is a cancer survivor.

The online communities in Serbia and to a lesser extent, Montenegro, are preparing for a new wave of Russians (tiny Montenegro introduced visas for Russians and Belarussians from November 1 as part of their future EU-joining steps). I cannot help but think about how huge Russia is and how tiny these Balkan countries are in comparison, and that their economies also surely cannot absorb everyone who has had enough and wants to leave but doesn’t know how to emigrate to a country which requires a visa.

I was scrolling this week and saw the most upsetting video of Putin actually making a joke (which fell flat, obviously, in front of a stunned audience of military officers), “if we were to end the Special Military Operation, what would we even do with ourselves?”. What is a game for him to counteract old age boredom has cost millions of lives and has no gone on longer than World War I. It is mind-boggling to me to think this might go on for even another year…even the president of Kazakhstan said to Putin’s face, during a public appearance about a week ago, that it is time to end the war. It was a bold statement from one of Russia’s relatively close allies.

Obviously the Ukrainians with whom I speak with are in Europe already. In the back of everyone’s minds is that no one in Ukraine wants to think about surviving another winter the way last winter played out, with freezing temperatures and hits to key energy infrastructure. This morning, it was reported that nine people died in Kyiv overnight as Russia attacked Kyiv with ballistic missles, and only one was shot down. It feels like now is more dangerous than ever to be in Ukraine, it must be exhausting on a level which is indescribable to live with the threat of being attacked in your sleep for years. Zelensky recently fired both the very popular minister of defense and the quite unpopular head of the army. The only constants appear to be both the war and Zelensky, make of that what you will.

Europe is quietly also tightening the screws. After March 2027, it will no longer grant temporary protection to Ukrainian men of age to serve in the military (although Europe has said it will not send back those already here). In Austria, the government voted to remove child benefits from July from those Ukrainians still on basic payments (I suppose the incentive here is to drive everyone to paid work, but it is essentially pulling the rug out from moms of young kids who for a myriad of reasons may not be able to work full time). Like everywhere, I suppose, those with a little financial cushion have some wiggle room, those who don’t have anything to fall back on are in very precarious positions. I see on a nearly daily basis posts from people looking to rent rooms for rental budgets which haven’t existed in Vienna since pre-2022.

I saw a post on social media today from an old friend from Russia, who is openly gay, left by walking across the northern border with Norway from Murmansk as soon as the war started, gave up a rather lucrative career as a corporate conference / event planner, moved to Spain, established residency, learned Spanish in a whirlwind despite not really knowing English, and is now working in a restaurant in a major Spanish city. He is renting a room without A/C with at least half a dozen flatmates. This is four years post-emigration. That is the realty of starting over, middle aged, in this economy, with wages where they are in Europe. He is not complaining. He filmed a morning yoga class in a public square on his way to work, all smiles, only hoping the fan he ordered will arrive soon.

We are sweltering again, and it is not for the faint of heart. There is a very good episode of The Daily on Europe and the heat. In early July, my type B daughter (I say this with love…I was once very Type A and am now more of a B+) told me she was invited to stay with a friend for a few days in August, and was googling flights to Bordeaux, the nearest airport. At the time, I didn’t think anything of it. She spent €300 of her own hard-earned babysitting money on the flight. And then the wildfires started. And all of a sudden, she is planning on flying into what sounds like a horrible situation. As a mom, your heart sort of stops, like, do you really have to? Are you sure it’s safe? Their area, and the drive there? How do we even know what it will be like in a week? Every day a new part of Europe is burning, and each week we are setting new heat records that cities cannot cope with. The trams, at least the ones I was unlucky to get on this week, half of them are still not air conditioned, and it is like riding in a literal tin sauna with only tiny windows cracked. I never before have paid so much attention to walking on the shady side of the road. There are reports that so many people have been swimming in the Old Danube that it is now also polluted with both urine and sun cream. Lovely.

As one kid considers flying away, I have the other two kids on opposite continents, one still in Asia, having, what she told me yesterday, is “the best month of my life”, due to finally come home on Friday. My eldest will be home for all of six hours exactly two weeks from today, which is just crazy, as he trades summer job in NYC for a semester in Asia. I feel like a travel agent and an ATM and a long-distance absentee parent this summer, and it is not for the faint of heart. It is a really weird sensation, this idea that they are managing life, the ups and downs, the good and bad, but especially during summer, which used to be our time together, without you. I am finding myself strangely sentimental about not being a part at all of their experiences, while being immensely proud of how they are navigating the world beyond what I showed them.

My WhatApp just went off with a photo from Rhode Island.

A few hours ago it was from Seoul.

I know my biggest accomplishment by far, it sounds silly, but it is true, is raising three wonderful, smart, empathetic, worldly young adults. Perhaps part of my mental block of late is also repositioning myself for this next phase of life. My identity as mom was so first and foremost for so long that I am a little lost without it. I mean, I have always been reinventing myself one way or another (very ADHD of me, unmedicated, naturally), but mothering was a constant. You still mother, of course, just not as intensely, and so much is outside of your control.

Ah yes…what to read. First, this bombshell of an article by the WSJ about Trump’s fundraising from the White House calling corporate America for donations. Gift article here:

‘The Boss Wants This Money’: Inside Trump’s Unprecedented Fundraising Operation

I did manage recently to read quite an addictive little book which I discovered by accident when trapped by a summer thunderstorm next to a bookshop with a decent English-language section. Now Lolita-themes are not my normal choice but the writing is very sharp, observant, the pace fast, the characters believable, and it just sort of comes together in the way that a good TV show does and draws you in.

I have also been trying, far less successfully, to get through a history of Russia via its forests, and I have to honest, while there are a lot of interesting tidbits scattered throughout, especially about writers like Tolstoy and Chekhov, I am having a hard time followig the throughline, and frankly, finishing. But that might be more my attention span at the moment and not a reflection of the quality of the research nor the writing.

I did manage to go to the cinema, twice! I absolutely loved The Odyssey and I went in completely blind because if we did read it in high school English in public school in Arizona in the early 1990s, I don’t remember a thing. The three hours flew by and I was really engaged and thought it was all excellent. Maybe it is also just staring at the sea on the screen, and the cliffside scenery, it was all just gorgeously shot. Stunning.

I also saw The Invite which is a bit like seeing an off-Broadway play on a screen instead of a tiny theater. In this case, I think a tiny theater would have given it the intimacy it deserved. It was well acted but a difficult watch if you have ever had a relationshp fall apart (who hasn’t) or been through a divorce. I kind of left feeling worse than when I came in, and these days, I need entertainment which serves as escapism.

I think that just about covers the thoughts floating in my head these past few weeks. I really do feel badly about losing focus, but I also don’t want to force words down which don’t have any feelings behind them. What would be the point of that? I would never want to waste neither my readers’ nor my own time. So please bear with me, and thank you, as I work out what this blog is (and isn’t). I also really appreciate your comments on the last post. I have given the shots a rest, and I do feel better, although I realize it never is just one thing, is it?

p.s. this photo was taken before the brutal heat kicked in — I do hope Vienna’s horses are finally getting a rest. They are not supposed to be working when it is mega hot, but every year you see them being dragged out in already questionable temperatures, unfortunately.

As some of you may have noticed (or perhaps not, lol), I have been absent here. I don’t have any good excuses, really. Nothing big happened. It wasn’t simply laziness on my part, although surely that too played a role. I reached a point earlier this summer when I felt like I genuinely didn’t have anything of any value to say, so I stopped writing, hoping that inspiration would eventually come. I cannot say that it has, but the grey cloud, for lack of a better term, has passed. I think I can attribute the grey cloud to several factors, most of them personal. So my apologies in advance if today’s post is a little different from my usual.

In April a friend of mine offered to give me a GLP-1 pen she had lying around. Microdose with it, she said, you will feel great and the weight will come off. It sounded appealing, although to be fair, before April, I had done a pretty decent job on my own of figuring out mid-life weight maintenance by adjusting my diet and being more aware of my food choices. In my case, this meant eliminating gluten, for the most part, and trying to watch sugar consumption. I would make exceptions for holidays and celebrations. It wasn’t a magic pill, but it helped. The pen appeared in my fridge, and I started to use it, tiny doses, after my 50th birthday in April.

It was really interesting in that you really do immediately lose the hunger sensation. The problem, though, at least in my case, is you are left with this feeling which is something akin to morning sickness, feeling slightly naueseous, and when you feel like that, the only thing you want to eat is bread. I kept up with the microdosing for a few months, and I did feel slightly slimmer and as if I was eating less, but my choices were certainly not as healthy as they were before I started using the GLP-1.

In my case, it took me a few months to realize what I was actually feeling. Alongside a reduced interest in food, I experienced a reduced interest in nearly everything that brings simple pleasure in life. I didn’t really want that glass of wine, I didn’t really want to make any social plans, and suddenly, that motivation, that makes you sort of go through the motions of life in the hope that trying new things will also be rewarding, it was gone. Gradually, over time, I didn’t feel like doing anything. It was so subtle that it took me months to pinpoint the feeling. At first I figured it was just stress. But I recently stopped using the GLP-1, ahead of going on holiday, the logic being, I want to be able to enjoy what I eat and drink while I am there, and within a week, not only did my hunger cues come back (with roaring force), but also I suddenly felt like I might be ready to take a few risks and start a few new projects or at least get off my couch without the feeling that everything is just a collosal waste of time.

So here I am, weeks later, finally mustering up the desire to open the computer and put some words to screen, telling myself that it is ok and everyone needs a break every now and then. Although in my case, I really have no actual excuse for needing a break. I just lost the desire to do the things that usually in the past had brought me joy. So for now, I will leave the rest of the injection pen in the fridge, and will try to manage my diet the old-fashioned way, and the hunger pains I will take as a sign of being alive and my body reminding me that food is also fuel, not just an annoyance to be muted. I think many of us, especially women, especially of a certain age, are just super sensitive to any kind of medication or hormones, and perhaps I am just in the minority, and it is ok that I learned this through experimentation.

The other thing I have been dealing with recently is the transition of your kids becoming adults and no longer needing you in the same way. For me, much of motherhood was micromanaging daily life so my kids could achieve their goals and I could make their home life as comfortable as I thought necessary. This summer, I watched my second child graduate high school (after a very challenging year health-wise, and thankfully, she pulled it all off, passed her exams, and the celebration was a genuine sense of relief for all involved), sent my oldest back to the U.S. for. a summer job in New York, living alone, another step towards adulthood beyond a college campus, and put my youngest, BY HERSELF, on two large airplanes, first to Abu Dhabi, then to Seoul, where she is now living with a Korean host family and studying Korean for a month. She is 15. I nearly had a heart attack saying goodbye and watching her plane, refreshing flightradar etc every half an hour. She sounds happier than I have ever heard her, and is navigating daily life in a totally new culture just fine without me. My eldest is managing adult problems, like his first employer not paying him on time, for weeks, just fine without me. My middle child, while physically present, has already started a summer job and is also managing just fine without me. I even joined her this week to try and “help” fix a problem at the bank with her card, and reader, she didn’t need me. I was simply in the way.

All of this is a big adjustment. You define yourself for two decades as the person raising little humans into big humans and then one day the only thing they need from you is a copy of your credit card and to know where their passport is. You send text messages, keeping track of the time difference (one is seven hours ahead, the other six hours behind). You know you should be happy they are managing so well, and remember when you were 16 and you went away for a whole summer, and there was no WhatsApp and your mom couldn’t track your flight online (side note — I do know understand why a Valium prescription suddenly appeared back in the day, upon my dad’s encouragement, so my mom could have pills to stop her from ‘worrying so much’).

One thing I have learned from all the Ukrainians I have met here in Vienna since the war in Ukraine began is how ordinary people can and do cope with extraordinary change. Normally I think of myself as someone who is particularly good in a crisis — but this isn’t a crisis. It is a fundamental shift. A new era. And it will probably take some time to get used to it, to define myself anew, and I know I should give myself some grace during the process, hence, when I really felt Iike I didn’t have anything to say, I just went quiet.

This summer in Europe, aside from the lovely distraction of the World Cup (those soccer games have been like balm for my soul, I cannot explain it, but I really have looked forward to them), we have been dealing with extreme heat and the culmination of years of governments ignoring problems (no air conditioning in many public spaces, including schools and hospitals). One weekend in June it was 40C in downtown Vienna (right around when Paris was absolutley melting, the first time). My only solution was to spend money I didn’t really have and go to Croatia for the weekend, where we could swim in the sea and be in A/C in a hotel. My youngest was still supposed to go to school on Monday, and it was only on Sunday at 8pm that the powers that be decided to quietly, rather unofficially, cancel a field trip which they had fully intended to take to visit the army (yes really) in 38C with no shade. The problem with cultures who did not grow up with extreme heat is they lack respect for it. In Arizona, in the 80s, if your A/C broke, you checked into a hotel, because living without A/C wasn’t an option. The rest of the week the kids melted in school, and even after it cooled down, the best politicians could come up with was well let’s cancel sports classes on hot days and written tests. They still haven’t even figured out how to legally have “heat days” off from school much like snow days in America. There is no proposal on the table to install universal A/C in schools or hospitals. It is really a disgrace. I have no other words for it. Ignoring it isn’t going to fix anything, and the vulnerable will suffer.

A few weeks ago I was asked to translate for a 90 year old Ukrainian man who is living in a pensioners’ home run by the city of Vienna (refugee housing, but not only for refugees). The only A/C in the buildling was on the ground floor in the common areas. The bedrooms themselves were sweltering. It was a very distburing experience. I left shocked and upset by what I had seen. A friend told me about a relative who was taken to hospital due to a health condition which deteriorated in the heat, and that hospital’s emergency room also didn’t have A/C. There is no excuse, and yet, at least in Austria, I doubt anything will really change. After all, the very well paid politicians surely all have their little covert A/C units in their homes and offices in the first district. Many North Americans do not understad that there are legal bans on installing the units in many places. Your neighbor can actually sue you for noise pollution and win, forcing you to remove your box. You cannot hang a box on a protected buildling. Ironically, eastern Europe is light years ahead in this regard because you will see boxes everywhere. I noticed them even in the old town of Dubrovnik that weekend, tucked under balconies and along side walls.

Beyond the heat, Vienna has also decided this summer will be the summer of repairing every single public transport line we have. I exagerrate, but not really. So suddenly trips which normally take 30 minutes now take an hour. I used to love to say how great it is that you do not need to own a car in Vienna, but frankly, this summer, I am biting my tongue. I got in a few days of driving on a short holiday to Montenegro (despite our misadventures last summer, it is my forever love, and I cannot stay away). The country is preparing to join the EU in 2028 (they even wrote so much on their planes), and frankly, I think they will manage. This year I heard so many English speakers, a lot less Russian, and it suddenly felt like the distance/gap between it and neighboring Croatia was not nearly as palbable as it had been in previous years. It was almost too civilized, I kept pinching myself, waiting for something to go terribly wrong. It did not. Everything was great. As we were leaving passport control, the officer handed our passports back to my daughter and I, and wishes us a good day in the local language, referring to us as “kittens”. I giggled. So not totally EU-compliant, yet.

The discourse out of Russia has been interesting in recent months. Ukraine has been prolificly targeting Russian refineries and energy sector targets, hitting cities deep inside Russia. This has resulted in a gasoline crisis, which the government can no longer hide from the population. Add on top of that growing fears about a new round of mobilization, and frustration with internet blockages and the like, and there appears to be a new wave of Russians preparing to leave their country. But unlike those who left in 2022, mainly because they were against Russia’s war in Ukraine and feared being drafted (often, both), those who are leaving now, or making plans to leave, are doing so because they have been inconvenienced by the new circumstances of living in a country which is actively at war. I watched Russians line up in Montenegro at the tiny airport, filling planes to Yerevan and Istanbul, taking connecting flights to get back to Russia, choosing Montenegro in part because so much of the rest of Europe is no longer accessible to them (Montenegro, unlike the Schengen zone, is still visa-free for Russians, but many except this to change in fall 2026). Even leaving Russia is far harder now than it was back in 2022.

So far, there have only been regional rumors of police rounding up young men and essentially forcing them to sign contracts to serve in the Russian army. Yesterday, I listened to a podcast in Russia which advised young men to actually lie and say they are HIV positive, for example, to avoid being forced to sign a contract. If you piece together drone attacks, gasoline shortages, VPN issues, lack of foreign travel, and an uncertain economic situation, it is no wonder that many Russians are now reconsidering their decisions to stay, even if in 2022 they concluded they didn’t need to leave, at least not yet. Mothers of boys are particularly vocal onine too about their own thought processes of needing to get their sons out of Russia before they turn 18.

I honestly do not know where all these Russians will go, because countries like Serbia and Montenegro are already quite “full”, Europe isn’t making it particularly easy to apply for visas, and other neighboring countries like Georgia and Armenia offer limited economic opportunities. Of the Russians I know personally who left in 2022, those who are doing the best are those who chose to fully integrate themselves, learn local languages, get local jobs, and accepted the fresh start for what it was — a new opportunity rather than a pause button after which they would go back to their old lives.

This summer in Ukraine has been particularly deadly, with Russia continuing to batter civilian targets. The news is grim, and it isn’t clear if there is any reprieve in sight. On an international level, Ukraine feels like a forgotten topic, as the world watches Iran, again, and the geriatric circus in Washington (very much Brezhnev-era vibes coming out of American politics these days). Today everyone is talking about Zelensky’s surprising firing of the young reformer who had only been running Ukraine’s defense ministry for six months, but by nearly all measures was doing a good job, especially in the areas of drones and the like. Many Ukrainians online are really upset about this, and see this as another example of Zelensky bending to internal political forces rather than making the decisions which would be best for Ukraine.

Here is also a very detailed, just published recap about the firings in Ukraine:

I would love to share with you some book and film recommendations, but unfortunately during this phase when I could not motivate myself to write, I also could not really motivate myself to consume art, either. I cannot remember the last time I simply fried myself on a beach without a book, but that is what I have done so far this summer. Perhaps my brain just needed peace. Who knows. I do hope it comes to an end soon because I do feel lacking intellectually, as if my brain muscles might atrophy. Replacing them with good old fashioned mom anxiety, from thousands of miles away, doesn’t feel like an upgrade. A friend of mine recently suggested an antidepressant to which I replied no thanks, I need to feel my stress in order to be able to act upon it. Which is true, to a point. I don’t actually feel depressed, rather just disappointed that everywhere you look, things are going, well, not great. Even as recently in 2022 when we started Cards for Ukriane, I still believed in happy endings. I still thought Ukraine would manage to win. Now the only question seems to be when will the violence end, both for civilans and soldiers. Looking around at the world economy, I am not sure I would have made the same decision to have three kids like I did two decades ago. I worry about their futures.

But then sometimes, like when I am stuck in a line in an airport, I look around, and observe the young people who are going to be taking over, hopefully soon, from my generation. They are inspiring, optimistic, fast, and flexible. I literally cannot wait until they get a chance to do things better. In fact, that is one of the few things I really see in a positive light these days. I love talking to young people, to my kids’ friends and classmates, and I cannot wait until the gray hairs of my generation start to pass the batons. As for the white hairs, I keep telling myself, even the aging autocrats are human, and even modern medicine cannot keep them alive forever.

Thanks for reading, and for your patience, as I try to adjust to my brain rewiring itself via my stomach (who knew?!).

p.s. an update for you on V — we were together to see her oncologist last week and it was amazing to see how much better she is doing physically thanks to the chemo. She can walk now further without immediately getting tired and is no longer coughing all the time. So the medicine is clearly helping, thankfully. She is also applying for long-term disability payments, essentially like extended sick leave as she can no longer work due to the cancer treatment. This will likely take months to be approved but it is light at the end of the tunnel in terms of at least being able to pay her share of her rent.

Europe is in the midst of a heatwave which shows now end in sight. I will spare you the weather forecast in Celsius for Vienna for the next ten days or so. It is brutal, and even more so when you think about the majority of people who have no A/C at home, and all the poor kids who have to sit in incredibly hot classrooms because some idiot decided school needs to end in July this year, adding an extra week onto the academic calendar. This mom will be using sick days as needed, because let’s be real — no learning is happening in these temps indoors, and if the politicians and bureaucrats failed to make any changes because of historic buildlings, “it’s only hot for a few days each year” and other delusional BS, I am not willing to tell my kid she has to sit there and melt. This Wednesday is the senior prom, which in Austria means families attend too, and I found myself frantically googling the venue to see if it is has A/C, and then still picking up a new floor-length flowy dress off the clearance rack today rather than melt in my go-to ballgown built for winter.

Yesterday, two adult men drowned swimming in the Danube. I also swam in the Danube this weekend — in those locations designated for swimming without a current (they are offshoots of the Danube, like man-made small lakes, to be more precise). I don’t understand how anyone could drown except if they went in the water as non-swimmers, not understanding the depth. I did see one family doing this on Saturday, with a boy of ten who clearly did not know how to swim, and it scared the crap out of me. Honestly. Then a giant group of Ukrainians showed up and started cannonballing themselves into the water one after the other, shouting at the top of their lungs, and it took all my composure to hold my breath and not go full Karen on them, to not explain that as guests in Austria part of the deal is that we do not yell at the top of our lungs in public and get everyone else wet who simply wanted to sunbathe on the pier in peace.

In other words, the heat affects all of us, and I do hope one day soon those in charge will finally understand the connection between central and northern Europe’s resistance to A/C and its socio-economic impact. I read recently that even Vienna’s famous public housing (apartments owned by the city, provided to low income renters as a non-market rent, waitlists for years, a certain amount of cronyism does play a role in acquiring a lease, many are lived in by recent immigrants who qualify) finally caved and said that A/C will be allowed to be installed at the owners’ expense and provided they use an approved company. Can you see the kickbacks? All of this fuss is because authorities do not want the ugly A/C boxes dangling outside of buildlings. So we just melt inside pretty buildings instead. Nearly. Paris seems to be even worse at the moment. I am slightly obsessed with the videos of all the kids jumping off the bridges into the green-looking Seine. When it is this hot with no reprieve at home, at work, or at school, it is unrealistic to think an economy can keep on humming. I have been in hospitals in Vienna that are not fully airconditioned. To me, in 2026, that is unacceptable. I wonder how many more of these brutal summers, which are now the norm, it is going to take to see some actualy changes. I am not holding my breath.

Interestingly, I do not actually live in a buildling with A/C. But it is newly built, and has a cooling system, which promises to keep us around 10C cooler than outside. This morning, I woke up to a warning sign in the living room, and I emailed our building manager in a panic. She advised me to open my windows for a few hours (something I had been afraid of, not wanting to let the heat in), and reduce the humidity in the room. A few hours later, and it seems to be working again. So it is not a perfect solution but I am very grateful for it, and for thick outside dark blinds + curtains. Having grown up in Arizona, I can handle heat, I just cannot handle when the infrastructure isn’t built to accomodate it.

This week I would like to draw your attention to what has been happening in Russia. Ukrainian drones struck the major oil refinery in Moscow this week, and there was an enormous explosion (some say this particular explosion with the lid of a storage tank blowing off from the force was actually caused by a Russian-fired anti-drone missle). A nearby apartment buildling was hit, as was a shopping center. The sound of incoming drones buzzing was unmistakable in this working-class suburb of Moscow. Naturally, the airports also stopped working at this time, right in the middle of summer holiday season. One woman wrote online her flight to Moscow had been diverted and landed in Ulyanovsk. “Take a train the rest of the way” was the advice she received online. That train ride is around 15 hours, for perspective.

This video below shows Moscow residents standing outside their apartments in the early morning hours, clearly spooked by the possibility that their buildings might be hit. Nothing new for Ukrainians, this is new for ordinary Russians, and I think may have more impact than any western sanctions did to date. Losing Zara, Coca-Cola, and Starbucks is annoying but not life threatening. This is something entirely new, and it is happening now across Russia in the sense that Ukraine is increasingly showing that it can launch its drones just about anywhere in Russia.

There has been chatter online about how safe it is to travel to Crimea this summer, rumors of a ban on gasoline sales to individuals. This is a big deal because Russians who do choose to holiday in occupied Crimea do so by car. There is of course an information war online, and it is difficult to gage what is real and what might be Ukrainian propaganda, painting things to be worse than they actually are. I was surprised to see that drones are now attacking Russian resort cities on like Sochi and Gelenndzhik, meaning holidaying at home is also not safe anymore. This report below in Russian explains how authorities are trying to create an atmosphere of calm despite the ongoing threat of drones. This video shows an air raid alert on a Sochi beach today.

I found this comment to be particularly telling, and I will translate it below.

11 hours ago (today): Why are the Telegram channels silent about all of northern Moscow hearing explosions

16 minutes ago (today): I am in Voronezh. A few hours ago, rockets flew above my head, they exploded. We live like this. We cannot film it, we cannot say where they landed, everything is forbidden. We are sitting in fear. It has been like this for two years already in Voronezh. And other places, like Crimea, who knows how long. Therefore it is a weird question to ask why we are silent. What should we do? Why is everyone quiet for a decade already? What were we personally supposed to do? I don’t know the answer.

Today I also read that Russia was evacuating its famous summer camps for kids on the Crimean peninsula, and at first I thought it was fake news until I saw it reported here by Meduza. Russia can no longer guarantee the safety of kids far from the front lines. The war is in its fifth year. I would not say this is what winning looks like.

I was party to a discussion recently with folks still living in Moscow. Everyday life is more annoying without the drones — you need a VPN to make any of the messenger or western apps on your phone work, and then you have to switch off that VPN every time you need to order a taxi or do something local on your phone. You have to live in two parallel universes. But for the most part, those with good jobs were still earning. The people I heard this from, one working in medicine, the other in a luxury business that directly benefits from bypassing sanctions. The same goods make it into the country, just now using different, not entirely legal channels. The money still flows, the wealthy customers are still buying. Everyone knows the game.

But now, the element of danger has been added. The drones strikes that cripple Moscow’s airports affect everyone, not just those living near the refinery. I think it is fair to say this is the most uncomfortable point in the war for ordinary Russians to date. If gasoline suddenly starts being rationed, this will only add to the frustration. We may well see another immigration wave of those who thought they could wait it out, and realize now that was a mistake. There are also rumors online of young men being stopped at random and having their documents checked, some kind of informal mobilization, but I have no way to verify this. I would simply say I can imagine this may be happening in places where the authorities rightly believe locals will stay silent out of fear.

I do not think any of this leads to any political changes within Russia, but it does mean the pressure is increasing and the risk of a public reaction of some kind, even if it means just a local incident, even if a few people decide to speak out in frustration, Ukraine has clearly succeeded at this point in bringing the war to ordinary Russians, something that did not really happen until now.

That’s about all I’ve got for today. I am trying to watch the World Cup when I feel in the mood, and when there are games in our time zone (!), but to be honest I am sort of waiting for the “good” games to start.

I would love some book recommendations for addictive beach reads, please, as holiday season is (hopefully) just around the corner. My unread pile at home is rather non-fiction and rather heavy, and at the moment life in general feels heavy, I would prefer a lighter escape in book form.

Kid just called from school and announced she is melting and almost fainted five times. I know teenagers have a way of exagerrating, but still…this is unnecessary. The older I get, the less tolerance I have for entirely fixable problems! If you are in Europe, I feel you. If you are in air conditioned North America, appreciate what you have!

Last weekend went by and I didn’t write anything because I feel like I no longer have anything smart to contribute to any kind of public dialogue. Lately, it feels like everything is just running in stupid directions, and no one is asking any of us “ordinary” people are opinions anyway. If years ago I felt like commenting was at least therapeutic or helped you connect to like-minded people online, I now feel like it is an exercise in futility. Hence, I have washed every load of laundry and ironed every shirt which was wrinkled to avoid sitting in front of my laptop. Until my kid who has been studying for weeks because she has not one but three (!) oral exams tomorrow for her Matura (high school graduation) was like mama, just do it and get it over with.

So here I am. I apologize in advance for the lack of poetry or deep thoughts today.

First, I would like to recommend a podcast which I found quite informative:

Donald Trump's Imperial Birthday Spectacle

I think it is easy to lose track of just how quickly things in Trumpland have slidden into something very messy, and yes, the bar was already low. Because aging is inevitable, and Trump like the rest of us, is mortal. This discussion was a timely reminder, at least for me.

Second, am not yet a Space X shareholder but I would not rule out anything in the future, simply because it feels like valuations and the like no longer matter like they once did. What matters now is sentiment, and it will be interesting to see what happens after the initial lock-up period is over (when those who bought during the IPO will legally be allowed to sell their shares) and once the index-funds all buy in because they have to, due to the size of Space X on the NASDAQ. For those of you who only saws the headlines that Elon Musk is now a trillionaire, yes, and the stock price went up 19% during the first day of trading. Speaking of mortals, I actually found myself wondering today what happens if Musk were to suddenly die, as he still controls 82.4% of the voting stock. Yes, really.

What a time to be alive.

Back on planet earth for real people, I cannot comment with any informed precision what it is like in the U.S. right now (other than the videos I am receiving from my eldest who is in NYC for a summer job and thrilled to be a part of the Knicks celebrations which have taken over the city’s streets), but I can share a tiny slice of what is actually happening in one little EU country due to budget cuts due to a budget deficit which needs to be closed and a lack of GDP growth last year. Reminder: no economic growth, fewer revenues, less taxes paid, and yet spending continues to rise in many cases in line with inflation. At some point, that is no longer sustainable, and something has to give. Naturally, politicians are not inclined to cut the fat from those who vote them into office (or from their own fat salaries, of course, which happen to be amongst the largest in the land, but compared to billionaires, they are of course, ordinary serfs who have been known to ride the subway to work).

On Friday afternoon, we learned Austria will no longer pay child benefit (on a monthly basis around €150 per child on a sliding scale with the amount increasing slightly with age) to Ukrainians here under EU temporary protection if they are still receiving Grundversorgung (basic payments for refugees). This will be effective from July 1. All other Ukrainians — those working or living off of their own funds, will still be able to receive child benefit. This move essentially cuts child payments from the most vulnerable Ukrainians, e.g. those who after four plus years here have not managed to get off basic payments. The measure is of course designed to encourage employment but it ignores the fact that for many single moms, finding housing (in some cases Grundversorgung also means the state provides your housing and/or pays you a part of your rent), finding employment and childcare have proved so far to be insurmountable hurdles, and so instead they have gotten by via pinching pennies very, very tightly. But suddenly this loss off “income”, whether it be €150 or €300 per month, will be a hard adjustment for those who until now made it work on very little. How they will manage, where they will live, will they go back to Ukraine — I really do not know. There was a wave of disbelief and now a sort of sad acceptance in my Telegram group on Friday as we tried to answer questions based on the information we received from government sources. The final text of the law has not yet been published. We do understand an important exception has been made for children with disabilities (those children in Austria receive an additional 50% payout).

This week I was also asked by two different Ukrainian moms to help them in their communications with Jugendamt, an organization the name of which sends a shiver down many an immigrant mother’s spine. This is essentially the Austrian equivalent of Child Protective Services, and in both cases Ukrainian families with small children were being investigated. Both mothers, to my knowledge, are still on those basic payments. In one case, I think the meeting was justified as the mother had experienced a psychological episode which required hospitalization earlier this year, and as the social worker explained to me, it is protocol to follow up with the family and minor children to see how they are coping months later. The second case was strange because on paper this single mom was doing everything correctly, her apartment was small but spotless, the only reason for concern was an “anonymous” tip, we don’t know from who, that the children were sometimes alone, and a report from a previous kindergarten that they found communication with the mother “challenging”. In any case, two social workers showed up for a home inspection. Is this a good use of the budget? I don’t know. I have my doubts.

Another Ukrainian in her 40s told me this week about her “German A0” class, and yes, you read that correctly. A0 is the class before A1 specifically designed for adult learners who are illiterate in their mother tongues. I have no idea why the Ukrainian ended up in that class, other than she is in no hurry to actually seek employment, and planned to stay in education for as long as possible (don’t get me started on the concept of paying people for nothing, it becomes addictive, and they get offended when someone suggests cutting them off). She told me about a class of men from countries like Afghanistan who are truly illiterate and are taking the course for the second or even third time, and some of them have families and kids here. How this is all a good or wise use of taxpayer money I have no idea because it just feels, on paper and through her descriptions, like an insurmountable challenge. How are all those funds invested ever going to pay back through years worked in the economy and taxes paid? Those kids with illiterate parents will also need an education, it just feels like a really, really challening situation that there is now no good solution to other than, perhaps simply cutting off the tap of free language courses, money for not working, and subsidized housing. But if you did that, you might have a revolution on your hands, and it might not be peaceful. I wonder how many Austrian voters would prefer to simply keep funding the machine until one day the wheels spin off.

In healthcare, I already seen the strain on the system, and I also see that cost-cutting still isn’t really a factor. When you get in front of a doctor, they try to offer the best possible solution to each patient regardless of whether that patient ever paid taxes in Austria to fund the system. I was recently with a Ukrainian woman with a bouquet of rare disesase in the university hospital, and it was without hestitation that the specialist doctor prescribed yet another MRI…costs are not factored in if deemed medically necessary. At some point, judging from the lines of patients, the math will stop mathing.

It all feels like a very, very slow moving tumbleweed which will keep rolling as the wind keeps blowing, but no one will actually start to take it seriously until things start falling apart on a larger scale — across education, healthcare, transport, everywhere that state funding is crucial. And in Austria, like many other social democratic nations in the EU, the state pot funds a LOT.

Meanwhile, the wealthy seem to be doing fine, no matter what country they live in. The markets have their jitters but overall the tragectory seems to be ok. Same for real estate. I was at a presentation earlier this week at my kids’ private gymnasium in Vienna, a school that used to have a reputation of being quite academic and quite challenging for foreigners to be accepted to (German-language snobbery is another beast entirely). To my pleasant surprise, amongst the new mothers for next fall were at least a half-dozen very well educated Ukrainian moms whose children have been in Vienna for four years and counting, and have mastered German well enough to compete for these school spots. Naturally, the well-off Ukrainians have to be able to pay full tuition, which from the looks of it, doesn’t appear to be a problem.

It really does feel at times like nothing is fair and the reality for so many is nothing like the existence of those lucky enough to say phrases as stupid as “money doesn’t matter”.

This week I also learned some sad news. There was an apartment fire in Vienna’s 22nd district, and I didn’t realize until I opened a Facebook mommy group, the apartment was that of Valeriya Kaiser, originally from Ukraine, but a longtime Viennese resident, Austrian citizen, and founder of one of the charities which did so much to help mothers & children when the war began. As soon as I saw the photos of the burnt-out living room, I reached out to Valeriya. She told me that luckily no one had been at home when the fire broke out, but they had lost nearly everything inside. They are now staying with friends, and waiting to see what insurance will cover, and we all sent a little money to give the family some funds to at least buy clothes for right now and replace the most necessary things that were lost. But the shock is huge and unfortunately it doesn’t sound like the city of Vienna stepped in with any real resources for the family. I should not be surprised, but I sort of am. Valeriya beat cancer back in 2021, helped hundreds (thousands) of mothers with kids, and now this. I will never begin to understand why the people with the largest hearts are often hit the hardest, while others live hedonistically for decades and never seem to experience any karma.

In any case, if you would like to help Valeriya, I can forward her bank details, just send me a private message please. We are writing “Spende” on the transfers so she hopefully doesn’t have any problems with the authorities down the road. You can see photos of the damage here on Lera’s Instagram.

I wish I could recommend more reading to you all, but I have been more nervous about exams this week than my middle child who has to go through them, and as a result, I haven’t had much of an attention span for anything other than my phone. I did start reading this book on Russia last weekend when it was warm and we could still swim outside. I hope to continue when the summer weather returns to us next weekend! So far I am finding the book well written and insightful, and refreshingly honest. Marc, for example, would get into heated discussions with Russians whose opinions he disagreed with, which is something I never did as a foreigner in Russia, so perhaps his own views were a bit naive at some points, but he also stayed in Russia really until the very end, and as such, provides an interesting perspective. He then went on to report on the war in Ukraine from Ukraine:

Thank you for reading and for your patience while my head has been other places. I am sure I will have more to report about how these changes to the child benefit are affecting families once the reality hits, and also, of course, we see how the payout law is actually implemented. There is always a Kafka-like element of you are at the mercy of whatever bureaucrat is looking at your file, will they know the new rules, or not? I have a feeling AI has not yet taken over reviewing the files. Austria is usually slow to adapt, but perhaps with the squeeze on spending changes will happen faster, who knows. At the moment you still go to hospital visits carrying folders (binders!) of papers and doctors still review them all, on paper. This country loves paper almost as much as it loves its traditions.

In closing, I would recommend this thought piece on AI from a European perspective by Armin Ronacher which Mario Zechner shared today:

Dangerous Technology for Americans Only

Europe is dependent on the United States in ways that are becoming increasingly impossible to ignore. We depend on American cloud providers, operating systems, developer platforms and now AI models and internet from satellites. We also depend on global semiconductor supply chains we do not control. If access to frontier AI becomes a matter of American national security policy, Europe is not a peer in that conversation and might not even be a market.

That is a humiliating position, but one that happened entirely intentionally.

I found it very insightful, although I am not optimistic, frankly, as I look towards both the U.S. and China and see little incentive for them both to be inclusive of Europe moving forward. As a Disneyland for adult holidays, yes. For everything else, how much do they really need us?

Last Friday, I spent five hours in hospital with V as she checked in for chemo and was evaluated by a pulmonologist. It seems apparent to me, although I am not a medical professional, that things are deteriorating quickly. My expectations of state healthcare in Austria are fairly realistic, I thought, but even I was surprised by the series of doctors all seeing the patient and the diagnosis for the first time, asking the same questions over and over and over again. The elephant in the room is danced around, you have to shout loud and clear about symptoms to be heard, and relief is offered only when stamped and approved by someone via fax. I wish I was making this up. I left only taking a few lessons with me: comforting, patient-focused healthcare requires a nest egg wherever you live, and when life presents you with opportunities to experience joy, grab them while you can.

It was with that mindset that I found myself on a beach in Croatia this weekend, the theory being one night is better than zero nights. My layman observations about travel in Europe this summer are that it will not be as hectic as the past few years have been. Here in Vienna, I already feel like there are fewer tourists, which is a direct result of the oh-so-smart-businesspeople running the Vienna airport, who refused to reduce landing fees for low costers Wizz Air and RyanAir, and as a result, the airlines simply left Vienna and cancelled most of their routes, respectively. So Vienna feels significantly less busy on the ground this time of year, which is not the greatest move for a country already worried about its GDP but no one asked me for my opinion. I don’t think anyone is really thinking about GDP. I feel like things will run on inertia until one day they simply implode.

Croatia was cheaper than last year (hotel) and the restaurants, already very exhorbitant in their pricing last year, didn’t dare raise prices again. The city felt more empty than it should be at this time of year, with nearly perfect weather, although the sea is still cool. When Arsenal lost the Champions League final on Saturday night, everything went quiet for a few minutes. Far more Brits than French fans on the move seeking sun this time of year.

I was on the beach next to a group of men who had flown all the way from Canada to watch the final in Budapest only to find out they had bought fake tickets. I didn’t feel sorry for them because they were an unlikable bunch, alternatiing from English (no accent) to Russian (trapped in 1990s immigrant tones with lots of swearing), and discussing if they might get the young escorts they had brought with them for the weekend to agree on a discount for the day of rest they decided they needed before making proper use of them the next day. The young girls appeared the next day on the beach and they were beautiful, but short. I realized immediately how their lives took different turns based on this factor alone. In all likelihood, they were Ukrainian. Don’t ask me how I know. It was all pretty upsetting to witness. I don’t know why, business as old as time, making a decent rate…but something in the physics of it was off. One man said rather sadly that he appreciated when the girls make an extra effort, and he defined this as holding his hand in public.

I wondered when everything went wrong, when this became the new normal.

I spent much of my beach time inhaling this book which is a page-turner. I could not put it down. I made a special effort before I read it to avoid reading all reviews, and I recommend you do the same. The premise is a “trad wife influencer” gets transported back to a ranch of the kind she lives on, only in the 19th century. I don’t want to say more than that but I will say the author is super smart in both her sarcastic observations of our modern lives and the character types she dotted the story with, and in her weaving of a plot. I really enjoyed it, although that doesn’t feel like entirely the right word.

Horrific news from Ukraine overnight. Russia had warned it was about to slam Ukraine with a new wave of attacks, even making a melodramatic statement a few days ago that foreign diplomats should leave the Ukrainian capital. It carried through on its “promise”, and the civilian death toll appears to be high, and growing. The images are horrible. Will it all ever end? How much longer are ordinary Ukrainians expected to keep living like this?

Ukraine has been striking deeper inside Russia lately, but it is targeting fuel infrastructure, while Russia simply targets Ukrainian civilians. There is a huge difference.

The intensity of the attacks I think reflects a lack of options from Russia’s side. There has been increasing speculaton regarding Russia’s ability to continue waging war, Putin’s position, and the state of the Russian economy.

Russia Finance Officials Tell Putin War Spending Is Unaffordable

Putin is also currently hosting the annual St. Petersburg Economic Forum, which at this point has become a domestic event.

Several prominent members of the Russian elite have attempted to warn Putin about the economic consequences of the war in the past, while Kirill Dmitriev, Russia’s point man in contacts with President Donald Trump’s administration, has been touting the potential economic benefits of a peace deal.

But a senior Russian banker, who also declined to be identified, told Reuters that Putin had already lost a good opportunity last year to strike a deal, ​and that the economy is now showing signs of instability.

Will those signs of instability result in any real political change within Russia, something which has been elusive basically since 2000? Your guess is as good as mine. I think I agree with much of what Mikhail Khodorkovsky wrote in his Substack a few days ago, and I especially like his conclusion.

How to Slay a Dragon

What Ends Putin?

For four years the obituaries have been written on a schedule of their own: the sanctions would break the economy, the elite would fracture, the streets would fill, and none of it happened. A new report from the NEST Centre sets out why, and it does so without the consolation that most such forecasts smuggle in. Its central finding is the one that neith…

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3 months ago · 76 likes · 5 comments · Mikhail Khodorkovsky

A closed system carries the cause of its own collapse inside itself, and Putin’s is no exception to that rule. The mistake is to think we have much say over the timing — we do not. The regime will go when it goes.

The only thing my (rusty) knowledge of Russian history assures me of is the timing and means will be unpredictable. I have also seen some in the west call for a breakup of Russia which to me sounds as comical as calling for a breakup of the United States (although to be fair, some states, like California and Texas, could certainly be major countries in their own right). So my only advice is to take with a grain of salt any commentary from anyone claiming to know what is happening inside Russia right now, or to have any insights into Putin’s health or state of mind.

Inside Putin’s $26 Billion Quest for Longevity

This is behind a WSJ paywall, but the subheadline alone “From mini-pigs and organ printing to cryotherapy and genetics, Russia’s president has turned antiaging research into a Kremlin priority” says a lot about what is really on the minds of those still trying to bomb Ukraine into submission.

So Washington has wrestling on the lawn of the White House next to a golden ballroom construction site, and Moscow has an entire industry of how to let a dictator live forever. Which is fairly on brand if you think about Lenin’s tomb, which someone at the time must have thought was very futuristic.

Some days, most days actually, I wish we could blink and wake-up. That there would be something more impactful to talk about other than the Space-X IPO. That ordinary people could feel like they are having an impact, rather than everything slipping through their fingers, that no matter how hard they work, it isn’t enough. The only people who seem to be doing well these day, in financial terms, are those playing the market, and those who have a craft so good with their hands that it cannot easily be replicated by AI or a robot.

Speaking of craft, I read this conversation with Rob Lee a few days ago, highlighted by the Economist defense editor, Shawshank Joshi, about the realities of warfare on the front lines in Ukraine. For someone like me, who objectively had no idea how things are now, it was eye-opening and frankly, sounds absolutely horrific.

ChinaTalk

WarTalk: Ukraine War Tactical Update

Rob Lee dials in from Kyiv for a long-form WarTalk on what the front line actually looks like in year four. Infantry sit underground for six months without seeing the sun, 2% of casualties come from small arms, and where the “forward line of troops” has been quietly replaced by a forward line of UAV teams…

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3 months ago · 68 likes · 9 comments · Jordan Schneider

The burden of this war is very narrowly focused. All Ukrainians feel it, but in particular the infantrymen. Rotations are very difficult now because of the kill zone, but also manpower challenges. Right now infantry, some brigades I’ve met with, say infantry is spending a minimum of three months at the zero line with no rotation. But there are many cases of six months and nine months. There are a couple of cases of guys who are over a year on position and just doing no rotation.

What it’s like is — usually if you’re infantry, you’re underground, either in a hole dug in a tree line somewhere or in the basement of a building. You’re not going outside very much because of the drone threat. Some of these guys, their eyes have to recover because they haven’t seen sunlight that much for six months or a year. There’s very little physical exercise you can do because you’re in a very small confined space. Almost all resupply is done by drone — these big vampire drones drop almost all the food, ammunition, water, whatever else you need.

It’s very difficult to do casualty evacuation. To zero line, in many places you can only do it by ground drone. You can’t even bring up vehicles. Basically you either have to walk out yourself or you have a UGV come get you. And in many cases that’s not possible. To walk to position and back, in some cases you have to walk 25 kilometers. I talked to an infantryman from the 9th Air Brigade a couple of weeks ago, and on his way out he had to walk 18 kilometers. Of course you’re walking along the most concealed and covered route. It might take days or a week or so, because you walk when there’s bad weather, when the drone threat is reduced.

You read all this and think all these drones, and rockets, and generators, and gadgets and AI, and are we really making the world of the future a more pleasant place to live in for humanity? Was there no other way? It all almost makes me want to become a feminist.

I think I’ll stop there because I would love to share something uplifting but I am grasping for straws at the moment. The only advice I have is take that trip, spend that day on the beach, go for that meal, because we all have one thing in common, and that is that none of us knows precisely what tomorrow will bring.

This week I am thinking about things coming to an end, somehow, without knowing what happens next. Being of a certain age, namely, having lived already through a number of what we look back on and refer fondly (or not so much) as “eras”, this one feels different. As I persused the week’s news, nearly all of it grim, the only common throughline I can find is things we once accepted to be true no longer being so. In other words, a lot of assumptions about the nature of the world we live in, ideas we may have grown up with for decades, are no longer true. This may very well mean that young people will be better poised than any of us to deal with the new realities, as having lived through fewer “eras”, they have fewer preconceived notions of how things should be.

Take AI, something I have found myself using more in my own daily life than I ever imagined (sans visuals, I still have zero tolerance for AI-generated images). I think most of us would agree the AI-revolution is now underway at a pace few outside of tech could have imagined just a few years ago. And yet, no one knows how it is going to change our everyday lives. It is as if an unstoppable force has been released with no guardrails, and even no concept of who should be establishing those guardrails. Governments? Companies? Individuals?

Every time I encounter a person performing a job that could be performed by a machine, I think about the nagging question in the back of my mind re universal basic income, or some form thereof, and wonder when the politicians are finally going to start addressing the elephant in the room. Today was a hot, sunny day, finally, in Vienna, and I went to a public swimming pool along with one of my kids. The person who sold us the tickets (which could have been an email, e.g., could have been automated), lectured us on having forgotten a student ID, and as my kid rolled his eyes, all I could think about are all the jobs that now already exist thanks to the kindness of European social welfare states. Does that person, though, really generate a sense of purpose doing something a machine could do? Would they not be happier on a hot sunny day swimming alongside the rest of us? Or at least acting as a lifeguard instead? I don’t know, but I wonder.

My kid then reminds me that something like 70% of the U.S. economy is consumer spending, which in my mind connects along dots in the following way: AI replaces people, people lose jobs, people stop spending, people go hungry, (broader) economy crashes. I would love for someone much smarter than me to explain why this will not happen. My kid muttered something about it being a great time to become a plumber, but it is not as if the number of toilets needing repairs is going to double alongside the rise of data centers. In other words, yes, I wholeheartedly agree that anyone who works with their hands in a way that machines cannot replicate should be safe in our new world which we cannot fully envision yet, that does not mean that everyone who once had an office or indoor job replaced by AI can suddenly, overnight be retrained as a skilled professional because those jobs too require a lot of training and some amount of raw talent.

While I am thinking about these existential questions with no good answers, this week the WSJ published an interview with Mario Zechner, who back in 2022, with no connection to Ukraine, stepped in to make Cards for Ukraine a reality. And now, in classic Mario fashion, we learn that he is one of the engineers behind the OpenClaw AI agent everyone is talking about.

https://mariozechner.at/uploads/vibe-wsj.pdf (free to read)

Vibe-Coded AI ‘Slop’ is Flooding the World With Potentially Dangerous Code (WSJ paywall)

You almost breathe a sigh of relief reading Mario and Armin’s thoughts, namely, that tools can be great but still need people to guide them. But try explaining that to C-suite execs and boards eager to slash costs with mass firings, and the traders and investors on Wall St who reward them for it. I think we all know how this one is going to play out, unless, of course, the bugs are so bad that nothing works without people. I am no tech person but I assume that AI also gets smarter over time.

Returning back to the real world, humans are still killing other humans, as Ukraine and Kyiv in particular suffered another horrible night, with Russia releasing a barrage of attacks I suppose in retaliation for all the embarrassments Russia has been experiencing of late, with Ukraine striking with increasing frequency deep inside of Russia. Russia “retaliated” by hitting Ukraine with a supersonic missile. The images from Kyiv are apocalyptic.

Prof. Ruth Deyermond wrote an interesting thread this afternoon highlighting how May 2026 has been a month of endless humiliation for Putin. Two veteran journalists, Pjotr Sauer and Shaun Walker, wrote a long read well worth your time in the Guardian today about why now finally feels different for Putin, a turning point of sorts, as Russians are finally united in being fed up with the war that never ends and bad news that doesn’t stop coming.

Silence from the U.S. as far as I can tell. We have our own gunshots at the White House (not to compare apples and oranges, obviously). Meanwhile, ordinary Russians are incredibly naively, to be honest, finally waking up to drones flying about their heads and businesses, and realizing that the war in Ukraine is real and not only in Ukraine anymore. A report from on the ground in Moscow (NYT gift article):

‘A Total Nightmare’: Voices From a Moscow Hit by Ukrainian Drones (Gift Article)

I wish I had a crystal ball and could guess when all the bloodshed would finally end. But this seems to be the one thing everyone can agree on: no one knows. They say Putin wants to take the rest of the Donbass by fall. Ukraine would say this is unrealistic. I don’t know how you measure anything anymore with drones doing the front line work, modern warfare now redefined from how it began in 2022. A Ukrainian told me a story this week about someone they know, a man who had finally had enough, and had decided to run across the border into Europe, paying someone who posed as a “guide” and said they knew the right places to make a run for it. Long story short, this man was caught by Ukrainian border guards, and the next day he was already in uniform. But it was how they did it that blew my mind: Ukrainian border guards are using drones to hunt down their own citizens trying to make a run for it. That is some new level of insanity which I cannot get my head around. What mother wants their son to live in a world in which your country becomes your prison.

I cannot get my head around our ability as humans to invent such powerful tools (AI, drones, to name a few) and our absolute lack of progress as a species to learn how to stop waging wars, killing each other, and lack of empathy on a societal basis for the living condition of our fellow humans. It is almost as if we never left the jungle, we just invented more powerful tools.

Which is so hard for me to understand because on an individual level, we humans are capable of so much love and kindness. Thank you all who helped last week — I was able to pass V. nearly €500 which she accepted with much gratitude. This week will be more hospital visits. Out of frustration I called oncology last week. I was told the answer to any deterioration is simply to go to the ER, sit, and wait to be seen. I cannot understand why we haven’t figured out a less painful way of dying. Rather, we have, but it is limited to those with funds and connections. Basically, the world continues to be cruel unless you are amongst the lucky. I was naive at best, thinking once you get a terminal diagnosis someone would care about your overall comfort or lack thereof. Systems are strained, and the humans who work in those systems often protect themselves emotionally, understandably, by avoiding difficult conversations. I see this now firsthand. I will try to be more forceful with my communication this week on V’s behalf.

In other news this week, I saw the mass protests in Serbia, originally led by students but now involving much of the broader population, albeit without a real political opposition leading it, continued. I found these two threads quite useful in trying to understand what this all means for Serbia’s political future.

Michael Martens on Saturday protests in Serbia and the comments below by Alexander Djokic:

Finally, and in totally unrelated news, I wrote a while back about a divorce memoir I read which everyone and their mother loved, and I didn’t. Well today, it seems, the other penny dropped, namely, this New Yorker article which points to court filings which paint a very different financial picture than that which the author describes in the book. Spoiler: even more well-off, beyond priveleged, etc. My problem with the book actually didn’t have anything to do with money. I mean, it was hard to have any sympathy for a woman going through a divorce from that position of wealth, never having to worry about how to provide for her kids after years of being a SAHM as a “normal” mom might. My problem was actually I could not for the life of me understand how you write an entire book about your divorce which you did not see coming without mentioning sex or intimacy prior, during, or after said divorce. It was as if the marriage was a contract which suddenly got cancelled and she was stunned.

What’s Missing from Belle Burden’s “Strangers” (New Yorker paywall)

I don’t have a subscription, but the New Yorker tweeted out the gist of the details here. The figures were already staggering in the “toned down” version of her financials (I am being kind) presented by the author in her memoir. The real figures are just a slap across the face to anyone who actually bought the woe-is-me worried about losing her home trope (I didn’t). I was more stunned by the lack of self-reflection when it came to the romantic parts of any marriage. How can anyone actually be stunned when their partner walks about after years of marriage? As some have said online, maybe it should simply have been a novel.

I think that’s all I’ve got this week. I am reading something new, a murder mystery set in Vienna, and while I never read mysteries as a genre, I am giving this one a go. But I keep staring at my paperback of Yesteryear on the top of my to read pile and it is taking a lot of willpower not to skip directly to it! I have read that people hated it and this makes me want to read it even more. I am super curious, plus the tradwife-goes-19th century premise alone is enough to carry me back to the nostalgia of reading the little house books as a kid, my late moms hardcover editions saved from her childhood…

Having visited China twice in the past two years (and never prior), I observed Trump’s trip to Beijing with perhaps more interest than usual. I was fascinated by the pomp and circumstance, as well as the subtle trolling which the Chinese seem to be experts at. The rows of schoolchildren jumping up and down waving flags and flowers, all wearing coordinated shades of pastel, waving American and Chinese flags. Trump must have loved that, it was something out of a North Korean playbook. Communist adoration-light, if you will.

But by the end of the trip, Trump was placed in a chair next to Xi whose cushion was notably lower and softer, making the images produced mirror the sentiment, namely, that the visit marks the end of an American era, a metaphor for the huge shifts in the balance of power between the world’s two most powerful nations in recent decades, a shift that feels even more accelerated in recent years.

As I have said before, I am no China expert, but I did listen to a very interesting podcast this week with Rush Doshi, a former advisor to the Biden White House who is now a professor at Georgetown, and if you have 45 minutes or so, it is well worth your time to better understand what each country brings to the negotiating table and what it hopes to achieve.

How Trump Increased China’s Global Power

The very brief version of the arguments presented sounds something like this:

China acts as a mercantologist, selling far more of its own goods around the world than it imports from others. This trade surplus puts it in a tricky position in that it doesn’t need to buy as much as it sells, but it needs to maintain buyers for its exports. China used rare earth minerals, which it is basically the sole supplier of, as a form of blackmail when Trump played the tariff game last year (and subsequently backed down).

I learned a lot about AI chips, namely that they are nearly all produced in Taiwan, with the exception of a plant the Taiwanese have set up now in Arizona. Official China still views Taiwan as the “unfinished Chinese civil war”. The largest question looming over everything is will China in the future be willing to use force in Taiwan. There is already an official Chinese plan stating that their military must “be ready” by 2027 to do so (being ready vs. actually doing so being perhaps two different things). In listening to all this, I kept asking myself why the average American should care who is in charge of Taiwan, and aside from chip manufacturing, I couldn’t really come up with a clear answer, other than it has been for decades U.S. policy to sort of unofficially support the status quo, but it seems like under Trump’s second watch the Chinese smell weakness, perhaps rightly so.

I keep thinking about Xi in the context of Putin, which is perhaps not fair, but men of a certain age in positions of huge power, especially in authoritarian countries, do appear to think more about their legacies and future history books more than just about anything else. I thought back to the museums we visited in Shanghai talking about the communist revolution, and the venum which was reserved to describe the nationalists, and it would seem only logical that China would like to reclaim what it sees as unfinished business. Unfinished business which now controls nearly all productin of one of the most important pieces of the modern global economy.

The podcast also describes China’s more sinister roles: buying Iranian oil, supplying Chinese-made parts for Iranian drones. Putin is arriving in China for talks this week. Xi apparently even talked about the current period as the rise of the east, with the west in decline. American decline is seen as something dangerous: like a an angry drunk, America might just lash out in unpredictable ways. So China and the American voters hae that fear in common, ironically.

I was amused but not at all surprised by the grand meeting hall photos with not a single woman in sight amongst either delegation. Feels just about right, frankly, given the state of the world at the moment, wars everywhere you look, ordinary people feeling like their economic wellbeing is slipping between their fingers. This is what happens when you put all the men in charge. Women are the better sex at things like listening and empathy. Women might think about the future for a second, and not in the context of history books. But we as a species are not there yet. Ironically, ordinary women I think are now able to earn more than many of their male peers in many western nations, but in the highest circles, whether it be politics or business, the playing field was never fair, and it seems we are taking steps backwards. Not surprising, just disappointing. Sort of on brand for the dumpster fire around us.

While all this was happening in China, Russia took the opportunity to launch brutal attacks on Ukraine, which resulted in dozens of cilivians killed. Last night, Ukraine launched a drone attack on Moscow (yes, you read that correctly). It killed four people. My social media pages were filled with messages and videos from shocked Russians awakened in the middle of the night in their Moscow-suburb skyrises to the sounds of drones buzzing outside and, occasionally, exploding right next to their buildlings. The Ukrainians online, naturally, expressed zero sympathy, having themselves been living like that for four and a half years now and still counting.

I don’t know what peace Trump is actually talking about because just skimming the headines it certainly seems like both Russia and Ukraine are turning up the volume on each other. Both countries are now probably the leading producers of military drones. The FT apparently reported this week that Putin thinks he can take the rest of Donbass by fall, which when you look at what Russia has actually achieved on the ground in recent months seems highly unrealistic. But when I think about Ukrainian morale at the moment (low for a myriad of obvious reasons), I almost think anything is possible.

Russia and Ukraine appear to be in agreement on one thing at the moment — no prospect for substantive peace talks anytime soon. So two struggling economies will continue to slog it out, primarily with drones, and the civilians will pay the price, with Russians only now experiencing this new reality. Until last night, many Moscovites probably genuinley did not really think they were living in a war zone. Suddenly, with Ukraine’s incredible advances with its drones deep into Russian territory, anywhere in Russia can be potentially a war zone.

This week I saw the film Nuremberg in an English-language theater in Vienna. It was a unique experience in that the Hollywood decision to cast only English-speaking actors in roles as Germans was curious at best, comical at worst. But when you watch a film like that sitting in Vienna, it has a different impact, because you are surrounded by history when you walk outside (in this case, the theater is a stone’s throw from Judenplatz, or Jewish Square, with a memorial to all those murdered at the hands of the Nazi regime in the camps of the Holocaust). The next day, we were invited to a Bar Mitzvah here in Vienna, in a synagogue inside a business school built by a wealthy American who was once U.S. Ambassador to Austria, and the symbolism of all that this year 2026 was not lost on me either.

Step outside of my bubble, and Vienna was filled with its fair share of protests this weekend (mostly) against Israel’s participation in Eurovision which Austria was sort of begrudingly hosting this year (online accounts widely complained of lousy hosts and cheap sets) on account of their artist having won in 2025.

It was so rainy and cold, and Eurovision to me personally feels like a leftover from the pre-covid, pre-war era, when we had time to dedicate a whole weekend to campy music performances. Maybe I am just getting old, but I’ve lost interest. I instead took myself through our rainy, unseasonably cold streets (my teenager explained to me that climate change is also causing some of these wild temperature swings) to our local maket, where thankfully, one can still acquire super fresh produce at affordable prices. I take none of this for granted.

This past week has been difficult and a shock of sorts. I think I have mentioned before a Ukrainian woman who came to Vienna because of the war, I will call her V, and worked as a manicurist here. That is how I met her, the nails you will see in the photo below are her work. Last year, she was diagnosed with colon cancer, and on January 2, 2025, I received a phone call from the surgeon saying emergency surgery had been booked for a week later. At the time, they thought it was ovarian cancer, as the 15 cm (yes, you read that correctly) tumor appeared to the doctors as if it was growing from her right ovary. It was only when they operated, and performed a complete hysterectomy, in addition to removing the giant tumor, that they discovered the origin of the growth.

V then went through twelve gruelling rounds of chemo, trying to come back to work during the second weeks (the first weeks she was too ill from the chemo to leave her apartment). But by September, a miracle of Austrian healthcare had taken place: she was told the cancer was all gone and given the all clear. We all shed happy tears.

Unfortunately, a few months later, a terrible accident occurred. V was cleaning the windows in her new apartment, when she lost her balance and fell off the chair she had been standing on. Probably still frail from the chemo, she broke her right, working arm in several places, and V was unable to work for several months, and went back to Ukraine for some time to undergo physical therapy (Ukrainian hospitals are experts at this now) on her right arm after it had been operated on (a metal pin was placed in her wrist). This spring, it seemed, V was finally healthy again.

She gave me a manicure just a few weeks ago. She was coughing a bit, but the doctors had given her an inhaler, and told her to get a CT scan in May. No one, not a single doctor on her care team from what is considered to be a very good hospital in Vienna, said that she should come in for a CT scan at any point between September and May. Blood work showed increased cancer markers, which must have sounded the alarm bells. On May 12, I accompanied V as we walked into a room in the surgical ward (no idea why this task was left to the surgeons, it is as if the various departments play hot potato with the oncologists) where four stone-cold faces were waiting for us, and I immediately knew the news was bad. Both from the looks on their faces and from V’s terrible cough which now sounded like something awful, and she was struggling to catch her breath, walking slowly, complaining of pain in her side and back.

In short, the doctor explained, the cancer had come back, and basically everywhere: bones, liver, peretoneoum (abdominal cavity), spots in the lungs, lymph nodes. The team urged V to stay positive, but their faces reflected that even they themselves did not believe these words. Chemo was ordered for Friday.

I accompanied V on Friday. At this point she can barely walk, can barely breathe. I have to ask for a wheelchair as soon as we are dropped off by her boss who is a salon owner here and borrowed her boyfriend’s car to drive us to the hospital at 6:30am. We wait patiently for the team to set her up for in-patient chemo (standard, I am told, for the first round which lasts 48 hours). Finally, she is offered pain relief (until now, she had not received anything stronger than over-the-counter meds). Finally, the doctors order oxygen through her nose as the coughing is horrific and her oxygenation is dangerously low. I translate as much as I can, a team of white coats standing in the room. I try to make small talk until the drip is set up, and then I leave, bursting into tears in the elevator.

I know things can deteriorate quickly, but this is something unreal. V is younger than me. She has a grown daughter in Ukraine who is renewing her passport and will come as soon as she is issued a new one. She has a sister who lives with her in Vienna but picked this week to go away (I have already done away with any hiding of my feelings on that subject in the messges I leave her to update on V’s health).

A few weeks ago, I thought maybe I would try to fundraise for a bucket-list trip of sorts for V. Now I realize she may never get time for any of the list. Now I am hoping a doctor will take a look at her tomorrow and recommend hospice, so she doesn’t have to suffer alone at home. I am not family, I am simply a loyal client who happens to speak German. I feel the burden of this every time the phone rings and I try to translate as best I can for the medical staff over the speaker.

Money will not cure V, but she will face immediate trouble now paying rent, and eventually her family is going to need help with simple things like funeral costs. I don’t have the energy in me to set up a go fund me or something of the like, but I would like to be able to tell V I gathered some means of her covering some of her costs while she is in this situation which is honestly worse than anything I could have imagined. I had no idea it could deteriorate that quickly, or cancer could spread that agressively. My own mother lived more than eight years with stage IV breast cancer; I fear V has only weeks left. The doctors don’t say it outloud, but they refused to send her home today, acknowledging that she needs 24/7 oxygen, and I am grateful for every day they keep her in hospital. Tomorrow the pulmanologist will make a recommendation. I am trying to take each day at a time.

It is not easy. To stay calm and just translate the very painful words.

If you would like to help V, although she didn’t ask, she would never ask for a handout, I am sharing the original PayPal link I created for Cards for Ukraine, which has been inactive for sometime. Anything I receive this week I will hand to V directly, in Euros, in cash.

Thanks for reading. It helps me to share this very sad true story because it is also hard to carry it around with me. You hope you are doing the right thing, but the situation caught all of us totally by surprise. I don’t know who is to blame that the return of V’s cancer wasn’t caught earlier, and frankly, none of that matters now. I usually think a lot about the fragility of life, but now so more than ever. I will never understand why some people get punched, and punched, and punched again, while others carry on, scott free, seemingly, forever. For that reason perhaps I am not a religious person. But I do believe in doing the right thing, and that is what I am trying to do now, within my humble capabilities. Translating feels like the least I can do.

I suppose it was sometime back in 2022 or 2023, in the thick of my volunteer work, that I decided writing weekly here would be a maintainable goal. And for the most part, I have managed to stick with it. But last week, and continuining into this week, I have felt this overwhelming weight on my shoulders, like I need to say something, anything, insightful, and yet I feel like the best I can do at the moment is restate other people’s observations and ideas. I am also dealing with some health stuff that while not serious (thankfully) makes me completely exhausted for no reason, so I will try to keep this short and focus on the ideas that lingered in my brain these past few weeks, in no particular order. They share one thing in common, namely, that nothing makes sense anymore. That two things can be true at the same time and yet on paper, if you line them up, they seem to cancel each other out. Wars are generally economically and humanly distructive and not good for any country engaging in them and yet they continue, with no real end in sight. The state of the world economy at the moment means that nearly every ordinary person is feeling the pinch in their wallets in a real and meaningful way, yet there are plenty of opportunities to make a quick buck if you are the right combination of smart and lucky and have some starting capital and access to markets. AI is changing our lives faster than any of us could have imagined even a year ago, and yet politicians around the world appear woefully unprepared to present any kind of solutions for the ways in which it is about to upend what it means to be economically productive on an individual level. I am frankly, truly surprised there are not more calls for universal basic income, but more on that in a second.

Let me begin by suggesting two new non-fiction books, both of which I could not put down. Excellent writing, timely, insightful, emotional. Both of these books had me walking from the subway home book open, reading glasses on, nearly bumping into strangers. They are both that good. After a long slump in which I could not really motivate myself to read anything that wasnt on a screen, this was a thoroughly delightful discovery. My middle child is watching old episodes of GIRLS, a new generation is discovering Lena’s gift for writing. Nature is healing, etc.

Yesterday was perhaps the most depressing 9th of May in recent Russian memory. I was actually pretty shocked a few days ago when I saw photos of drone netting over Red Square (a quick AI-aided search now confirmed for me those photos were in fact fake and shared by a Ukrainian advisor to the defense minister). But the sentiment they represented is very real. The parade was so scaled back it included North Korean soldiers marching in place of Russian heavy equipment. I still cannot get my head around how in the middle of a four-years-and-counting war against the very country you then fought side by side together with as one to defeat Nazi Germany, Russia can even find anything to celebrate. The whole fiasco looks as stale as Putin’s regime, which I dare say, seems to be aging these days more like spoiled milk than fine wine. It feels like stagnation has morphed into something worse, darker, and bad news has a way of picking up speed like a snowball rolling down a mountain.

I recommend this excellent summary of the weekend:

I was at dinner with a Ukrainian friend on Friday evening when she pulled out her phone and showed me the news of Zelensky’s official presidential order ensuring Ukraine would not target Red Square on May 9, purportedly after Trump had intervened to call in this favor. My friend was incensed, particularly as Russia continues to target and kill Ukrainian citizens every day. The Ukrainian media spun this as Zelensky “trolling” Putin, but honestly, is any of it even funny anymore?

What I hadn’t realized until I took a closer look this week (this podcast takes a deeper dive for anyone interested) was exactly how much damage Ukraine has been able to inflict in recent months and especially weeks on economic targets across Russia. The Bell published this week this map:

So Russians are not only dealing with permanent bans on all foreign-made messenger apps, regular cuts to mobile internet in cities like Moscow and St Petersburg, an economic crisis showing no signs of abating, with many small businesses forced to shut their doors, but now the violence of war has come home, and major Russian companies are having their assts directly targeted and damaged. Who is going to pay for all of this and still sell it as a win? It is no surprise the old man is choosing to spend as much of his time in isolation as is possible these days. There is no strategy. There are no wins to be had. It feels like the house of cards might just be starting to wobble. Maybe.

A friend recalled a recent conversation with a well-off woman who returned to Moscow to check on her assets (as one does), and for the first time there was a hint of it is no longer a city where I would like to live right now, citing inconveniences such as having to switch on a VPN to send a message using one of our communication apps, or not being able to order a taxi when the internet it down. These little things grate on you when suddenly your ordinary life, the implicit contract that was Putin’s promise to the “elite”: you get to make money and live a comfortable life, provided you stay out of my politics, are no longer true. Russians regularly remember the “good old days” when you could fly to Paris or Rome for a weekend on a regular salary, and Schengen visas were not as elusive as tickets to a sold-out concert. Of course if you ask Ukrainians how they feel after four plus years of all-out war and not an airport being operational across the entire country, there will be no sympathy, but the key to any kind of lasting change in Russia is general discontent amongst most of the population, although I would not hold my breath in anticipation of a revolution. There will not be any. But a coup? Honestly, who knows. It kind of feels like anything is possible. The messaging and the tactics look stale, as if the collective “Kremlin” have run out of tricks up their sleeve.

This week, The Economist published a piece by an anonymous former senior Russian official entitled Vladimir Putin Is Losing His Grip On Russia. Too good to be true? Maybe. But the cracks are showing.

CNN on small businesses in Russia closing. I read every day on social media about Russians from cities across the country planning how to emigrate. Economic frustration drives these decisions as much if not more than anti-war sentiment. Anti-war folks left in 2022. Those leaving now are doing so because they no longer see a future in Russia.

This video describes a new European intelligence report describing Putin’s increasing isolation and fear of an assassination:

Huge caveat. Observers far more informed and with better sources than me think the exact opposite, that Russia isn’t on the brink of anything. Do read Farida if you don’t already:

Vlast

Why the Russian regime is not on the brink of collapse

Welcome to Vlast! This time we look at…

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4 months ago · 14 likes · Farida Rustamova and Margarita Liutova

Meanwhile, in Ukraine, I have heard stories recently about businesses having to close, not able to survive in a war economy in which everyone is feeling poorer, those men still living in Ukraine of army age are increasingly isolated at home, fearful of being handed draft papers while out in public. This means if you own a restaurant, for example, your business was already struggling. Now the women are spending less money, ordering only a drink but not food. Eventually, you cannot cover your fixed costs, and you make the difficult decision to shut your doors.

Another person tells me the story of a young man who had enough and ran away from the army, now sitting in the countryside in his parents’ home. But being hidden away is not a life for a young man in his late 20s, so the family are now thinking about how he can return to the army, just in a way that doesn’t mean automatically being sent to the front.

I read a report this week about a Ukraine government order requiring families on the front lines to now hand over their children for mandatory evacuation.

Here in Austria, I have noticed something which is hard to put my finger on, but I mention it in my private conversations. I feel like many Ukrainians are really suffering now in a psychological sense. The war has dragged on for so long, they are no longer new arrivals, are expected to be fully self-sufficient, and yet, more often than not, things have gone wrong along the way, buildling a new life in Europe has been anything but easy. A woman wrote me last week from somewhere in middle Austria explaining her husband had died with 42 (here, circumstances not explained), and how should she and her son now pay rent, cover funeral costs, survive? I of course don’t have answers to those questions. I made some generic suggestions and offered my condolences, reminding myself, for the sake of my own mental health, that I cannot help every person who contacts me simply because they knew how to contact me. I have recently sat through very painful discussions at schools and hospitals where teacher or doctors say X and the Ukrainian hears Y and only Y and it is like no one is listening to each other. As if everything is a fight and you no longer trust anyone. Perhaps high cortisol for extended periods of time can do that. Anyone can be strong for two weeks or even two months. But four and a half years? Frankly, I suppose I should wonder why I didn’t see it earlier.

The happy ending we all hoped for appears to be the thing of fairy tales.

The final topic I would like to cover ever so briefly is the general cost of living crisis. Ask anyone, in any western country, and they will talk to you about the cost of food, gas, airplane tickets, basically anything. It feels like everything got more expensive and no one is earning any more than they did before, at least on salaries or hourly wages. This podcast talks about recent American political polling but it is insightful:

In the same breath, we have AI changing things at lightening speed, and AI-adjacent stocks are going crazy. I made a few adjustments to my own portfolio in April. They were hardly researched. I did a quick Google search (pardon me, Gemini!), wrote down a list of names recommended by famous Wall St banks, played a game of "Eeny, meeny, miny, moe" with the tickers, and by some miracle of momtentum and TikTok traders, one of those names is up over 50% since the end of April. It makes absolutely no logical sense that passive income can significantly outearn normal wages even with modest starting capital with such swings in valuation. Of course, this also means the bubble can burst at any moment, and you can lose as much passive income just as quickly as you make it. But in general, this AI thing, it is here to stay, we are all using it in our daily lives, and politicians in general have been totally head in the sand ostriches when it comes to talking about how they plan to provide universal basic income or address the question of “man searching for meaning” or at least how to pay his/her bills in an era when many, many white collar workers will suddenly be totally redundant.

I came across this New York Times’ TikTok today on the AI boom and its potential impact on jobs…

…and earlier last week about the impact of data centers on U.S. communities, and how that may affect the midterm elections:

I was recently in Austria’s equivalent of the job center or unemployment office, which is also tasked with assigning recent immigrants free German language courses. The politics of the organization are such that their employees are instructed to never speak English even if they know it and the “client” is a recent immigrant whose English is better than their German. For this reason, I was accompanying a Ukrainian woman who used to own and operate her own hotel, and now wanted to be assigned a German language course. She had been turned away, twice, when she tried to speak English, and we were ushered together intoa tiny office decorated with sun-damaged prints from China and filled with plants surrounded by plastic water bottles half-filled with water positioned next to a humidity monitor, as a beaurocrat worked his way through her CV with a pace which mirrored that of the DMV sloth in Zootoopia. Here was a person who was performing his job, objectively speaking, terribly, with no incentive to hurry up, asking totally irrelevant questions for the sake of watching the clock go by until it was time for lunch, much slower than any AI could have done, prone to human error, with a sense of importance that made him triple-check how he placed a staple or pull out a yellow highlighter and highlight dates and times that were already printed (because nothing has gone paperless, Austria is like a heroin addict when it comes to the printed word) in bold all caps.

We need a solution for when AI takes all these, objectively speaking, “busy work” jobs in one fell swoop, which could theoretically happen anytime. These “sloths” are people who need a purpose, need an income, and that is going to be one hell of a challenge. Not that I feel particularly sorry for them. I don’t. And everyone with an entrepreneurial streak is going to be just fine. But many governments (looking at you, German-speaking Europe) actively legislate so as to prevent entrepreneurship, and then will be stunned when suddenly they need to provide some kind of basic income, and more importantly, purpose in society to a whole generation of paper pushers used to working in government and government-adjacent offices.

It is really crazy if you stop to think about it. The video above says that companies like Meta laid off 10% of their workforce using AI as a cover for what was really just cost-cutting, but it is a warning sign nonetheless. There will be no bidding wars for jobs computers can do better. I heard someone recently refer to their entrepreneurial spouse as the ultimate “idea generator” and perhaps those people will be just fine. But we are all going to need to change our outlook on work and value creation. All of us who do not work with our hands to create something a computer cannot replicate.

On the one hand, you could in theory feel even more sorry for recent graduates. But they at least have a chance to start off doing something entirely new. We just lack the vocabulary to give the right guidance now as everything is in flux. But the real challenge will be everyone 30+ who feels the rugs suddenly pulled out from under them. The five stages of grief will be painful and may not pass quickly. I see nothing from politicians in any western country to indicate they are planning for this in any real way, with any sense of urgency, which is downright alarming given the speed with which our lives might change. An invisible storm on the horizon.

So these are the thoughts which keep me up at night in no particular order: war, economics, AI.

That is all I have in me this week. Perhaps I will try now to write not just on weekends, but simply when I feel the inspiration. Thanks for your patience, and as always, for reading. My summer book pile is quite thick now with what I hope are fascinating new titles, and I hope to share some more with you next ime.

I really didn’t expect a big birthday (as in round number) to impact me. I turned 40 without flinching. I remember asking for an expensive handbag and that was that. Just another day, just another number on the page. 50 though, 50 hit different. For months I was frozen in dread, unable to plan anything, unable to process the number in front of me. Everything that begins with a 4- sounded somehow still not that old, but the 5 was staring at me like some kind of numerical alarm bell, saying, quietly, now it is really all behind you. In short, I put my head in the sand, refused to plan anything, and was rescued by friends and family sweeping in and giving me what was essentially the best birthday celebration I have had in years. It also meant a little weekend getaway last week, so rather than write when I have nothing to say as a result of truly self-centered behaviour, and not coming up for air to pay attention to what was happening in the world around us, I indulged last weekend in celebrating with a great group of people and am now back at my computer, at my desk, thinking not about myself (finally), but about our world, and the times we live in.

I re-adjusted a bit of my portfolio this week, giving in to what I see as balls of tumbleweed picking up speed across the plains, rather unstoppable. I shifted towards some pure AI plays, I acknowledged the defense-sector spending, that oil prices may remain high for some time, and sold bad choices: overpriced leggings that are no longer hot, big box stores being boycotted by the left which only do well when Americans feel they have disposable income to spend inpulsively, and a medical device story which hadn’t done anything in over a year. Stock picking is not for the faint of heart, and I am not particularly good at it, but even making those calls feels like acknowledging the new reality we are living in, in which many of the things we once thought to be true are no longer. I think that is, perhaps, the hardest part. For years I raised my kids with certain beliefs stuck in my head as unwavering: that getting into a good college and doing well there will automatically lead to good job prospects. I, for example, no longer believe that to be true. I think AI will take away far more white collar jobs than blue, and if someone has a talent, and it cannot be replaced by robots, one should seriously consider thinking about pursuing that career. Humans will always want to eat delicious food, get manicures, and need haircuts. We are always going to need someome to fix clogged sinks and stuck toilets. Airplanes, for now, do not fly themselves. The list goes on, but I think one of the biggest shifts in my mind as a parent of teenagers is I no longer believe the college kool-aid. It can be a path to success for a select few. For many others, it may not be worth the return on investment. It may simply be lost time in a model from the past.

This week, Meta laid off a whopping 10% of its workforce after spending billions on AI. Now of course tech companies are the first to immediately reapt the cost-cutting benefits of investing in AI, and we do not know yet how this will actually work, internally, in practice, but that is a scary headline. We humans are going to need to have real conversations about universal basic income in developed countries (and when I say this I do not mean years of unemployment payouts for doing nothing which have become endemic in many countries run by social democrats). We need to find a way for people to find meaning in their work and provide for their families while not competing against computers which in many areas will now perform better than us, and are not suceptible to human error, and the common cold, and sick kids, and burnout, and being annoyed by a bitchy boss.

I am thinking a lot about the signs within the economy. I have a good friend from my elementary school days who has had a successful career in marketing both with start-ups and later with a Fortune 500 company. She recently interviewed for a new role, as her department was downsized, and competed against 100 candidates for what was a lateral move and a pay-cut. Now, she worked her butt off and was rewarded with the job and is still well compesated with an exciting role and years of service which surely will pay into a good pension but….this model does not apply to anyone graduating from college now, and it already doesn’t apply to the other 99 candidates who did not get the role. It is that hard out there.

I often scroll through TikTok to get a better feel for the U.S. economy, and I came across some interesting videos this weekend. In southern California, a seasoned (by that I mean she is probably around 30 and already bought her first home) stripper talked about how now clubs are full of men who come in but don’t want to spend even $20-$100 on private dances. They want to look but not pay. That is a heck of a warning bell if I ever heard one. $4+ gasoline shows up in other areas of spending where suddenly belts are tightening. Trump’s foreign adventures are being felt at home. The same stripper about a month ago posted about a bunch of guys getting deployed…and the club being super busy. Pretty sure those were Navy.

There is another influencer who posted unashamedly about high fasion and foreign travel and her glamorous life in New York, and she now started a daily series in which she posts what she orders to be delivered to her New York apartment every day. She never cooks, and orders two, sometimes three meals. On a rainy day yesterday, she ordered a very specific Starbucks iced coffee with lots of additions and substitutions, and with delivery charg and tip (she always tips the highest possible %, hats off to her, and she says this over and over to her audience, acknowledging her contribution to the gig economy by tipping above and beyond), the singlular iced coffee was $21.

So here we are. Those who have carved themselves out a unique space (she has over 1 million followers on TikTok where she generates income as a content creater) do not flinch at $21 coffee, while everyone else, it would seem, especially those who expected to have salaried jobs for life, is now thinking about what they can cut back on. What was once safe is no longer, and what was once risky may be safer than we think. Maybe in this economy the only path to success is to be a creator (assuming you are not a doctor or teacher something very useful to society which thankfully has not yet been replaced by AI).

I really enjoyed this very thoughtful discussion on the New Yorker Political Scene podcast about how Trump’s foreign wars have now come home:

Donald Trump’s Economic Warfare Abroad Comes Home

Trump’s administration started a war in Iran which now looks like it may actually benefit Iran more than the U.S., with the Strait of Hormuz weaponized in a way that was only possible in theory before, and now is in practice, and the economic impacts of these foreign misadventures now starting to pinch ordinary Americans at home. The discussion is really thoughtful and really worth your time. There are tidbits such as an acknowledgement by some foreign leaders of traditional U.S. “allies” that the U.S. pulling out of NATO and the UN are not non-zero possibilities anymore. You listen to this, and realize everyone is having to go through these stages of grief and then finally coming to acceptance of the new reality with Trump at the helm. The new reality that America is not the reliable friend with deep pockets and shared values you thought you had. Foreign leaders will readjust, but how will American voters?

Trump is now as unpopular as he has ever been. Even two-time Trump voters, especially those who would describe themselves as “independent”, are starting to express their frustration, even if not outright admitting it was a mistake to vote him into office in the first place. In this episode of The Daily, two reporters who know Trump probably better than any others explain that Trump’s view of the war does not necessarily match how the rest of the White House sees it. Meaning, as I read between the lines, we are truly at mercy of the decisions of a single person. Never a good sign.

Trump’s View of the War

So when I woke up this morning and saw the headlines about the shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, my immediate thought was back to Trump’s terrible rating and his need to boost his popularity and the last time he had such a boost it was when his ear was nearly shot off. I cannot imagine anyone can sneak a gun into the White House that easily. I cannot imagine this whole thing was anything more than a desperate attempt to change the narrative with a room full of journalists live streaming on their phones. It reads like something out of a reality TV producer’s playbook for new plotlines to spice up a season with lagging ratings.

I truly appreciated this breath of fresh air and sharp, no bullshit take by Puck journalist and author Julia Ioffe who was in attendance last night, recorded after 1am when she returned home:

Circling back to the New Yorker podcast, one of the points they make is that if you are going to play “economic” warfare, you have to be prepared to hold your ground and to play the long game. So far, Trump’s impulsive wars have not been benefitting America. If anything, they have been benefitting America’s sworn enemies, pushing the oil price up for Russia and Iran, even pulling back some sanctions against Russia, nearly forgetting altogether about the war in Ukraine, for which we were theoretically sanctioning Russia in the first place. The tariff games have been more or less paused by the Supreme Court (thankfully), but the political risk associated with an America led by a man nearing 80 who remains as unpredictable as ever has not gone away. The only thing I think still holding up American valuations in general is the size of our economy. But the rest of the world is surely planning for a future in which the U.S. is less relevant than ever. Of course in areas like tech/AI/innovation and entertainment no one is challenging America, yet, but that could only be a matter of time, especially as China focuses to catch up in the first category. Maybe one day we will be left with a charicature of Hollywood, Netflix series we all watch bootleg versions of, sports teams who continue to entertain us, but the Amerian economic dream with a two-car garage and a backyard swingset a relic from the 1980s iconic high school love story movies. I feel like there is a strong possibility brand America will live on, while the reality on the ground will continue to deteriorate for many Americans, as they look around the world and start to ask, are our day-to-day lives really better and richer?

Stranger things have happened.

I received a thoughtful email this week from a reader sharing this video addressing the eternal question of why do more Russians not protest more against Putin’s regime, especially in light of recent mass mobile internet outages (self-inflicted, as we now know, by the FSB) in major cities like Moscow and St. Petersburg.

My answer to the question is rather simple. I remember the day when Yelstin announced, on New Year’s Eve 1999 (turning into 2000) on Russian TV that he was resigning and we learned that Putin would be taking over. I was in Moscow at the time, and called my friend who lived across the street. Her mother answered the phone, and told me it was bad news, because Putin is “KGB”. There was a historical memory in play. Generations of Russians know what happens to people who speak up. Moreover, there have been more than enough examples in recent decades of what happens to those in “opposition” who speak up or dare protest the regime. So protesting within Russia is, in my opinion too, a foolish enterprise. What Russians are doing, and in larger numbers than perhaps the rest of the world realizes, is simply packing up their lives an emigration. They move to anywhere they can get a residence permit: warm beaches of southeast Asia, non-EU European countries like Serbia, Georgia, Armenia, EU countries if they can figure out the paperwork, sometimes even as far as Latin America (babies born in Argentina receive automatic citizenship which the babies can pass to their parents). In other words, Russians may not be protesting, but they are marching with their feet by leaving Russia, for good. This is not just an economic protest (in fact, many may even continue to work for Russian clients or jobs remotely), but rather a desire not to live in a country which has become isolated from the rest of the world, a desire not to have their children indoctrinated with Putin’s history lessons in Russian schools, a desire not to have their sons and husbands fight in Putin’s wars.

Last year, Chatham House estimated at least one million Russians left Russia since the war began. I feel like the real figure has to be actually higher. If little Serbia with its population of 6+ million already absorbed something like 100,000+ Russians, if you look at the world, and all the possible locations to start afresh with a Russian passport, the figure has to be more than one million. And yes Russia is huge, and perhaps this isn’t that much in the grand scheme of things, but leaving is a means of protest, one of the few still available.

This past weekend I joined another birthday celebration of a mostly LGBTQ+ group of Russians who are now spread all over Europe, with some still living and working in Russia. The meeting point was Serbia because it is visa free and still has direct flights to Moscow. Over a coffee before we all headed to the airport, we casually started talking about all the western brands that pulled out of Russia: Starbucks, McDonalds — both now replaced by local copycat brands, Coca Cola — now there are a dozen different types of colas on the market all produced by the same factories which used to produce the real thing, and IKEA — no successful big box replacement, yet, but the furniture can easily be sourced online from local producers. Yes, Zara is gone, but life seems to go on without it. Russians in immigration also joined our celebrations, and they are also not seeing the world through rose-colored glasses. Some see Serbia as a stop before trying their luck elsewhere, others married locals and it is now home. One common thread is an implicit understanding that no on supports the regime nor the war, but some people made the decision to stay in Russia for financial and/or family reasons. Some have elderly parents they cannot abandon. Some have jobs they cannot do abroad, cannot work remotely, essentially a lifestyle they aren’t prepared to give up and start from zero. What is beautiful to observe in these groups is how there is zero judgement, and rather simply joy at being able to gather together for a few days in a neutral location. Perhaps these European weekends are now even more precious than back in in the day when it is was no problem to apply for a Schengen visa and fly to Paris or Rome for a weekend from Moscow.

In case you missed it, the team from Vlast (Farida Rustamova and colleagues) hosted a live Q&A this week, and covered topics from the internet outages in Russia to if Russia’s economiy is really on the brink.

Vlast

Live with Farida Rustamova

Listen now

4 months ago · 29 likes · 3 comments · Farida Rustamova, Margarita Liutova, and Howard Amos

With the weather finally turning warmer (I was able to engage in a very cold first outdoor swim yesterday at a public pool!), I am trying to read again, and I just ordered two new books which I will let you know how I find them once they arrive:

Famesick, A Memoir by Lena Dunham (great looooonnnng read here by Rafael Frumpkin). I am not a millenial, but I loved GIRLS. I never understood the public hate Lena receives. I think she is a very sharp writer with a very unique voice.

The Descent by longtime Russia correspondent Marc Bennetts who spent 25 years reporting from Russia and tries to make sense of what happened. It has received rave reviews and I am looking forward to jumping in!

My daughters also gifted me this relatively new book on China which will also be going into my pool bag as soon as the weather turns warm enough again.

I think that is all I have for this week. I keep hearing from Ukrainians about the damage Russia continues to inflict, especially on cities like Dnipro. Out of the news does not mean nothing is happening. It simply means this is our new normal, and everyone asks for how many years more, and no one knows. Meanwhile, life goes on, in some kind of bizarre parallel universe.

I hope to one day live in a world, especially for our kids’ sake, in which these forever wars are no longer normal. I fear instead we may simply be shifting to a new landscape in which remote-controlled drones replace soldiers but ordinary people still die. I hope I am super wrong about this.

Today is Orthodox Easter (my social media feed is flooded with beautiful pastel cakes and dyed eggs, each country having a different word for the same sweet bread or sweet cheese tower), but today much of the world is watching tiny Hungary as Hungarians head to the polls in record numbers, and from the looks of it (too early for any final results to be in other than exit polls), Mr. Orban’s time appears to be up. Which is fascinating in and of itself, and also that democracy, it would appear, is actually still working within the EU. I don’t know why I find this fascinating, perhaps I have grown far too cynical, and yet any time of friend of Putin’s doesn’t actively steal an election, I think it is cause for celebration. I did see a tweet earlier today by one of Orban’s political advisors (who interestingly shares the same last name but is no relation) accusing the opposition party which is expected to win today of rigging the vote, etc. It was exactly the kind of message one puts out when your only form of defense is to accuse your opponent of something you would do.

Perhaps we should just take a second to appreciate this tidbit, for those of you who didn’t know the name of who is expected to be the future leader of Hungary:

Turnout was apparently massive, at nearly 75%. As I write, the polls have only just closed a few mintues ago (7pm Budapest time). CNN, in what may be a sign of what is to come, is leading with the headline that the race is close. Politico expects court challenges either way. So as much as everyone would like to see a “win” in Hungary (which is really nothing about Hungary but more about seeing a Trump and Putin buddy be elected out of office by those in the west tired of the alliance of conservative old white men, to put it nicely), it seems we may not get an answer tomorrow or even this week. Furthermore, from Hungarians perspective (and I cannot speak for them), I think this was less about foreign policy and more about the future of their country which they think has been held back by years of crony deals and corruption with EU money. I was last in Budapest a year ago, and I noted then that the city looked less well off than other central European capitals (just realized I used this photo back then too, oh well).

Regime change in Hungary would certainly feel like a win for many Europeans and EU politicians tired of official Hungary’s antics. It is also important to note that Orban has a personal axe to grind with Ukraine and is permanently railing against Zelensky to the point that the whole thing looks ridiculous and dare I say, anti-semitic. It would appear the last minute campaign appearance by US Vice President Vance didn’t do much of anything, no surprise there either.

We also learned today that talks with Iran in Pakistan appear to have gone nowhere. Now Trump is threatening to close the Strait of Hormuz to all traffic. This would of course be an escalation, cutting Iran off of revenue, as until now Iranian ships and those ships which paid Iran were getting through. I have no insight into this other than to say that in the short term, I suppose, we may face even greater supply issues, and that will keep commodity prices artificially high. So the sigh of relief the markets breathed may indeed have been very short-lived. Obviously, this whole thing is a mess which cannot now be undone and the White House must be scrambling behind the scenes to try and come up with a least bad solution, if there is one to be found. I cannot imagine the anger within the Gulf states, and as some experts rightly point out, all of this is going to lead to pipeline buildling on their part, as long-term no one is going to want to be vulnerable to having their exports held hostage by Iran on a whim. Frankly, I suppose, it is surprising this all never happened sooner when you look at the geography of the map. A testament, I suppose, to cooler-headed governments.

A few interesting long-reads for you this week:

A very insightful discussion with economist Brank Milanovic about his new book. He describes this new economic situation we are living in, and I found it particularly insightful in the context of trying to get my layman’s head around what I saw in China on our recent visit. I have not yet read his book, but I am now thinking I should order it.

Another long read, totally unrelated, but on the concept of the “Disneyland”-ing of Europe by certain, generally anglo-saxons, in search of a fantasy version of a slow, idyllic life. The writing is sharp and astute, and worth your time.

Camp Wunderkammer

Italy is not Disneyland; Italians are not quaint zoo animals.

In February 2026, Harry Styles regaled the wider public with this riveting recount of his time spent in Italy. He told The TimesCamp Wunderkammer is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber…

Read more

5 months ago · 213 likes · 91 comments · Angelica Frey

I listened to two very different but both intriguing podcasts this week. The first, an interview with Lena Dunham about her new book (I am a huge fan of her TV shows and although I understand why she is controversial I find her voice so unique and at times so damn smart I am willing to look past everything else). The second, an interview with a veteran New York Times journalist who flew to Mexico to take a drug which is illegal in the U.S. but used experimentally, primarily by military veterans, to get over PTSD.

While scrolling today I also came across this interesting piece by historian Sergey Radchenko about giving up his Russian citizenship. I was surprised by two moments. First, that he didn’t expect Russia to actually invade Ukraine in 2022. Second, that he thought one could make a joke while inside the Russian embassy (read to the end, I don’t want to spoil the outcome).

I Had Poked the Bear Right In the Eye

Perhaps there are situations in which ordinary person common sense overpowers academic prowise. As someone who experienced moving to a new country as a child, and all those immigration processes through a child’s eyes, I feel to my bones the need to shut the hell up when inside a government office, not say anything that could potentially offend anyone, and tow the party line. I am also truly surprised how a historian could miss Putin’s obsession with maps and history because it seems so fundamental to understanding his motivations as a leader…perhaps because it is so ridiculous it was difficult to believe or take seriously. In any case, the article is interesting and giving up one’s citizenship is something you actually have to do when you take on a new one in many countries and is not nearly as straightforward as it might sound. As the author jokes, you could not simply set your Russian passport on fire and toss it over the gates of the embassy.

In a sign of the (grim) times we are living through, the New York Times did a long interview with Lauren Sanchez, which I was inclined to read after a veteran journalist retweeted it. Reader, let me spare you. You will not find her nor Bezos any more interesting if you make it to the end. It is actually remarkable how people can amass such staggering wealth and still not come across as anyone you would actually like to have dinner with, or even a cup of coffee frankly. And then you think about all the possibilities of what could be done with that wealth if the in the “right” hands, and it is just depressing. The whole thing reads just…empty. And the fact that they live on some billionaire island in Miami, well Florida is just a metaphor for everything preverse these days. Imagine having all that money and still choosing to live in Florida. Anyway, I warned you. The only interesting tidbit is she is actually a helicopter pilot. Which is kind of cool, I suppose.

This week I saw an art house film in the cinema in Vienna which caught my attention with its name — Yugo Florida (the car, not the state). It is a classic story in many ways about father and son, and life and death, and the lead actor is very talented, as I knew him from other Serbian-made shows. More than the father-son relationship, I was fascinated by the portrayal of women in the film, which the main character interacted with using about as much thought and consideration as one uses to decide what to eat for lunch. It was fascinating in that sense alone.

I must apologize that my recent writing here has been short on substance. I can feel it too and I don’t have any easy answers. I have reached a point where I feel like I don’t have anything really valuable to add to the discussion of what is happening all around us in an era where it feels like much of what we knew and took as god-given has come off the rails. Most days I feel like writing about totally different topics, frankly, but I haven’t figured out the right way yet to package and share those thoughts. In the meantime, thank you for continuing to stick with me. I hope that at least by sharing interesting work by others this provides some value-added.

Before I hit publish, I just checked for the latest from Hungary, and it looks as if the opposition leader is “optimistic but cautious” as the votes are now being counted.

I had meant to sit down and write this on Easter Sunday (a holiday I mostly associate with the misery of allergy season and closed grocery stores in Europe), but unfortunately we also brought some form of a “man cold” back from China. At first I was downing antihistimines like uppers, but then I realized they weren’t doing anything, and all I wanted to do was crawl back to bed at all hours of the day and night. Today I managed to acquire what is over-the-counter cold medicine in most English-speaking countries, but for some reason an Austrian pharmacist insisted I needed a prescription to buy, at which point I muttered something about being here 13 years already and never having been told that before, walked to a second pharmacy, and got the drugs. As the song goes, I took the drugs, and the drugs are working, so before they wear off, let me share with you my impressions of our trip to Shanghai last week.

I must preface by saying that it was a a lifelong dream to visit China one day, and we did that a year ago, with a visit to Beijing (wrote about that trip here). This time we had, thankfully, a direct flight to Shanghai. It is now possible to visit China as an EU citizen visa-free for up to 30 days. They introduced this last year for tourists, and it was extended in 2026. Americans actually need to enter as “transit”, meaning you fly out to a different city than you arrived from, so I flew to China as a Serbian citizen — the two countries have close ties going back to the 1990s when Serbia was under sanctions from just about everyone and China kept investing and doors open.

This time around I felt a bit less stressed about all the trip pre-preparation, but it is important to note for anyone who has not been to China yet and is thinking about it: visiting China is not hard but it does require a bit more preparation. In short, you need to download an e-sim, purchase a VPN, and download AliPay or WeChat (most foreigners seem to use AliPay, so I did this too). You add your credit or debit card to AliPay, and use the app to pay for purchases within China. You will have a QR code and your own PIN. You can also bring cash, and change at the airport, and most places do accept cash, too, but you will experience a lot of small transactions all day and the AliPay app is really great for that. It also has inside the app both the landing form you need to fill out before arriving (also a QR code you show at the airport) and the Chinese version of Uber which is called DiDi and they have a version that works in English inside the app. All of this is logistics, but also the key to success or frustration.

This time I perhaps underprepared, as I did not buy Disneyland tickets ahead of time, primarily because I didn’t think I needed to and I wanted to see how the weather would look so we could be sure to go on a sunny day. Long story short — we never made it to Disneyland because it was sold out by the time I thought to buy tickets. Yes the kids were upset. I made it up to them, more or less, with a trip to feed the red pandas at the wild animal park, an unlimited supply of Chagee iced milk tees (retail price just over €2, QR code menu, you order entirely on your phone, you only interact with staff to show your order number to collect), and multiple visits to packed Mini So stores whose primary purpose seemed to be selling small stuffed animals on keychains and 999 other non-food goods young female consumers cannot live without.

Passport control always gives me a little bit of nerves because although it is not outwardly scary-looking in China like in Russia, it is still very much an authoritarian country, I am fully aware of that, and hence, borders make me nervous. The machine speaks to you in the language of your passport as it scans your face and takes your finger prints. Our clearance seemed to take ages as the border control officer thought my older daughter didn’t look very much like her photo anymore. But in the end, it was just about patience, and they waved us through.

We changed some money, and tried to order a Didi, but at this point the long flight caught up with me, and I sort of freaked out when it checked all possible options, including the most expensive, so I cancelled the order and decided we would take the subway, which happened to be a direct line to our hotel. Buying a subway ticket was actually super easy. You click on the screen to change to English, select your destination station, how many tickets you need, and you scan a QR code in AliPay for payment. It cost us each a little over €1 for a 60 minute ride into the city center. There are security bag scanners at the entrance of every subway station in Shanghai, something you quickly get used to.

The Shanghai metro is now the world’s largest and also was built quite recently, and only opened to the public in 1993. You don’t see historically impressive stations like I imagined from Russia where stations opened in the 1930s already. But the trains are exceptionally clean, everyone is quiet and orderly, and frankly, the trains seemed a lot nicer than the Vienna subway which is generally touted as one of Europe’s best. I could not stop observing how much infrastructure China has built in such a short period of time. It is truly mind-boggling.

My first impressions of Shanghai was a combination of New York and London, as the Bund which looks towards super modern Pudong makes you feel like you are standing on the Thames, and the big bright lights of the Nanjing shopping street made me feel like I was in New York. I guess that is the biggest difference, that when we visited Beijing, it felt very Chinese. Shanghai was so diverse, including architecturally, that it made me want to learn more about its history. I must admit, my knowledge of Asian history is rudimentary at best. This 2006 archive piece actually does a great job of summarizing what makes Shanghai feel like such a mix of cultures, both architecturally, and somehow in the air — it felt lighter and less Chinese than Beijing. A museum on the history of Shanghai featured a new exhibit on Seoul, South Korea, and highlighted many of the similarities of the two economic powerhouse cities, and made direct references to “puppet Japanese” who occupied the city in 1937. I immediately remembered from our visit last year to Seoul learning about how long Korea had actually also been under Japanese occupation.

As we explored the tree-lined streets of the former French Concession (which really do look like they are somewhere in Paris, minus the clothes drying on the metal racks outside the windows), I kept thinking about what all this colonial history means for modern China today. And then I got my answer in the most unlikely of places. After purchasing numerous delicious iced coffees and pastries (Shanghai is the queen of aesthetic bakeries and coffee/tea/matcha shops, very much like Seoul) and wandering the shopping streets of the French Concession, we headed to a smaller market area and then to a new big outdoor “mall” which reminded me of Scottsdale, except the buildings were actually historical, and right next to this upscale mall, Xintiandi, was a museum to the first meeting of the Chinese communist party. The Memorial Hall of the First National Congress of the Communist Party of China, to be exact.

It was totally surreal to go from a delicious burger at Shake Shack (literally better than any I ever ate in America), luxury Korean skincare, and nearly every designer brand you can imagine to a modern museum with entry free of charge which is essentially like a very well done propaganda exhibit to the origins of the Chinese communist party. There were groups of Chinese visitors all wearing party flag pins on their jackets. There was another group who arrived and stopped at the entrance to all recite what sounded like a Chinese pledge of allegiance together in unison. This all right next to a mall which was a capitalist wet dream. My conclusion? Communism in China is not anything to do with communism, it is a unifying national idea replacement, and centers around an identity based upon a single national idea, and a strong sense of anti-imperialism, anti-colonialism. You read the history of Shanghai, look around at the wonders they have built over the past few decades alone, and understand of course why China sees its future as something only China should decide and be in control of. From what I could see, modern, authoritarian China is just as capitalistic as any society I have experienced.

The differences to the U.S., though, are stark. You don’t see homeless people. You don’t see drug addicts. I am not saying they do not exist. I am saying they have likely been removed from public sight. I did not ask any Chinese people on our trip how they felt because the longest interaction we had was on a subway when a sweet young woman offered one of my daughters one of her keychains from her backpack. When you go into restaurants or cafes, you very often order directly from a QR code menu, and you do not tip (it is culturally not expected and would be weird if no one else is). The element of small talk in a shop or cafe is simply not there, especially when you don’t speak the language. Everyone is exceptionally polite. I tried to attend a Chinese class this past fall and I failed miserably. I accepted there are some things beyond my brain capacity, and Chinese is one of them. I walked around in awe of them all, and barely managed to recognize a few words and characters from the hundreds we were taught.

My daughter asked to visit an English bookstore. I found one, officially titled, “foreign language bookstore of Shanghai”. I found a display of official books (see photo left), and there was censorship, but it was subtle. A stamp on the inside of the paperback novel that it had been approved for sale in China, and on one of the back pages, in a story which took place during the Vietnam war, a paragraph had been covered up in thick, white sticker which was difficult to remove from the page. My daughter discovered this paragraph contained derogatory words about communism. While in our hotel room, there were a few old films free of charge, one of which was Gone With the Wind. Traumatized by viewing it too young (another parenting fail of mine), they asked to rewatch the amputation scene, only to discover it had been cut out of the flim. These are tiny things, but reminders that a capitalist paradise can also co-exist with full control, or at least the illusion thereof, especially in a digital society.

AliPay, to be fair, knew my every move. It knew which taxis I took where, what I spent money on and where, and even which bank cards I used to pay for those transactions (you can add more than one, thankfully, as in the middle of the trip my eldest informed us his copy of my credit card had been stolen and I would have been stranded if not for a back-up Revolut card I added before the trip). In general, I didn’t have the impression anyone in China was annoyed by the endless swiping and scanning of QR codes. There are lots of employees everywhere you go but less so in customer-forward roles, more in fulfillment of orders. I thought a lot about a recent report I read or heard about China’s economy and the boost it could experience if it were to reduce the tax burden on the lowest earners, the backbone of its “gig economy”, the 200 million plus delivery drivers and the like, and how freeing up more disposable income for them could give the entire economy a GDP-boost.

I also thought a lot about the construction bust you read about, and as we took two long subway rides through semi-agricultural outskirts to reach the wild animal park where my daughter was insistent on feeding a red panda apples like she had seen on TikTok (incidentally, the Chinese are all on their phones on the subway and all watching the Chinese version, RedNote), I did see some groups of empty apartment blocks never finished. I read recently this creepy article about some burials of ashes (!) now taking place in some empty blocks due to lack of affordable cemetary plots. To be fair, we were almost entirely in the city center, so I personally did not see a lot of evidence of this overconstruction. What I did see on existing construction sites were huge mini-villages of accomdation for construction workers in containers, like you see in the reports from Dubai. Which means laborers are being brought to the site and then living there the entire time they are working. That is, I assume, how you transform a country’s infrastructure at lightenting speed.

I was left with the impression that everything opens early and works late, and the subways were crowded at all hours of the day. I felt like one has to hustle to survive, and everyone was busy hustling. It was in such sharp contrast to the apathy and lethargy and trapped-in-time-slow-decay (I really am grappling for words here) I experience in Vienna these days, especially in institutions. I wondered if China has an AMS or job center, and what the terms are. I know that high youth unemployment is still a problem despite the visual you have of economic activity all around you. There is a hustle — as you walk down the street and stick out like we did as three blondes, you are approached by people with little business cards asking if you want to buy counterfeit bags. I assume you are then taken to an alley around the corner.

Transportation and food are generally cheap if you translate the average prices in to Euros, but I am assuming that everyone in China is also earning a lot less. I actually caught myself thinking this morning on the u-bahn in Vienna that the people here look worse dressed and less well off, in the way that poverty and years of stress leaves lines on one’s face, than the Chinese I saw on the subway in Shanghai. The major hotels cost like any other major city in Europe, and the same I think is fair to say about non-food shopping. Our hotel was filled with both Chinese and western guests, and I suppose Disneyland was sold out in part due to a brief early April school holiday in China which coincided with our visit. Surely income inequality is rife in China’s major cities, too. China seems to already have a homegrown enormous “Amazon equivalent” company which is the answer to any consumer need or want in any category.

Everything I am writing are massive generalizations and I therefore perhaps hesitate to even go on. The last evening one of my kids turned on CCTV channel one, and it was exactly what I would have expected, perhaps even more so. Friday night family generational dramas with tears and emotion and main characters who work in courts as judges/prosecutors. Instead of commercials there were what felt like long, beautifully shot, modern infomercials about everything from China’s nature and agricultural wealth to the accomplishments of Chinese children in schools. At 10pm, the nightly news came on, and was, as expected, only about China and their own achievements, factories, economic news, etc. Remember, if you even want to use WhatsApp or Instagram, you need to use your VPN, and even with the VPN, some apps like TikTok were incredibly slow to load. Reaching different points of view is not impossible but it is a hassle.

China has created a world within a world. And most of the time, frankly, at least in Shanghai, it felt like the future. None of us wanted to fly home. My girls were downright emotional about not wanting to leave. I had not expected that.

p.s. briefly on who else is visiting China now — most of the non-Chinese visitors we noticed were speaking Russian. You do see/hear other Europeans, too, and some visitors from the Gulf states for obvious reasons. One morning we were buying subway tickets and I overheard a group of still-drunk-from-the-night-before young Russian men. I asked them gently if they needed help. They were as confused by the English screen as the Chinese. They were trying to get to the train station. I helped them to buy their tickets, and the most sober of the bunch thanked me and tried to apologise saying they ‘got an early start’ while the reality was, of course, they simply never stopped. It was somehow rather comical, this scene of lost, drunk Russians amidst a morning rushhour, it took me back to the early 2000s when many of them were just discovering foreign travel. But most of the Russians we saw were families and looked solidly middle class, not extravagantly wealthy. Important to remember geographically many Russian cities are closer to China than to Europe, plus no need to get a visa (China lifted the visa requirement in September of last year in large part to encourage more tourism from Russia).

This week I would also like to share with you this very moving, exceptionally researched long read by veteran war reporter C.J. Chivers who spent several months in Kyiv this winter:

How Russia Weaponized the Cold Ukrainian Winter (gift article)

I barely monitored the news out of the U.S. and Iran while we were in China. It was actually like escaping for a week. I thought a lot about what this moment might mean for China. Would they use this opportunity with the world distracted elsewhere to do something in Taiwan? This FT video below presents an interesting summary to China’s position as a net importer of oil but having diversified its energy sources and able to negotiate 1-on-1 with Iran to get its tankers through, as the analyst No. 3 observes (more on that bonkers story in a second).

Skimming through X the other day I came across this insane story about an investment research firm which sent an analyst directly to the Strait of Hormuz, armed with $15,000 cash, some nicotine pouches, and cigars, to try and figure out from the source what if anything was actually getting through. The full article is behind a paywall:

Citrini Research

Strait of Hormuz: A Citrini Field Trip

Introduction…

Read more

5 months ago · 1082 likes · 34 comments · Citrini

New York magazine also published an excellent summary here (if you give them your email you can read it for free).

I present, the TL;DR version, which is truly epic:

Bottom line: analyst No. 3 observed that some Chinese ships are getting through, which means China has made deals with Iran, and also that for now at least, the strait is not mined.

I found this discussion below to be highly timely and informative both on China and AI and on how things might develop with Iran. It is amazing to think that one Austrian developed a new tool so powerful it may now entirely redesign how companies use AI. The Chinese are calling it “lobster mania” refering to OpenClaw. Basically, unlike “chat” AI apps, OpenClaw actually peforms tasks rather than just asking questions.

I am really the last person who should be commenting on anything tech or AI, in that sense I am very old European (lol), but if anyone can adapt to this new future it is modern China because they are already living it. I thought a lot while we were there about how such rapid development was possible, on such a massive scale, and so quickly, and it soon becomes glaringly obvious that such changes could only have been possible under an authoritarian model — democracy and public debate do not lead to quick and efficient decision-making, as we see now in the struggling economies (and defense systems) of many old European countries. I wonder if in this new world the concepts of liberal and democracy and individual voices will become passe, obsolete, just like our brains and bodies, as AI and robots replace them. The biggest challenges will be how we as socities determine what rights every individual is entitled to, and how everyone can have a chance at making a living while not overly subsidizing one group at the expense of another. In many ways liberal democracy, at least the old European version, is already failing younger generations as pensioners will never vote to take a pay cut in the present in the name of future economic growth. People are generally selfish and will generally vote in their own self-interest. In some countries, like China, no one asks you to vote in the first place. And yet, in general, in the big cities, people look happy and pretty well off. I would argue more so than in what I saw in Germany just a few weeks ago. Actually if I stop to compare what I saw in Berlin and what I saw in Shanghai all within the span of a few weeks it is shocking. Truly.

As for my home country, I have left Trump out of all of this on purpose because reading the tea leaves is an exercise in futility, now more than ever, and the mood swings seem to grow worse by the hour. Vance has been campaigning with Orban this week which is just so lame, especially now that even the Hungarian people have decided a change of leadership is long overdue (I am being diplomatic with my words).

I wish I could say I think the war in the Middle East will all be over soon but really I don’t see how it can end soon. I think the new normal is a lot of geopolitical uncertainty and that is, frankly, bad for business for everyone. Well, except for those placing insider bets on what Trump is about to post on Truth Social. What a time to be alive. It feels like the rug has been pulled out from everything we were told to believe in but nothing has arrived yet to replace how we are supposed to see things and make sense of it all. I find myself questioning everything at the moment, and I am fairly certain I am not alone in this.

I have no idea what to tell the kids, and this kills me, slowly.

Thank you for reading, and sorry for the delay.

This week I made a very quick trip to Berlin, by train (actually, two) to see Nurejew, a controversial ballet about the life story of Rudolf Nureyev, by famous Russian theater director and once-under-house-arrest Kirill Serebrennikov, which premiered in Moscow in the Bolshoi ever so briefly before it was immediately banned by the Russian authorities for “LGBT propaganda”. Years later, the ballet found a new home at Deutsche Oper Berlin, and friends invited me to go with them, after the lead dancer, an extremely talented dancer from Brazil, David Motta Soares, who moved to Russia at the age of 12 to train at the Bolshoi ballet school, somehow ended up at their New Year’s party in London, and it was decided that we would all head to Berlin in March. And so we did!

The ballet itself was mesmorizing, incredibly beautiful, with theatrical staging which made me feel like I was back in Moscow’s now closed Gogol Tsentr theater for one night circa 2016. The storytelling was emotional, and epic, and the dancing impressive, and provocative — this was Berlin, and full male nudity made the audience giggle but not gasp. Afterwards, we all ended up in a restaurant together and David joined us. It was amazing to see such artistry up close, and to be able to tell the artist just how much joy he and the other performers brought to the audience that night.

Germany, on the other hand, was a different story. I hadn’t been in years (which is funny, living right next door), and I was shocked by how trapped in time everything looked out my train window. Everything I saw along the way, changing trains in Munich, arriving in Berlin, made me feel like I am living in regal Vienna in comparison. I joked to a friend that if Austria saw its heyday in the 1990s, then German probably experienced its peak in 1985. If Asia feels like the future, Germany felt like a sad version of the past, now weighed down by decisions made by decades of governments seeking compromise. The S-bahn smelled like actual piss. Twice. It felt a lot less safe than Vienna. Active drug use was much more visible to the naked eye. I am choosing my words carefully but I think it is safe to say Berlin at least did not give the impression of being a capital of an economic powerhouse, to say the least. I jokingly promised never to complain about Austria again.

I had a lot of time on my hands during two nine-hour train journeys, which I took not out of concern for the environment, but because Vienna has now lost many of its cheap flights thanks to the super smart (sarcasm) negotiating skills of the Vienna airport. I thought to myself as I was brushing my teeth this morning that it is funny we still do things like turn the water off while brushing so as to save water, while the world is literally on fire. And yet, we continue.

I listened to this very insightful podcast on Cuba, and learned that 1 in 5 Cubans recently left the country, many to Florida, and also to Spain. The economic situation in Cuba is so incredibly dire, and as some have already started to point out that Trump is losing interest in the war he started in Iran (with no good end in sight, to put it mildly), in his “boredom” he may just be thinking about how to get his hands on the Carribean real estate, which is of course how he probably views the impoverished island nation which for decades has struggled at the hands of its own pseudo-communist regime and as a powerplay between west and east. Concepts which nowadays have lost all meaning, but Cuba seems trapped in past struggles, the future anything but clear.

I also listened to a fascinating podcast on China’s robot factories which operate, literally, in the dark, as robots do not need light to see what they are doing. It is about more than robots, naturally, and dives into the deeper questions of how do you shape a modern society when even the children of illiterate workers have received an education, go to university, and are no longer satisfied with the prospect of a factory job? The conversation made me think a lot not only about China, but the world more broadly, as we have developed AI, robots, and drones faster than we have thought about what will happen to the people they are replacing, and how humans will find both purpose and livelihood in this new era.

This week it feels like everything deteriorated. Any hope of a quick solution to the war in Iran is surely gone. There seems to be a disconnect between the blockage of the Strait of Hormuz and markets understanding what this means once missing deliveries actually start to be missing at their destinations. There is, of course, a lag of weeks. Some argue the oil price at the moment does not reflect the shortages that are about to be felt. Some Asian countries, like the Phillipines, have already begun rationing. And it is not just oil and LNG. The lack of helium (also produced by the plant in Qatar which was hit and whose damages will take years to repair), or rather reduction of global supply by one-third, will affect the chipmakers who make the parts for the AI data centers. Even fertilizer is shipped by way of the strait, and this will affect planting season which is now. It is almost as if no one in charge understood the meaning of the word “global” in front of the economy politicians like to talk about.

I find myself screenshotting important points.

1. The gulf countries need the war to end but are not in agreement on when and how.

2. Oil prices do not yet reflect the loss of supply which is a ticking time bomb; the damaged refineries will also take a long time to repair.

3. The U.S. under Trump has now become, as some (Ian Bremmer I remember said this) predicted, the number one source of political risk around the world

4. The oil that leaves the gulf takes weeks to reach its final destinations; the shortages will only start to be felt in April

5. Trump has moved troops into the gulf and a ground campaign is possible…I have started to fear these weekends are the calm before the storm.

I also really recommend this insightful WSJ article by veteran reporter Yaroslav Trofimov about what life is actually like in Dubai right now:

The Gulf is Divided and Sees Dark Times Ahead

Speaking of storm, the markets are not happy with any of this, and aside from oil companies whose stocks are all on the rise, everything else is looking very sour, with the S&P experiencing its worst month since 2022. That means even worse than when Trump announced all the tariff lunacy at this time last year. This is not the “winning” America First etc. which Americans thought they were voting for. Everyone is feeling this now at the pump and in their investments. Food inflation, at least in Europe, is already so bad I cannot imagine how we are supposed to stomach even further price hikes. These days I go to the store and feel like I buy my usual modest assortment and everything suddenly is twice as expensive. I feel these hikes more than in non-food items. I can treat myself to a new pair of jeans at Zara for the same amount it costs to fill the fridge for a day or two — this feels weird.

There has been a lot of “action” in Russia this week. Firstly, Ukraine has been hitting on a near daily basis both Russia’s crude export ports in the northwest of the country and refineries as far inland as Yarolsavl. Some economists argue (see Alexander Kolyandr’s text below) this does not really hurt Putin’s wallet because Russia taxes at the well, and the war in Iran has pushed up crude prices for everyone, but I think there is an impact when now even ordinary Russians understand Ukraine has the capability of hitting targets essentially anywhere in Russia. This is a fundamental change vs. 2022.

Why Ukraine’s Russian oil strikes are backfiring

The ongoing mobile internet outages in Russia’s two most important cities are causing outrage and frustration amongst locals in Moscow and St. Petersburg. The FSB has done this as to prevent the drones from being navigated with GPS, and also perhaps because they say Putin is now even more paranoid about an attack on him personally after seeing the fate of the former Iranian leader.

Moscow internet blackouts: the Kremlin tightens its grip on Russia’s digital space

This week Putin also gathered Russian business leaders and demanded they too contribute to the war effort, as reported by The Bell and the FT. Some argue this is not out of economic desperation, but rather to remind those who have profitted off of the war that it is their turn to give back to the motherland. The Kremlin, funny enough, now denies it even asked for cash.

Putin asks businesses to pay for war

And yes, it goes without saying Russia continues to pound Ukraine. As one Ukrainian told me this week, in cities like Odesa, there are celebrations during the day, birthdays and weddings, and then things at night get very dark and very scary.

This week I also came across an unusually nuanced (for a non-native of the region) long read by Vincent Bevins in the London Review of Books on the student protest movement in Serbia. I felt this paragraph in particular:

For now, it’s not difficult to find students who oppose Vučić from the right. I met Milos, a dedicated weightlifter, at an upscale restaurant in central Belgrade. He declined the starters I’d ordered, saying he’d recently cut out carbs. He told me he was in the movement for three reasons: he wants to put the Orthodox Church back at the centre of Serbian society; he opposes the LGBT agenda imposed by the West; and he thinks Serbia needs to do more to support the ethnic Serbs living in Kosovo.

Finally turning to slightly lighter subjects, I did manage to read one book on the train, one that was recommended to me by a friend, but I must admit I didn’t really like it. It was well written, but I had a hard time finding sympathy for the author (it is a memoir) for a number of reasons. I then began to wonder what is wrong with me, as I couldn’t find any even remotely negative reviews online, it is a NYT bestseller, a movie is being made, etc etc. Strangers is the story of what happens to an exceptionally wealthy woman turned SAHM when one day her financier husband decides he is leaving her and the children, for good, no shared custody, just after she learns he was cheating on her with a married colleague. This all unravels during covid, and the book takes us back to their falling in love, and also chronicles the fallout of the divorce. I had a hard time relating to her both as a mother and a wife for how she positioned herself, her seemingly unawareness of her exceptional financial privelege, and I didn’t understand how you write an entire book about a marriage falling apart without mentioning intimacy not during, not your desire for it (or rather, lack thereof) afterwards. Having said that, she is a good writer, her descriptions do create images in your head, and I pushed through, even though it wasn’t what I had hoped it would be — for me.

This week I am off on a trip I cannot afford but it is booked so we are going and I must admit I am super excited. My girls and I are off (fingers mega crossed) to Shanghai tomorrow so I hope (inshallah etc) my next blog will come to you on Easter Sunday, all about China!

This spring feels so bizarre. I was speaking on Friday with a Ukrainian woman originally from the Zaporizhzhia region of Ukraine. Her elderly mother stayed behind, and refused to leave. There are six houses with people living still in them on the entire street. Every day, the Russians inch closer. Her mother waits for whatever fate has in store for her. In the process of our small talk I say something which I think sounds stupid, but the woman immediately seems to understand what I mean.

“It all almost makes you think back to covid and realize that was nothing.”

What I meant was, at least back then, the world was somehow locked down together in pursuit of a common goal. It was a huge challenge we all experienced and made our way out of together. Now, it is as if half the world is on fire while the other half is running around trying to capture content on their phones. I felt ridiculous even taking the photo above yesterday, but I know that beauty can have a calming effect especially during times of crisis. Even I cracked a smile at these pink bears.

Was it just yesterday (it all feels a blur) that Trump was saying the U.S. had achieved most of its goals in Iran? As if he was trying to hint at wanting an off ramp? And now, it seems, the tone has done a 180 degree turn, and he is now threatening to “hit and obliterate” Iran’s power plants if they do not guarantee safe passage for tankers through the Strait of Hormuz. As someone online noted, bombing power plants would actually be a war crime, but it seems in this year 2026, no one is keeping tracking of that concept anymore. My initial thought, after of course disappointment about this spiral of escalation, seemingly without any thinking through of potential consequences, was that Trump would then literally be copying Putin’s playbook. It was the targeting of power plants which resulted in such a brutal winter in Ukraine this season.

It is as if every weekend there is some escalation. Now just imagine you are sitting poolside in the heat and sun of Florida making these decisions. Or more precisely, from a golf cart. It is just mind-blowing.

What I do not undestand, and will leave for the experts to tell us, is how much firepower Iran actually has left. If the U.S. does what it has threatened to do, because I am assuming Iran has no incentive to back down now (its regime is after all fighting for its existence), and Iran is still exporting oil out of the strait (ironic, isn’t it), then Iran will fire back and it will be the Gulf allies who will pay the price. Qatar has reportedly already lost 17% of its LNG-production capacity after that one hit (although I did read an experienced journalist write that in times of war countries have a tendency to exaggerate damage to as avoid second strikes). Anytime major infrastructure is bombed you obviously do not rebuild it overnight.

So while some of us are taking photos of magnolia trees and posting them online for virtual likes, others are dropping bombs on what was the technological infrastructure of the progress of and integrated global economy. These days all that integration looks like a liability rather than an asset. It is all terribly sad when you stop to think about it.

Again, we could not have had a woman president because she would have been too emotional, according to many men who voted for Trump. What did we get instead? Instead, we captured Venezuela’s dictator (by far the most successful of the impulse ‘let’s take over that country’ moves by Trump 2.0). Then we threatened Greenland and caused a huge rift with EU allies. I heard this week (I would link but I forgot the source) that in the heat of the Greenland moment, Denmark actually sent soldiers to Greenland with instructions to blow up the runways of the airports to as to prevent landings by U.S. aircraft. Luckily, it didn’t come to that, but it was frighteningly close.

Trump promised to end the war in Ukraine in what, a matter of minutes? Instead, all talks are now off the table, Russia is reaping the benefits of a soaring oil price, and all talk of a potential end to the war has been removed from headlines. War in Ukraine appears to now be a status quo that no one is working on ending. This war in Iran was of course started by Trump. No other U.S. president dared, perhaps, it is fair to say, for good reason. Because they knew a thing or two about the region and about history and about how to read a map. This act first think later mentality has the potential to bring down the entire global economy, which is actually, truly remarkable if you trace it back to one golf cart in Florida. It is so mind-bogglingly crazy that it is understandable why people are now suddenly obsessed with taking pretty photos of their matchas. We need something stupid and pleasing to hold onto when nothing makes sense anymore.

This week I was actually planning on writing about Cuba because it is in a dire situation with oil exports from Venezuela cut off by the U.S., power blackouts and shortages of basic goods, and Trump saying this week from the Oval Office that he could “take it”. This podcast provides a good historical overview if you like me didn’t really pay much attention to those lessons in school:

Honestly, after listening to this podcast, it sounds like things in Cuba could only get better if the U.S. were to interfere. But could Trump 2.0 really handle two wars at once?

I shy away from any predictions because they seem a fool’s errand these days, especially when the real news is so shocking you have no idea it is actually real until you read it from three sources just to make sure.

This week I am headed to Berlin for one night to see the ballet Nureyev that was banned from the Bolshoi Theater in 2017. It will be a reunion of sorts for our gay friends from Russia who are now spread all over Europe like spinkles on a cupcake. I will be taking the train (two, in fact) because airfares are obscene between Germany and Austria’s capitals, so I have these books in my carry-on. The marriage unravelling memoir sounds like a trope but it has gotten so much press that I am curious (I fear it only got published because of the deep pockets of the author). The Russian forest story seems like the kind of escapism I need right now.

My screen recently has not been filled with anything intellectual. I have opinions on the new reality show Age of Attraction, and am irritated they are making us wait a week to watch the last episode. I do think it is cool that women are finally having the age gap relationships in the other direction. Long overdue! But yes, they can be cringe, too, I get that, and genuinely feel for the kids.

I have heard this New Yorker essay by Amanda Peet is spectacular, but unfortunately I have not mustered up the courage to read it (yet), and having had two parents battle cancer (one of whom I lost three years ago tomorrow), it might hit too close to home to read now anyway. But I share here because I see so many people sharing it online:

My Season of Ativan

I read the first few paragraphs and the writing is stunningly good. I will return when I am ready.

Today is a bit light because I feel like I have been reaching in the dark for big ideas this week and coming up short. I signed up to now go to an expensive hot pilates class in a new studio. I love heat and I hate pilates but I felt like maybe sweating it out in a dark room of anorexic, twentysomething strangers in matching spandex sets would help. One of my teens laughed in my face and already immitated what I will sound like when I crawl back home in a few hours and inevitably complain I would like a refund.

I wish you all small joys and endless patience in these interesting times.

As I instinctively know very little about the war in Iran, and the Middle East more broadly, I find myself searching for information. I continue to be left with the impression that even the experts do not know how the U.S. can end what it has now started. Of course not clearly defining one’s goals makes it easier to declare victory and walk away, but the disruptions to our global economy even if the “war” were to end tomorrow are already staggering. It is as if the Department of War didn’t know what climate activists have been trying to tell us all for years: that we are all much more interdependent and tightly connected on this one planet with finite resources than national borders and languages and cultural differences would have us believe.

Why Little Was Done to Head of Oil’s Strait of Hormuz Problem (gift article NYT)

Yesterday, while scrolling TikTok, I came across this video from India where people are already fighting over a limited supply of natural gas which they need for cooking. That gas is of course normally coming in the form of LPG through the very Strait of Hormuz which America’s War Minister said was technically open except, as if a very small asterisk to his statement, Iran was still bombing it. Except that, yes, it is open.

An excellent map explainer by Bloomberg’s Javiar Blas here.

The ripple effects are actually truly global. And in just two short weeks. This video from Sky provides a very good overview of what the situation is like on the ground in the region right now. Dubai has reportedly told bloggers to stop filming their buildings being hit by drones. A few brave souls use written social media to describe what they are seeing and hearing. A Russian entrepreneurial company in Dubai is already selling “drone netting” for private homes, having quickly pivoted from hawking a special roof paint which promises to reduce your cooling costs in summer. Two of the largest airports in the world, Dubai and Abu Dhabi, are both not yet operating at anything near to full capacity. This has ripple effects on travellers around the world. These are entire economies based on a peaceful situatin in the Middle East. It is as if Trump and Netanyahu (let’s not forget who did all that lobbying) lit a match they had no idea how to blow out, and how far the fire might spread.

In terms of oil and gas, it is important to understand that it is not only supply that cannot get out, but when countries run out of storage, they have to turn off production, and that is not a process that you just turn off and on like a tap of water. There is pressure involved, and this is gradual process. So in layman’s terms, what this has done to the global market for oil and natural gas is a huge (expletive) deal and the impact will last for months to come, even if the war were to miraculously be over tomorrow. But it won’t be, of course, because America and Israel managed to kill part but not all of the ruling family, so now the son is in charge, and as much as Trump loves to make himself a “deal”, killing someone’s loved ones and then expecting them to sit down and negotiate with you is a script so ridiculous no Hollywood studio would ever bankroll it.

How big is the global energy supply shock from the Iran war? An overview from The Economist:

In this clip below, Carlyle’s Jeff Currie explains the disruptions to global supply chains and why this is not something that can go back to “normal” immediately. It is not just oil and gas, but fertilzers and other commodities. “The damage is going to take months to unwind. There is no policy response that can stop this ascent in crude.” So it is not just the price of oil, but the flow rate as he explains — the supply does not ramp up immediately after you turn off the taps.

It is almost as if there wasn’t an adult in the room who knew any of this 16 days ago. Israel might have known but probably didn’t care because it has it’s own view of things, rather in black and white, given its geography and history and the political situation the country’s leadership finds itself in. Forever war with neighbors is sort of the new normal now. But Trump’s American people, for whom he is supposedly doing all of this, did not need this. Their lives did not change one bit based on the regime in power in Iran.

So here we are. And no one seems to have a good explainer as to how this might end, quickly. And as the war in Ukraine has shown us, people can eventually get used to just about anything. Will we soon live on a planet in which half is at war and half is at peace and those of us lucky enough to live in peace simply reschedule our holidays accordingly?

I did not watch the Oscars last night but I did see the winners and was very pleased to see not only that Mr Nobody Against Putin won the Oscar for best documentary, but also that Sean Penn won an Oscar for best supporting actor for his role in One Battle After Another, but that he “ghosted” the Oscars and instead was on his way to Ukraine, which, to be fair, is a much more powerful message about the state of the world we live in than standing on a stage in a tuxedo to receive an award. This is the problem with peace and war co-existing. The rest of us want, understandably, to keep on living, while everyone living at war looks at us as if we have lost our minds, while they are out there quite literally trying to survive. You really cannot get your head around it.

While the world’s attention has been focused on the Strait of Hormuz, a place few of us could have named just a few weeks ago (myself included), Russia has taken the opportunity to continue to hit Ukrainian cities. In Moscow, the authorities have been jamming mobile phone internet and have turned off city Wi-Fi to the point that now you are basically without the internet on your phone in much of central Moscow, and it is starting to drive everyone crazy. Residents are actually having to call taxi companies to order cars. Maps don’t work. Many of the taxi drivers are immigrants themselves and have no idea how to drive through Moscow without navigation tools. The internet has been jammed because Moscow is being attacked by drones, and this of course, was never part of the Kremlin plan. So while we all talk about oil and gas in the deserts of the Arabian penninsula, and how to get it to the world, Russia and Ukraine continue their war, on the front lines, with drones, and in the skies.

Elsewhere, I am seeing more and more on social media from ordinary Russians wanting to finally leave Russia. There are messages even from big cities, like million + cities in Siberia, who have had enough of everything: the war, the cold, the snow, the lack of economic opportunity. They are ready to sell their apartments and go. Go to whereever they can. They write about small businesses shutting, the economic squeeze of Putin’s war affecting ordinary people. They do not see a future. You cannot blame it on the snow and cold alone because those were always facts of live in Russia. Now, ordinary Russians look around and say do I need this? They read messages from Russians who have left and emigrated far and wide. They know that immigration is not a panacea but they also know if they stay there is a very good chance that things will just continue to slowly deteriorate. The thing with the wild 1990s and fast moving early 2000s in Russia is that there was hope. There is no hope now, and this makes people move with their feet, as scary as it sounds.

I came across this BBC interview yesterday with Fiona Hill in which she argues that Putin essentially wants to make Ukraine another Belarus, which might have been believable back in 2022 before the war started, but makes no sense now after more than four years of bombing and killing ordinary Ukrainians, how exactly would you imagine a peaceful vassal neighbor after you spent the past several years trying to ruin their homes and their country? A friend told me yesterday about a scenario which she heard whispered by an ordinary Ukrainian now living in Europe and actually, frankly, that scenario sounds more plausible to me. The east of Ukraine is already lost to Russia. Those living in occupied territories have already had to accept Russian citizenship to have mobile phones, banking, collect pensions, and even see a doctor. So those regions are gone. The middle of the country, the theory goes, remains as some kind of weakened, decapitated Ukraine. And the far west, the regions closer to the EU, they get absorbed by neighboring countries like Poland and Hungary, and the EU essentially expands its own borders. It does sound a little far fetched, yes, but it also reflects the mentalities on the ground. The one thing both of these prognoses have in common is there is no scenario in which a strong and free Ukraine emerges. Which is perhaps a lesson for future generations about what half-way support results in: half-way results.

This week I also wanted to recommend a very, very long read (11 chapters, and I am yet to read it in full myself) about Russian spies and hired Balkan killers and how they got caught using Google translate to communicate between two Slavic languages which often sound similar but can at times mean two different things. Once again, Christo Grozev and team have completed a masterfull storytelling from the very real world of Russian spies and hired killers:

Lost in translation: How Russia’s new elite hit squad was compromised by an idiotic lapse in tradecraft

In thinking about a world in which we co-exist alongside several major wars, all hoping they won’t reach our borders (head in the sand sort of attitude, with a hope and a prayer), I think it is also important to point out this written by one of Russia’s public intellectuals, Dmitry Trenin, who was once western-leaning and in recent years turned very pro-Kremlin. It is important what he is saying, namely, that Russia has no desire to become friends again with the U.S., that it will fully support other rogue states, and cosy up as much as possible to China. The lines appear to be drawn and no teams of negitators no matter how close they may be to Trump and Trump’s own inflated views of his own “dealmaking” skills are really no match for a new world in which countries have real enemies and the stick is more powerful than words. A violent playground, indeed. And the rest of us have to just get on with our lives and try to take cover when things get hot. What a sad state of affairs. How lucky we were to live in peace, and how little we appreciated it at the time.

This week I also read The Correspondent, which is a remarkable book because I absolutely loathed the main character, and yet found myself drawn into the story, wanting to know what would happen. It is written entirely in letters and emails, and has become something of a slow-burn hit, being recommended through word of mouth to reach bestseller status. The writing is divine. A real talent. I don’t know how you sit with a main character that unlikable to produce such a work of art.

I think that is it for me this morning. If you are struggling to make sense of all of this, you are not alone. I find myself more focused on little things in my own life, a distraction of sorts, perhaps not unlike how many of us started weird little hobbies during covid. We cannot control what is happening around us but we can control what is for dinner, that sort of thing.

I love the 8th of March because it is like a bonus holiday I never knew existed until I moved to Moscow in my 20s and all of a sudden international women’s day was not only a day off of work, but on occasion for every woman to be congratulated. It is not a romantic day like Valentine’s. Rather, men are expected to congratulate all the women in their lives: mothers, daughters, wives, girlfriends, colleagues at work. This morning I took a walk through Vienna and saw local flower shops doing brisk business. The holiday never really took off outside of communist countries, so now if you see a man carrying a bouquet on the 8th of March, there is pretty good chance he speaks some variation of a Slavic language. Americans seem to now be aware of this new holiday (new for them), and are now cracking jokes about it being typical that women would lose an hour on their holiday (the U.S. moved its clocks today).

I struggle with what to write this week as everything I have turned to in an attempt to further educate myself about how things in Iran and the Middle East may play out has left me with the impression that this time, truly no one knows. Even the experts are hesistant to map out any potential scenarios, perhaps because the decision-making (or lack thereof to put it more correctly) that went into the U.S. and Israel launching a war on Iran was so impulsive that now it is extremely difficult to predict how this will unfold. For now, regime change in Iran seems to be off the table. How could they expect Iranians to take to the streets and topple their government while Tehran is in flames and in a giant black cloud from American bombs being dropped on the oil storage depots near the capital?

The situation in neighboring gulf countries has also not entirely quieted down. It is almost as if those who started this war forgot about all the negative consequenes to nearby economies of an active regional conflight. What are Dubai and Abu Dhabi if their airports cannot function on a normal schedule? Will American allies remain loyal while their countries are being targeted by Iran? It is almost as if no one asked any of these questions. Israel may be used to being in a semi-permanent state of war with its neighbors, but no one else is. Everyone else wants to enjoy the prosperity they have built.

What really alarms me is when I hear commodity experts warning about the potential consequences of a huge spike in oil prices. Not just to $100 a barrel, but what if crude spikes temporarily to $200? It sounds outrageous, but it also sounds like, reading between the lines, that with one-fifth of global oil consumption moving through the Straight of Hormuz, if that were to be interrupted, it would have a monumental impact.

How High Could Oil Prices Go? (and I suppose, even more importantly, for how long would they stay that high?)

Oil prices spiking not only hits consumers around the world at the tank (particularly in the U.S. where many have no choice but to drive their cars), but of course has a negative impact on any business dependent on petroleum-based fuels to move products and people. In other words, nearly everything in our lives is somehow also touched by the price of oil. What scares me in all of these experts are extremely hesitant to say with any certainty what might happen.

“Oil prices have risen to their highest level in more than two years, after Qatar's energy minister warned he expects all oil and gas exporters in the Gulf to stop production within days.” Frightening stuff they describe, and a very real possibility if the situation isn’t tempered. I really cannot see how the U.S. and Israel at the moment walk away looking triumphant. Which means they will not stop now, which makes the situation all the more dangerous.

The Cosmopolitan Globalist

The War Beyond Iran

By Vivek Y. Kelkar…

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6 months ago · 13 likes · 1 comment · Vivek Y. Kelkar

This article, while behind a paywall, seems to really address some of these questions.

“The effects of modern wars don’t stay confined to the belligerent states. They spill outward through supply chains, energy systems, alliances, and financial networks. If the Trump administration understands this, it has not been reflected in its rhetoric.”

Just like with the ICE mess in Minnesota (act first, clean up later), this time the Trump administration seems to have started a war without a plan for what happens when it quite literally has significantly disruptive ripple effects on the entire world’s economy. Ironically, all the American presidents in previous decades surely knew this and surely that is one of the many reasons why America didn’t do anything since 1979. The most dangerous leaders are those who actually believe they know better than everyone else. Just ask Russians how they are living at the moment, both emotionally, and economically. As a side note, the Guardian wrote this week about how Russia’s war in Ukraine is literally emptying rural communities in Russia, as soldiers are drafted from everywhere but Moscow.

Silver Bulletin

Gas prices are set to go vertical

This is going to be one of the shorter newsletters in recent Silver Bulletin history. My main mission for the next week is to finalize our NCAA tournament forecasts. But as you might have noticed, th…

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6 months ago · 223 likes · 16 comments · Nate Silver

“However, there are two other problems downstream from cutting off Iranian production. One is that Iran has retaliated by attacking oil production facilities in other Gulf States. The other is that the Strait of Hormuz is essentially shut down to shipping traffic. Saudi Arabia, the U.A.E., Iraq, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman and Bahrain, combined with Iran, collectively provide about 30 percent of the world’s oil.”

In short, this all sounds…very not great. I only hope there are people with access to Trump’s ear who can explain all this. Not the celebrity ministers we see on TV. People who actually understand and may be able to convince him to figure this all out before the consequences spread even further.

Here in Europe, there was quite the scandal this week which may not have made international news. It caught my attention because I have actually seen these “money trucks” driving in Vienna’s third district near the Raiffeisen Bank headquarters. I stopped and did a double take a few months ago because I spotted the Ukrainian license plate and the bank name, Oschadbank, Ukraine’s state savings bank. It turns out this Ukrainian bank regularly buys cash Euros and USD from Austria, and literally drives them back to Ukraine. This week, the truck was stopped in Hungary by the Hungarian authorities, and all seven people were arrested, and the money seized. $40 million, €35 million, and 9 kilograms of gold.

Hungary seizes millions of euros in cash and gold from Ukrainian convoy

Ukraine immediately lashed out and accused Orban, who faces an election next month, of creating the scandal for political gain. It was later reported that the seven Ukrainians were released, but I have yet to find any confirmation of the money being handed back.

“Hungarian officials said on Friday that the seven detained Ukrainians would be expelled from Hungary, but it was not immediately clear what would happen to the seized money and gold.”

Striking that these days something like this barely even makes a local news headline.

Here in Austria, I supposed I have been thinking about the women I spoke with this week. Yesterday I took my daughter for a haircut with a Ukrainian mom of three who opened her own salon here a few years ago. She seemed a bit down, a bit off from her usual bubbly self. “Do you think it is safer here than in Germany?” she asked me, with a look of great concern on her face. It took me a minute to realize she was referring to the U.S. military bases in Germany. “It is good Austria is not a NATO country,” she remarked. The scars of having fled one war, and understanding you cannot go back to your hometown anytime soon, mean you are always worried about another war finding its way to you. I also received a text message from Israel yesterday, asking about short-term apartment rentals in Vienna. This person is a Russian-speaker. There is little sympathy when you are, twice, from the agressor country, although as an individual how much responsibility does anyone hold? Am I personally responsible for Trump’s war on Iran? In my head, that sounds ridiculous.

We are now in an era where everyone is trying to guess what will be the safe place. We all worry about how this new reality will affect our daily lives and livelihoods. My daughter and I are selfishly having anxious conversations about a connecting flight this summer booked via Abu Dhabi. We want her normal life to continue despite the inconvenience (yes, I am writing with irony) of a war no one voted for. My son was on a college program trip this week to the Dominican Republic which included two supervised visits to Haiti, which is essentially a lawless economy with 70% unemployment and they were allowed to tour a market on the border accompanied by armed guards. They were told of factories where workers earn $3000 per year. These priveldged college kids were given a brief glimpse of the cruel realities of being born into one of the world’s poorest countries. “They sew Levi jeans there,” he said, as if a proverbial penny had just dropped. I am so grateful to whoever thought to show this to these kids who are studying business, less we all grow up and forget our humanity and the creul realities of our co-existence on this fragile planet. “People were bathing in the dirty river.” I nodded. I just kept listening. I realized this was life changing for a kid who has seen a lot, but never that kind of poverty or suffering.

This international women’s day I am grateful to be living in a country where women still have choices. On Friday, I accompanied a woman to an abortion. It was not my first time doing so. I have not idea the statistic but I can say in my personal experience the women have always already had children, and simply decided they cannot provide for one more. I am grateful to live in a city where abortion access, while expensive (€600 irrespective of the method, pill or surgical), is easy and treats the women with dignity. It took me all of five minutes to schedule the appointment. Staff were exceptionally professional. I do not take any of this for granted. I talk about it openly with my own daughters.

Strange times we are living in while there is so much to fret over on a global scale, we seem to be gripping ever more tightly to the little pleasures that bring us joy. In that vein, I would like to recomend a wonderfuly unhinged new show on Netflix, Vladimir. I have not read the book, but I was immediately hooked. I loved the story and the acting and highly recommend it, expecially to women of, shall we say, like me, already a mature age.

Thank your for reading and apologies that this week I am a little short on substance. The media I have consumed this week has felt the same way. I think we are all searching at the moment for anything definite, and this still feels rather elusive.

I hesistate to even comment on the U.S. and Israel attacks on Iran because they are way beyond my comfort zone. I know nothing more about the Middle East than the average person who consumes some basic news, and unlike other armchair experts, I prefer to reserve my opinions for parts of the world or situations which I feel like I have a better than average understanding of. So with that disclaimer, let me begin by sharing with you what has helped me to get a better understanding of what has happened so far and what might happen going forward (the latter being of course much, much harder — it quickly becomes rather apparent that the actual experts don’t have a lot of specifics, either).

Today was officially the first day of spring, and I decided to enjoy the weather while listening to a few podcasts recorded this weekend about the attacks on Iran.

I started with Pod Save the World as I find their nuance on foreign policy issues to be much better than the average opinion writer.

Next, I listened for a while to this which basically can be summarized as: Trump makes decisions alone and doesn’t really consult others. He trusts his own gut. The hosts are quite biased, even going so far to criticize Trump for his dietary choices, which I think discredits the arguments they are trying to make. But, if you believe what they say about Trump being a prolific survivor and someone who can and does act alone, then it makes the events of this weeekend easier to understand, especially for those looking for some complicated logic behind the strikes and, as we now know, the killing of the “supreme leader” (I put these words in quotation marks because they feel strange to write in complete seriousness.

The Pod Save the World hosts point out, wisely, that the killing of one eighty six year-old is not the equivalent of regime change. There is, in fact, an army, revolutionary guard, police, etc. Trump made it very clear in his own speech that he expects the “people of Iran” to do the work of actually installing a new government. This either sounds exceptionally naive or means there isn’t really much of a plan other than taking out the senior leadership of Iran, which it seems Israel was tasked with doing, while the U.S. focused its attacks on sites with military and uranium enrichment targets.

The fallout, as we all have seen over the course of the weekend, was swift and regional. A friend texted me yesterday morning that her friends in Israel were headed to the bomb shelter, family cat in a box in tow. My daughter shared at the dinner table tonight that her friend’s grandparents who live in a small town not far from Jerusalem felt their windows shake at the impact of something Iran launched at Israel which landed in the vicinity. We saw the images of parts of “civilian” Dubai and other cities in the gulf area briefly on fire, the strangest dichotomy for places which market themselves as tax-free bubble playgrounds for the wealthy. Brits were filmed complaining they have holiday plans. Russians were sharing memes online about Slavic prostitutes running for cover. It all looked surreal. And yet…it is very much real. I began to panic about a flight I booked already for this summer for one of my kids to fly to Asia…via Abu Dhabi. I thought about acquiantences who live there now.

We see Iranians, especially those living abroad, celebrating the death of the “surpreme leader”. They are reservedly optimistic that this might all bring about a less awful government for their country. My other daughter has a tutor in Vienna who is originally from Iran, and whose mother still lives there. Today, he expressed hope that this is indeed good news.

And yet for those of us old enough to remember America’s other forrays into the Middle East (I still remember the early TV images of Desert Storm from high school), we all remember how ‘over in a few weeks’ turned into forever wars few politicians could justify looking back, decades later. The irony is Trump himself always positioned himself as the isolationist candidate, criticizing both Democrats and other Republicans for their putting American boots on the ground in foreign lands. As some have joked, the newly formed Board of Peace is suddenly Bored of Peace, it would seem. Trump even went so far in his remarks (which I believe were made from Florida wearing a white baseball capped with USA in giant letters across the top) to admit that some American soliders may lose their lives, as if to sort of justify their heroism, sacrifice, whatever is the politically appropriate term for sending servicemen to a death without a declaration of war by Congress, ahead of time. As I write this, it has been reported three American servicemen are already confirmed dead.

Interestingly, all the podcasts — including the third below, The Daily, which is also a very good overview, mention briefly that Trump is doing this without an act of Congress, but it is already taken as a god-given at this point. It really does feel like Congress has been completely sidelined by this presidency. I wonder for how long, if not forever. Russia too used to have a Duma which at least pretended to legislate.

The fact is we knew there was a very good chance America was going to attack Iran. We had all seen the movements of navy ships and aircraft carriers into the area. The buildup had been underway for weeks. What I had missed, which was brought up on one of the podcasts, was that Netanyahu visited Trump in Mar a Lago back in December with the intention of pushing for an attack on Iran in 2026. Another thing I learned while listening this afternoon is the U.S. apparently went so far as to offer free nuclear fuel to Iran in exchange for the country giving up its uranium enrichment capabilities. When that offer was rejected, it is argued, that was the decisive red line for Trump.

“As part of that effort, Washington offered to support a civilian nuclear program for Iran, including a proposal to supply nuclear fuel free of charge on a long-term basis.”

Apparently, Trump also made false claims recently, including that Iran would soon have a weapon capable of reaching the U.S. This, according to the podcasts I listened to today, is not true. He even went so far back in history as to bring up the 1979 hostage crisis, which few except the boomer generation will remember.

I think the most striking thing from what I have heard so far is there doesn’t seem to be an actual plan for how this regime change is supposed to play out, provided Israel and the U.S. actually manage to kill the Iranian senior leadership (as the Pod Save the World hosts rightly pointed out — the 86 year-old they did kill was already planning on passing the reigns onto someone younnger). How do you suddenly set up a loyal government in what has been a dictatorship with force by a pariah state with decades of spite towards Israel and the U.S. being spewed as state propaganda?

They say Iran has no other friends in the Middle East, but now all countries in the region will certainly be watching very closely hoping for a swift end. How does the war impact oil trade and global aviation? It is as if the grown-ups have forgotten that wars usually have terrible secondary effects on our daily lives and our economies. Iran has something like 2000 ballistic missles. Which, as a layman, I understand to be a significant number, meaning Iran can, if no boots go on the ground, continue to be a menace to the region for sometime. Is there a plan for that?

Journalists also pointed out that while no Russia nor China, Iran has decent cyber warfare capabilities, so there may be interruptions to western businesses and governments, too. They say China will be happy the U.S. is using up its own weapons in Iran…leaving, I suppose the theory goes, fewer stockpiles for a potential future confrontation over Taiwan. Although personally I cannot see the Trump administration going to war over Taiwan; this wouldn’t line up with the “zones of influence” world map view of foreign affairs.

So far, Canada put out a statement which was surprisingly supportive of the U.S. Europe, as usual, is observing with great concern (it is a weekend, here, after all!). The UK refused the U.S. permission to use its air bases for strikes on Iran. I imagine that also might change, depending on how things go. No politician wants to have their signature on yet another “Iraq” war, this time in Iran. That much is clear. The death of a brutal regime which did horrific things to its own population is certainly a good thing, but this is not a kidnap Maduro and flip the switch situation. The problem with impulsive actors, like Trump, particularly when they are surrounded by yes-men, like Putin has shown us, is they are at great risk of acting first and thinking later, with consequences for well, the entire world.

Today I walked through the streets of Vienna, feeling the first rays of spring sun, and thought that just a few years ago, ordinary Ukrainians also enjoyed a lazy Sunday under peaceful skies until one day, they were no longer. And everything changed overnight, for the forseeable future. I find myself trying to push such thoughts to the back of my head, but they pop up far more often now. I wrote a friend today who lives in London, “at least you are on an island”. I am happy that one of my kids is in the U.S. because that feels, ironically, safe. But that is also an illusion, and the U.S. has a way of producing domestic gun violence that it needs no foreign enemies.

This week I accompanied a Ukrainian to a public hospital appointment. The waiting room was filled with more women with head scarves than without. I am not being racist, I am painting a picture of what a public hospital looks like in Vienna these days, and who is having babies. The doctor was originally from Bosnia. Her bedside manner was abrupt, extremely direct, and incredibly familiar. By the end we were all laughing, and she was prescribing not only medical advice, but also a new husband to the somewhat stunned mother-of-one.

There are flowers which grow on former battlefields. Our socities here in old Europe are often richer as a result of those who fled pain and loss to build something new. Just look at the Iranian diaspora around the world. I can think of a half dozen doctors alone in Vienna we have seen over the years.

But none of us want to be forced to go anywhere. You want to have the choice of leaving or staying. You want to be able to tell your kids where everything is going to be ok. And I think that is what so scary about the present moment. No one really knows.

This week I was asked to help with translation at the funeral for a teeanger. I perhaps would not have agreed had I understood the assignment upfront, but once I had said yes I felt I could not pull out. It was as sad and unbearable as you can imagine, worse in fact than such things are portrayed in the movies or TV. I stood there looking at all these beautiful young people in black saying tearful goodbyes to their friend and classmate, and it made me want to live every second of life as if the clock is ticking super loud in the background. It was a cruelly sunny warm day. Another women whispered to me it would have been better if it had been raining. I nodded in agreement. I came home and hugged my own kids extra tight. I made dinner without a word of complaint. I started to see things in a different light. I had an important conversation at the dinner table about you can always tell me anything, and said I love you one too many times.

Perhaps that is a tiny slice of wisdom as one ages — to learn to enjoy the present moment to the fullest, rather than living in memories of the past or dreams for the future. Easier said than done, I know.

Thank you for reading.

(video from Prague earlier this week)

Tommorrow marks four years. I really cannot believe it. When I think back to the intense period for all of us volunteers which followed February 24, 2022, in some ways it feels like just yesterday, but in many other ways, like a decade or more. Some things have remained constant. Still no one knows what tomorrow will bring. Still Europe has shown little creativity in thinking about how to best integrate the millions of Ukrainians who now call the continent home. I caught a clip of an Austrian military officer speaking on local TV this week, warning about what an end to EU aid to Ukraine would mean for civilians still living in Ukraine. Essentially, he says that an end to aid would make civilian life inside Ukraine “unlivable” and could result in even further numbers of refugees leaving the country. I was pleasantly surprised to hear this given airtime. So often it is as if everything happening quite literally next door in Ukraine is forgotten or ignored here. This is a good long read in German by Der Standart about the current situation in Ukraine and possible solutions.

This week the Guardian’s Shaun Walker, a longtime Russia correpsondent whose work is always worth stopping what you are doing to read, published a very long read on who knew what in the days and months leading up to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Essentially — the U.S. and UK tried to warn Europe and Kyiv, the latter remained deeply skeptical until the very end. Most notable is a German intelligence official actually flying into Kyiv on February 23 as embassies had already relocated to western Ukraine.

A war foretold: how the CIA and MI6 got hold of Putin’s Ukraine plans and why nobody believed them

As I wrote in a note earlier this week:

I flew out of Kyiv on Feb 10, 2022. Hotels catering to foreigners were empty. Most locals appeared to be going about their daily lives as if they too didn’t believe what would happen. My personal calculation back then was a small article in Russian in which the journalist interviewed Russians in southern border towns who whispered nothing would happen until after Feb 23 (a holiday). Mind blowing about German & French intelligence.

This weekend I wrote on a whim that I would like to get together with other women to go out for a drink and make new friends. The kind of thing you write on social media and don’t really expect much to come of it. I figured maybe I would set up a few coffee dates. I wrote in Russian because in general my experience in Vienna has been that those who socialize in Russian are more open to making new friends than those who speak English or German (most likely as a result of all being far from home). To my great surprise, more than a dozen of us gathered yesterday evening in a chic bar for a few cocktails and really interesting conversation. There were women of a wide range of ages, from Russia and Ukraine probably in equal numbers, and one young woman from Kazakhstan. Perhaps because I am “neutral” in the sense that I am neither Russian nor Ukrainian (I am certainly not neutral when it comes to Russia’s war of agression which has killed so many and upended so many lives), it was so nice to see a group come together and despite everything that has happened over the past four years, for a common language to unite rather than nationalities to separate. By the end of the evening, the ladies were making future plans, what kind of group activities we could do together next time. I was only the facilitator, but it left me with a kind of optimism that has been in short supply of late. Sometimes when everything feels terrible in the big picture, the little picture and the people right in front of us can give us hope and inspiration.

There has been so much this week and yet I don’t really feel confident in my views on any of it, from the Epstein stuff to AI taking away our jobs (or not, depending on who is making the argument), to the Supreme Court vs. Trump and his tariffs, I don’t feel confident yet to say anything which hasn’t already been said. There was an interesting newsletter by the New York Times quite nicely sumarizing how Europe is back to courting China out of necessity, from a rather weak position, on account of the U.S. becoming an ever more unreliable ally.

I did manage to watch the last few minutes of the gold medal hockey game, quite by accident really. As an American who was born in Canada, I would have been happy with either result, and I was genuinely pretty chuffed for the Americans as the celebrated, and don’t really understand all the hate they are getting as result of them taking a phone call from Trump in the locker room (he is, after all, the president, and this would happen in basically any country, irregardless of the president’s politics). It was very odd to see the FBI director there, as if he had nothing better to do, especially while we all witnessed the horrific scenes out of Mexico. I have a close friend who flew out of Cancun yesterday, and called me from the airport, describing army and police all over the highway, and this was very far away from Guadalajara and Puerto Vallerta where there was active shooting inside the airport.

If you need an artsy distraction, I decided to take a chance on Wuthering Heights after hearing so many intellectuals being so very upset about the film straying from the book, while others loved the presentation. I will preface by saying I have never read the book (nor have I ever read any of those English classics — I have an Arizona public school education and in British literature, or lack thereof, it shows. I think I consumed a Cliff notes version of Hamlet in 11th grade and that was that). I also loved Saltburn. Plus I had seen a clip of screenwriter and director Emerland Fennell saying the color red in the film represents death. So I took the plunge, and I was so glad that I did. The film is like a visit to a very intriguing museum exhibit. It sucks you in and you just kind of run with it. It is art on the screen. The plot is somehow secondary. I loved it.

On Netflix, I also recently watched a Polish show whose title, Lead Children, turned me off at first, but I then gave it a chance, and I am glad that I did. It is very well acted and tells the awful true story of industrial pollution which was buried under the communists in the 1970s. The story is set in Poland, based upon a real female doctor who dared stand up for the sick kids, but I can imagine there were so many more stories like that all over the world, and probably, frankly, still are in places we don’t read about.

I think that is all I have today. A little light, I know, but perhaps better like that than going on about things I don’t feel strongly about. Lately I feel a bit like my head is in a haze. End of winter malaise perhaps, although we are not experiencing anything like the New York blizzard at the moment. I am watching the videos in awe. Our snow melted faster than it fell, and it is now pouring rain outside like London in November. The only saving grace is the days are growing longer, and with them, the promise that spring and eventually summer will soon bless us with their strong sunrays. I caught them for a minute today while waiting for an appointment, and stood there, just trying to absorb a tiny drop of vitamin D, and with it, a little bit of optimism.

Thank you for reading. I very, very much hope one year from now I will not be writing a post with the word ‘five’ in the title.

It is only Wednesday but I already have much I wanted to share with you all so I find myself at the keyboard this morning. It is, in a way, like therapy for me too.

The sun has decided to bless us with its presence for a few hours. These days we take none of it for granted. Yesterday morning I awoke to sun and a dusting of snow, headed out dressed for winter, only to get caught in a downpour around nine. Everything feels fickle, even the weather.

I had to give testimony yesterday as a witness in a local police station. Nearly a year ago, I was in my friend’s car when she bumped into the parked bumper of a delivery van. She had checked, and driven off, seeing no visible damage. Some concerned citizen reported the whole thing, much paperwork back and forth, and I spent half an hour yesterday trying to recall how exactly I remembered it. The police officer had one of those keyboards which light up like a disco ball, and I was mesmorized by the neon colors racing before my eyes as I searched for the German words for parallel parking and the like. It was an exercise in futility, a complete waste of taxpayer Euros, over an offense which has a maximum fine of a couple hundred Euros. Alas, they cannot issue the fine unless they determine what actually happened. So hours are being spent trying to figure out something no one actually saw, and the parked car never reported any damages. I was not allowed a copy of my testimony. The woman with the neon keyboard will decide who she thinks is telling the truth. As she told me, “if a person crosses a street wearing a red sweater, and bystanders are asked what color was the sweater, they will not all say red.” I was only thinking: does it matter what color the sweater was?

Later yesterday, I was riding one of Vienna’s commuter trains, and two ticket inspectors appeared, which is a normal occurance. What was abnormal is they were accompanied by three police officers, so five grown adults all on state paychecks making sure we had all bought tickets. We had not all bought tickets, of course, and I watched as a heavily tattooed man, the kind of tattoos one might get in prison (neck, hands), ever so quietly maneuvered himself out of his seat and towards the exit door, without any of the five enforcers actually seeing him do it.

I smiled at the young woman standing next to me, and she smiled back. It was like a David vs. Goliath and I think it’s fair to say we were all cheering for him to get away because the whole scene was just comical. He quietly slipped out into the train station at the next stop like an alley cat into the night. One of the three police officers had a beard and a ponytail braided to his waist. I wondered if this is how we are planning on stopping a potential Russian invasion. With inclusive definitions of what policing is supposed to look like. There are reports on local TV now all the time about possibly increasing the number of months young men will be asked to serve in the army (mandatory army or civilian service is already required of all male Austrian citizens once they turn 18). The videos show them practicing combat of the kind you read about in history books. Not a drone in sight. It is as if everything around us is moving at lightening speed and Austria has pressed the playback slow button.

Scrolling through Instagram this morning, another local story caught my eye. A while back I listened to a podcast in German in which a school director was interviewed. He is in charge of a middle school in a part of Vienna where the majority of kids do not speak German at home. He was also openly a member of the local conservative ÖVP party. His observations on what immigration has done to education and vice versa were, at the time, I thought, rather interesting. Because it is the elephant in the room few on the left want to talk about. This morning, I read a post by Falter that this same school director gave an interview to Russian state TV. Which is incredibly telling at just how adept the Russians actually are in finding exactly which Europeans at the local level might be sympathetic to their own anti-immigration, right-leaning talking points. I have no idea why the school director thought this was a good idea, or how it was even allowed, but given the lack of staff in education in general in Austria at the moment, I doubt he will lose his job over it. Falter reported he did resign from his ÖVP roles. But that is like a public apology of a politician. Meaningless.

None of this changes any of the underlying issues, of course. A state budget that is bleeding money and yet reform seems impossible (police examples, but I see the waste in healthcare on a regular basis, too), and an education system which divides kids at the age of ten into “smart” and “not smart” and then wonders what happened when half the kids grow up being not entirely functionally literate in German.

Europe has enough on its plate without having to worry about Trump and Putin. But here we are.

With the new year, there has been more reporting about real economic woes within Russia. The picture is getting worse. This BBC Russia report on the effects of food inflation:

The Best of BBC News Russian - in English

Food prices are surging in Russia. Is the war hitting Russians in the pocket?

By Olga Shamina, Yaroslava Kiryukhina & Sergei Kagermazov, BBC News Russian…

Read more

7 months ago · 2 likes · BBC News Russian

Alexandra Prokopenko writes for The Economist, “Russia’s Economy Has Entered the Death Zone”. She added, on X:

“Russia’s economy hasn’t collapsed. It has entered the “death zone” — surviving by consuming its own future.
Growth at 1%. Budget deficit rising. Military sector expands while civilian industry shrinks.
Interest payments > education + healthcare.
No climber survives this altitude forever.”

So Russia’s economy is borrowing against its own future. The same thing Putin is doing with his population. The New York Times travelled to a forgotten, impoverished village in Kamchatka with a majority indigenous population and wrote a stark piece about what it is like when most of the men are called to war, and most of them never come home.

A Russian Village of Military Valor Waits for Its Reward (gift link)

“As a foreman for the local electric network, Aleksandr Chevvin, Ms. Zakharova’s husband, did not need the money. But in August 2023, he could not be dissuaded from volunteering because, he told her, his grandfather fought in World War II. A Ukrainian tank shell struck Mr. Chevvin’s dugout days after he deployed, killing him.

She did not tell their five children for 18 months, until her son in kindergarten was shocked to discover a picture of his father among the dead soldiers honored on the schoolhouse wall. Ms. Zakharova keeps waiting for Mr. Putin to appear on television to explain more clearly the purpose of the war.”

Scrolling through TikTok yesterday, I came across a video of a recent meeting between Putin and female army officers. A mother of four, who looks ethnically to be from one of these indigenous communities, or perhaps Central Asia, is an army medic, and tells the Russian president how she was stationed just 40 kilometres from her husband, a marine, but they didn’t see each other once during that year. He was killed in action, and it was she, alone, who discovered his dead body and pulled him from the battlefield for burial. Putin listens to this horrific story, stone-faced, and then makes a rambling comment that this is the stuff of books (again the history motiff), poems, and perhaps one day someone should make a fictional movie based on the story of this woman’s heroism. The others around the table nominate her for a medal. She is in tears recalling what she went through, but adds, “I pray for peaceful skies and our victory”. No one even knows anymore what victory, over whom, for what purpose. The war has become an ingrained part of everyday life in Russia, too.

Let’s also not forget which other countries are continuing to fund Russia’s war (I did see the kung-foo robots for the Lunar New Year, and yes, they are impressive).

In my conversations with Ukrainians in Vienna recently, I have noticed a shift. They are nearly all, without exception, now talking about Austria as their forever home. With no doubt. Despite not having a legal status of forever here. Yesterday I spoke with a grandmother who is here alone with her granddaughter. She has found a job, and her granddaughter is applying to a competitive public school (gymnasium). The girl’s parents are both in Ukraine, both working for the army. This is their new normal. The grandmother talks about this set-up as if it will continue for the forseeable future. The granddaughter speaks very good German, almost without an accent, carefully choosing her words, trying not to make any grammatical mistakes. For this family, and thousands of others (millions, if you look around the world), they now see their future beyond Ukraine’s borders. And that is a huge issue, because what does a post-war Ukraine even look like if the Ukrainians who left do not move back home?

The New York Times ran an interesting essay by Nataliya Gumenyuk this week in which she argues it is not about when the war ends, but how.

When Will The War End? The Question is Meaningless (gift article)

“I spent a lot of last year — as I did in other years — traveling around Ukraine talking to people. What’s clear to me is that this war no longer feels like an interruption; it’s just reality. Ukraine’s military may be exhausted, but it’s also the most battle-hardened in Europe. The front line, with its split screen of futuristic drones and the trenches reminiscent of the wars of the early 20th century, may look like the future and the past at once. But it’s just our present, the only one we know.”

I read her piece and had a different takeaway. I read about an economy which has lost millions of citizens and is now centered around an army at war. An economy in which men and women risk their lives for a paycheck larger than the average, or leave the country, or hide if they cannot afford to leave. Entrepreneurs suddenly want to go from operating restaurants or selling cars to producing drones. But what happens when one day, in the not so distant future, the war is determined to be over with the stroke of a pen in Geneva or Istanbul? What happens to the trenches and the drones and the ex-military suddenly left unemployed? These questions are the kind ordinary Ukrainians ask themselves, and then decide not to go home.

The bigger quesion is what will all the other countries now hosting Ukrainians do with them from a legal point of view. Austria is one of the few which offered the possibility to apply for permanet residence if one is gainfully employed and can provide for one’s family according to a government formula calculating income, rent, etc. But for most others, the EU temporary protection will end in March 2027, and it will then be up to individual countries to decide what to do. Meanwhile, it will be five years since the war started. Five years of marriages, divorces, births, deaths, new and lost jobs, school, kindergarten, university, health scares — life marches on no matter which country you are living in, no matter how “temporary” authorities call the status of Ukrainians.

Military analyst Michael Kofman just published his outlook for the war in Foreign Affairs, Ukraine’s War of Endurance: The Fight for Advantage in the Conflict’s Fifth Year. I have a hard time with military analysis because I see war in general as just pointless pain for nothing. I believe most ordinary people would rather live in peace and be able to go to work, raise their families, and enjoy their lives with which color passport and flag they have flying above them being of secondary concern. There is now, for example, a city of 50,000, Kramatorsk, which is still under Ukrainian control but if all of Donetsk region were to be given to Russia at the negotiating table, that city would overnight become Russia. People who live there know this. And yet, some stay. As humans our lives look more similar than different across borders, especially now that we are all connected virtually. There are Ukrainians here in Austria whose relatives are now living in Russia, in Donetsk. The biggest issue is how to communicate, as Russia messes with WhatsApp and Telegram. Life in those parts is not rosy, but it has not been since 2014. Those who remained made a choice.

While I was looking for the article about the military situation on the ground in Ukraine, I came across this piece, which I must admit, I am bookmarking for later. I have a pit in my stomach. I know I should be informed, but these things are easier to read from DC:

Europe’s Next War: The Rising Risk of NATO-Russia Conflict

I often tell myself in Austria that Russia could take over without firing a single shot. I still believe that to be true. I don’t know why it gives me a false sense of security. I suppose the same way many people in Ukraine never believed Russia would ever do anything, until they woke up that fateful February morning nearly four years ago.

In closing, I would like to recommend this podcast on Cuba, which might just be the U.S.’ next target after decades of failing, and with Rubio at the helm…and this new documentary, The Track, which I have not yet seen but looks very good on Amazon Prime about Sarajevo, Bosnia, and what has become of the 1984 winter Olympics facilities, the impact of the war decades later, and the next generation of athletes…I saw a preview here.

Thank you for reading!

It has been a while since I sat down to write an ordinary weekend post, after my recent trip to Belgrade and the series I wrote about the Russians I met while I was there. I am now about halfway through an intriguing, if very long (I think Russian authors often no pressure over word count if they are financing the print run themselves) Russian-language novel, The Last Russians Were Seen in Belgrade, about modern-day Russians in Serbia juxtapositioned against a stories of the “white” Russians who fled to what was then newly-founded Yugoslavia after the communist revolution in Russia. I am always amazed by authors who manage to write about the present in real time. I feel like it takes years to observe.

I am having a hard time processing the present. I feel like one of those people so focused on my own daily struggles, both simply annoying and other larger challenges, that I forget to notice what is happening around us. I don’t like that feeling. I read an email from Puck’s Julia Ioffe and was reminded about the Munich security conference, which I wonder if they will have to rename someday, as things feel rather insecure everywhere at the moment. Puck led with the headline, “Is NATO Already Over?”, writing:

The Munich Security Conference, once an annual affirmation of the U.S.-led transatlantic order, has become a mirror for European anxieties that America is transforming from an ally to a threat—and that the task of protecting the continent will soon fall on their shoulders alone.

I saw clips of Marco Rubio’s speech on TikTok (it does worry me that I see news there before I see it elsewhere…which says something about our collective attention spans, or at least mine), and I have to admit, I agreed with most of the soundbites I came across. The full speech is here below:

It seems like an effort to try and win back some hearts in Europe after last year’s disaster featuring Vice President Vance (who remains deeply unpopular abroad, and was booed by audiences at the Olympics in Milan). I agree with what Rubio said about the United Nations, not the America saves everyone part, but rather that the UN has proved itself powerless in keeping peace and preventing wars around the world. The world is indeed not perfect, and the old insitutions have shown themselves to be powerless in a world in which might is all that matters. The problem is, of course, the U.S. has lost the trust of much of the rest of the world, particularly under Trump 2.0. Europe is worried, worried about Russia, worried about its own future, but having America point fingers and tell it what to do isn’t going to bring about change any faster.

Sitting in tiny Austria, holding onto its traditions for dear life, I can imagine a day in the future when the rich keep drinking champagne, dancing in tuxedos and gowns at balls, while not understanding the are no longer a first-world economy, their society fundamentally changed by mass immigration from beyond Europe’s borders without a plan, the socialism-light economy contracting in the face of decades without reforms needed to reduce taxes, create an environment to both encourage and make it possible for small businesses to survive, end the endemic dependence on state subsudies by a large swath of the population. I look around Vienna and see a beautiful museum with no plan for its future. I feel like Vienna is an appropriate metaphor for much of Europe, understanding we are talking about 27 different nations within the European Union alone. Some more progressive and clear-headed, others in total denial about the new realities of a world in which the United States is no longer the lender of last resort for Europe’s collective security, and no one really knows where and when Russia will stop.

In Munich, Europe Says It Is ‘De-risking’ From the U.S. Amid Trump’s Unpredictability (Gift Article — New York Times)

There is so much in this one article. It starts with a blunt reminder that four years ago, just before Russia invaded Ukraine, it was America sounding the alarm bells, and European leaders dismissing the evidence, “declaring that the Russian president…was bluffing”.

“Leaders of several European nations said that after that series of shocks they are talking about ‘de-risking’ from the United States.” A term previously used in the context of Russia or China is now being used with regards to Trump’s America, with Trump personally seen as the unpredictable factor. I think it is fair to say global investors are doing this too, to a lesser extent, but the trends are there, and were visible already last year. But economically, if I had to place a bet on whose economy will be doing better in ten years, I would still bet on America, and that is just one of the many problems Europe is yet to address head on. Europe does not respond well at all to outside criticism.

On the security front, Europe seems to have finally understood it is on its own now, NATO or no NATO. Germany now asking France for nuclear protection. The Danes were reportedly told by several Americans that Trump could suddenly reverse his demand that the U.S. must own, not lease, Greenland.

“It is far from certain that the French would be willing to risk Paris to save Berlin.”

I can answer that for you. They would not.

The article quotes a former aid to late Senator John McCain who says, “In London and other capitals, Europeans are talking like this is 1939. Nobody in the U.S is thinking this is 1939.”

To be fair, I don’t think many people in Europe think it is either. We live in collective denial, continuing to see images of Kyiv freezing without electricity and thinking it cannot happen to us. We know exaclty how close Ukraine is to our own borders, and yet we think it is a “their” problem, something that happens in post-Soviet states, but not to us Europeans. Maybe the Baltics, some whisper. An afterthought.

These two FT headlines caught my attention. Zelensky still talking about elections (to be fair I cannot imagine anything less relevant at this moment), but the real point is that as soon as he ends the war, it is all over for him personally. The knives are already out. I tend to agree with Kyiv’s mayor. Ukraine’s survival in my mind is still very much an open question. How do you survive at war for years with no end in sight, your economy crippled because your population had to leave because they could no longer live in their homes as they were frozen out of them by Russian strikes to Ukraine’s power infrastructure? Every Ukrainian I have spoken with in recent months understands that even if the war were to end tommorrow, life in Ukraine will not suddenly return to “normal”. The speak with melancholy as they ackowledge that the carefree, peaceful life that existed in Kyiv and Kharkiv pre-war (I luckily have some incredible videos of that on my phone, now that I think about it) is never coming back.

An acqaintence here in Vienna survived cancer and then a broken arm. She is a manicurist. She went back to Ukraine for a few months to undergo physical theraphy (free of charge, thanks to the war, in a new center which treats military and civilians). She admits on the streets you see women, elderly, kids. You don’t see men. If you see men, they are often wounded soldiers. She says this as a matter of fact. The men who are in Ukraine without connections to provide them with the “white ticket” as a “the army cannot touch me” document is referred to, do not venture out much for obvious reasons.

What I am trying to say is anyone sitting in the comfort of a warm apartment in Europe without the threat of having their male loved ones pulled off the street and sent to the front lines should bite their tongues before asking Ukraine to keep fighting for X number of years more over territory which it has already lost. Ukraine has already made it pretty clear that it knows it has lost much of the Donbass, the question is only how much. Those living in places like Donetsk have already taken out Russian passports years ago. They had to in order to access medical services, banking. The Ukrainians who live in Russian-occupied territory have either left or are now ok with living in Russia. They are not waiting to be rescued.

The more important question is how much more does Putin want and can he bite off. I don’t have an answser for that. I was shocked to read in the New York Times article above “the Europeans…are preparing for another year or two of war”. I wanted to scream, are we living in the same Europe? Have they spoken with any Ukrainians who are not Zelensky and his entourage? Have they asked the mayor of Kyiv what his city will look like in another year or two without peace and massive repair?

Rubio admits, per the article, “We don’t know if the Russians are serious about ending the war.” He is right to advocate for an outcome “Ukraine can live with and Russia can accept”. The question of course being what will Russia do next, and no one knows. Things aren’t exactly rosy inside Russia, but a little economic and social pain for his population never stopped Putin before, why would it deter him in the future?

This week I also listened to a fascinating podcast about the impact of AI on our lives, particularly our work lives. If you own stocks you know they took a beating last week, over increasing investor fears of what AI is about to do to the workplace and the economy more broadly as we know it. Of course it is too early to say for sure, but I think each of us in our own lives has noticed how AI has really started to take over much more than even a year ago, and the growth in the future could be exponential. We now live in a world in which not only do we have wars and security concerns, but grave economic concerns, as we have invented machines which are replacing people. Yes, this happened before with personal computers and we all survived. But in the short term, I do think there is a real risk of significantly increased unemployment in a whole slew of professions, and you still don’t hear any meaningful discussions on interesting economic concepts such as universal basic income (this is fundamentally different in my mind from the minimum income payments of ‘socialist’ European countries which are not universal and only reward those who do the least for society imho).

I don’t know enough about AI yet to have a view how this will all develop, but I do think a lot about the only jobs it really cannot replace are those involving some form of manual labor: truck drives, hairdressers, chefs, nurses. Anyone with an office job who isn’t running the whole show could potentially be at risk somewhere down the line, especially those cozy, middle-class jobs. Goldman Sachs recently announced it is going to use Anthropic’s Claude to automate some accounting and compliance roles. The podcast above discusses how many software companies saw their share prices hit hard during 2025 as investors began to realize the software solutions may become obsolete if AI can be used to bypass them. So it does seem like a revolution, even though on a technial level I understand very little.

But then I think about something so simple as writing. Everyone can tell when something is AI-written. It has a specific voice. We don’t enjoy reading it. It feels void of real emotion and depth, and dare I say, fake. When a human writes, you can hear their individual voice. This cannot be replaced. I do not think we are on the verge of beginning to consume a lot of AI-generated art. Even AI-generated photos look so phony we can spot them a mile away. For now. But who knows what the future will hold.

In the context of these huge technological changes, it is also clear that Europe is not home to any of the companies leading the charge (do correct me if I am wrong). For example, I just looked up who owns Anthropic, owner of Claude, and it is still privately-held, backed by Amazon, Google and Nvidia, among others. The world is moving at lightenting speed it feels these days, in so many areas, and yet here in Austria it is a drama that the education minister dared suggest reducing Latin instruction in high schools and replacing with more digital education. Yes, really. The museum is beautiful and for now highly livable, but I think every day about where to suggest to my kids they make their own homes as adults and I still don’t have the answers. One has chosen the U.S. and is working his butt off to make sure he can cut it. The other perhaps feel more culturally European, but that isn’t set in stone. As a mother, this is something I worry about every day. If you are lucky, like them, to have choices, you should choose wisely.

I am always impressed with societies that adapt quickly to new realities. I saw this Valentine’s Day report from China by CNN, where authorities changed the laws allowing couples to now marry in the cities where they work, as opposed to their hometowns, in order to encourage more marriages, and by default, more babies. If you read social media in North America and Europe, there is really a trend amongst young women (and men, too, perhaps) to ask why should we have kids at all? And no one has really offered them a solid, decent answer.

The cost of living is soaring and politicians feel it last, especially here in Europe, where they outearn almost everyone. Looking at some local celebrity photos from the Opera Ball this week, it all seemed in such bad taste. The whole thing. The white tuxedos and the red silk ballgowns, faces of local politicians, lawyers, and ex-wives of financiers blushed from too much champagne and too many bodies in a small space, tickets costing something like a third of a monthly salary of a minimum age worker. It was giving strong let-them-eat-cake vibes, as the young kids say.

Perhaps my cyncism this week comes from having been a witness to something pretty awful, which I am fully responsible for putting myself in that position, of course, but still, it made me think about, well, everything. I don’t want to go into more detail than I wrote earlier this week, so I’ll just leave this here:

This Ukrainian couple met at the refugee housing center here in Vienna. The woman left her first husband with whom she had three kids already. She took one kid, left the older two, and moved in with the new guy. They together had a fourth kid who was born with a rare genetic condition resulting in some serious health issues. This fourth kid has not even begun walking yet and they got pregnant, again. So in a way, this sad outcome was some kind of intervention from above in what was an impossible situation. But to have to go through it (the midwife came in with no time to spare when I rang the buzzer; it could have been worse had I been alone to deal with it), and then hope that the two grown adults who should know better actually learned a lesson from the whole situation, that part is pretty heartbreaking. Are we sometimes as humans our own worst enemies?

I am glad I do not work in healthcare or social work. I would take too many of other people’s problems home with me, and would start to neglect my own. It always blows my mind how some of us go through life overthinking absolutely everything, and others, well…some Slavic cultures call it fate but I have some other choice words for it.

To end on a positive note — I attended a movie premier in Vienna this week. Or I should say Beč, as Vienna is known in Balkan languages. It was really incredible to see Svadba (Wedding), a Croatian-made comedy about a young couple who announce their engagement to their respective, influential families (she the daughter of a Croatian businessman, he the son of a Serbian top diplomat), and is breaking box-office records across the region and beyond. A Vienna cinema dedicated all eight screens to show the film on a Thursday evening, followed by a brief speech by the 38 year-old screenwriter and a few of the cast members. The film did have German subtitles but no one watching, perhaps except for me in parts, needed any translation.

With regard to books, The Correspondent finally arrived, and I am looking forward to digging in, as I have heard so much praise for the book, I am now curious if it will live up to the hype. I would also like to recommend to you a book that is available for pre-order (out in May), a murder mystery set in Vienna, Murder at the Hotel Orient , written by American author Alessandra Ranelli. I would also highly recommend her very personal, very moving blog post Friday the Thirteenth. Her writing is so powerful. It is not my story, but parts of it felt eerily familiar. I am sure anyone who has had to walk away and choose themselves, as painful as it is in the moment, will relate. I think that is what true writer do when they hurt: they pour themselves onto the page. I understand. I hesitate to call myself a writer but sometimes putting words down is the only thing that helps.

Thank you for reading and for your continued support!

…if you missed Part 1 and Part 2

My last day in Belgrade began with a massage I booked on a whim when I came across an ad, in Russian, for a stylishly-branded yoga studio which also offered massages. I booked via PurPur’s Instagram, without really checking the address. The studio ended up being about a 30 minute bus ride away, in a part of Belgrade I had never spent time in. I started to pay attention to the street names: Nikolai II, Leningrad. The streets near the yoga studio were haphazard and less afluent than in the center. It was a bit hilly, and I felt like if I blinked I might be in Istanbul. I could see a market square in the distance.

Tucked away in a residential buildling on a street which featured a mixture of apartments and cosmetic studios, the yoga studio was only visible by the name on the buzzer. In other words, to make such a business work, your marketing game has to be top. I walked into a large studio spread over two floors, which included a little table with jewelery and the like for sale, and a cozy corner for drinking tea. I was shown into a calming massage room. I noted the kitty poster and hoped that she has found a new home. On my walk from the bus, I noticed someone had carefully placed three little plates of cat food under a parked police car.

Irina gave me a 60 minute massage designed to encourage lymphatic drainage. It was so relaxing I almost fell asleep. As I was leaving, Irina told me a little bit about her own story: so far she had lived in Spain and Turkey. She had left Moscow a while back, and was one of the many Russians trying to determine where to set down permanent roots. She talked about maybe going back to Spain. We bonded over a shared dream of one day living by the sea.

I was supposed to then meet with a Russian jewelry designer who has a shop in the ironically named Belgrade Design District — ironic because it is about a dozen small shops all set up in the ruins (I use this word intentionally) of what must have been an illegally-built 1990s outdoor mall, tucked into the courtyards of buildlings smack in the city center. Now the property must either be under dispute or no one has the zoning to tear it down, and it is like a mini-market with indoor shops for creative wares. Unfortunately, although perhaps not entirely unsurprisingly, the shop owner I was supposed to meet was not there, and her shop was dark. I was happy I saw the area in any case, as it was exactly the kind of thing that gives Belgrade that edgy vibe which westerners like to document with curiousity. I see the graveyard buildings of the mafia 1990s and 2000s in a different light. I remember those times and am happy frankly the country was able to move on from them. I took a few photos, and ordered a taxi to take me to Galerija, the impressive, enormous new shopping mall at the Belgrade Waterfront development, where I had my next interview.

I had a bit of time before my next interview, so I took ordered a sandwich and a coffee, and took in the atmosphere of the mall, which, for a lunchtime on a Tuesday, was actually really busy. Again, the flavors of every imaginable flavor of e-cigarette floated pungently in the air. No one was in any hurry, and many people were working on laptops. Everything was still decorated for Christmas. My sandwich was lousy. My coffee was perfect.

Elena

Elena suggested we meet at the mall, and when she arrived, on time, dressed elegantly in soft pinks and maroons, she led me into one of the restaurants inside the mall, which again, was absolutely packed for a Tuesday afternoon. We took a seat on a little love sofa in the winter garden section, with a view of the Sava river, and I took in the whiff of the giant cigars the men at the table across from us were enjoying. This made me think about a popular misconception which foreigners often have when they come to the Balkans in general. They see people sitting in cafes during the day and exclaim, “how is it that no one is working?!”. The thing is: they are working. Work just looks different. It is a coffee, a meal, that important phone call. Relationships are still everything. Elena tells me she too has adopted a bit of this local mentality, and met with a client that morning for an in-person coffee rather than just a phone call or a Zoom.

With a very pleasant smile and a warm demeanor, Elena begins to tell me her story. She is 45 and moved with her daughter, now 21, from Moscow, with intention, after the war began. Elena has been an interior designer for two decades, and built up her own business from scratch, raising her daughter as a single mom. When Russia invaded Ukraine, it became crystal clear to Elena that she could no longer live in Russia, that nothing good will come of Putin’s politics, and she didn’t see a future for her own daughter in Russia. She had raised her daughter to speak her mind and value freedom. Elena didn’t want to now have to tell her daughter as an adult to watch what she says, to whom.

Elena has some Ukrainian roots, and relatives who live there. She remembers February 24, 2022 as a very sad day. She knew that emigrating would mean starting over again, from zero, but, she explains “if not now, then when?”. Elena explains did not want to pay taxes to a government that was waging war on Ukraine. She had never been to Serbia before, but came for a visit in September 2022. She observed that the language wasn’t that different from Russian, and the openness of locals towards Rusians. Elena swoons when she talks about the Serbian people she has met. She loves them: their warmth, their openness, their willingness to help. Elena again reiterates the importance of being able to live where you can speak your mind freely.

Elena waited until her daughter had graduated from high school in Moscow, and they moved. Their first year involved taking Serbian language classes, together. Elena visited a furniture show in Belgrade, and was at first disappointed with the limited selection, but she has since learned where she can source what. She is used to working with teams of experts while executing an interior design project for a house or apartment; now she has to rebuild that network abroad. She hints that in Russia contractors were more punctual with regard to deadlines. In Serbia, he explains, you can make plans and then the person can simply disappear for a month. I nod in agreement. None of this surprises me. Elena takes this all in stride, “now I just have to be more selective about with whom I work, who I can trust to deliver on time".

I ask Elena about her clients. Many of them are Russians who are looking to buy properties in Europe. She has also taken on a few local projects, who understood the value-added provided by an experienced interior decorator, and is now working on projects not only in Belgrade, but also in other Serbian cities. Elena has bought a car, explaining, she was always the kind of person who explored Russia by car during her holidays, and now she is exploring Serbia. I think the key to Elena’s marketing of her own work is that she explains she makes interiors for people, not for magazines. This resonates, as I think about the cold interiors you often see in hotels or in photos, none of which are actually livable.

Elena’s daughter is now studying psychology at a private university in Belgrade in Serbian. She has moved out, and has a job as well as an assistant in a dentist’s office. Elena is active in the local community, attending networking events, trying to make connections which will help her grow her business. She would love to learn to speak Serbian well enough to be able to speak at industry conferences; for now she is happy to attend as a listener. Elena explains that Russians working in her industry tend to cooperate more than they see each other as competition. She understands that to be sustainable in the long-term, she must engage local clients, and not depend fully on Russian-speakers. Sometimes wealthy Russians ask her to check out potential real estate in person for them, flying her to Montenegro, for example, to do on-site inspections.

We shift to more personal topics. Over a new year’s holiday, Elena decided to book a spa hotel, alone. There she met her partner, also from Russia, but not Moscow, and was also staying there alone. They are now a happy couple, and Elena describes how if they had both stayed in Russia, they surely would have never crossed paths. She talks about maybe, one day, the dream of becoming a Serbian citizen and being able to travel in Europe. A Schengen visa is for her also something out of reach.

Elena’s business consists of interior design, setting up properties to be rented out or sold, and “homestaging”, an American term that is transliterated as it sounds directly into Russian. Elena explains she can take a totally empty apartment and turn it into something ready to be presented within a couple months, and can fully homestage a property within two to three weeks. Successful “staging" can sigificantly impact how much rent an owner can ask for. It seems like Elena understands the art of selling a dream life.

Elena explains she feels free in Serbia, but is aware of the curse of the “red passport”, of not being able, for example, to visit a property in Slovenia one of her clients is considering purchasing. She cannot fly to the Milan furniture show. Elena even knows a Russian in Serbia who gave up her Russian citizenship in anticipation of receiving Serbian citizenship, but that never happened, and now she simply has no passport.

Elena’s 70 year-old mother remained in Moscow. She does want to join the family, despite being invited. Phone calls are technically no longer possible with Russia, or if they work briefly, the quality of the line is really bad. Her mother said, “I was born, and I will die here.”

Elena jokes she and her daughter are no longer “blind kitties” referring to the feeling of helplessness one has at the beginning in a new country. We talk about all the countries Russians hae emigrated to in recent years, across Europe and beyond. I again think about this enormous brain drain. It was not easy at first, especially when her daughter, like any teenager, was angry at her mother for moving her away from her hometown, from all her friends, for forcing her to start over aged 18. But now, three years later, she is grateful. She understands why Elena made them move. She understands that her friends in Russia cannot speak freely.

Elena tells me an anecdote which describes Serbia to a tee. When she first arrived, she attended language classes at a private language school. The owner, Elena explains, “had her eggs in different baskets”. I give her a blank stare, not really understanding the idiom. “In one building she housed a language school with several classrooms, a cafe, rooms to rent on a nightly basis, and a currency exchange.” I smiled and laughed. That to me sounded like the classic Balkan entrepreneur. Diversification even on a micro scale.

As I ask for the bill, Elena recalls her own childhood:

“I was born in the Soviet Union. I grew up being told there were things I could only say at home, with my parents. I didn’t want that to be the new normal for my own daughter. I raised her to speak freely, and suddenly, as she enters adulthood, I am supposed to tell her to be careful what she says to whom? I remember what it was like when you cannot speak your mind.”

Olya & Ilya

My last interview in Belgrade is with Ilya and Olya, husband and wife, both 38 years old, together since their first year in university, the kind of happy couple who finish each other’s sentences in a relaxed, rather incredible way, parents to a nine year-old son. They have a very interesting business, Ollio boutique apartments, and Ilya invites me to meet them at one of their new apartments. He sends me an address in the city center, not far from the zoo in Kalemegdan park.

Olya and Ilya are essentially doing what would not be allowed in many European cities due to legislation, but for now is proving to be an interesting-if-scalabe business model in Belgrade. They registered a company which signs long-term leases on apartments, working with a Serbian real estate agent who they describe as a natural salesman, talented at convincing property owners to agree to this. Olya then decorates and fixes the apartments to make them marketable, and then they are listed as short-term accomodation on global platforms like Booking.com and Airbnb (one of their apartments here). The key here is scale, the couple explain — anything less than ten apartments doesn’t make financial sense. But before I get into the details, let me tell you how this fascinating team (both held senior leadership positions in tech companies; Ilya had 75 people reporting to him) got started as entrepreneurs in Belgrade.

In December 2023, the family left St. Petersburg (Ilya actually grew up in Norilsk) for Baku, where they lived for a year and a half. They found Azerbaijan’s capital to be beautiful but “empty”. Both were working remotely for their tech jobs. They began to ask, where next? They looked at Portugal but estimated they would need something like €30,000 to get started. They chose Serbia, and fell in love, althouogh Olya admits at first she was skeptical. Again I hear about the people in Serbia who made the move easy. They connected with their Serbian real estate agent before arriving, and the very first day he had booked five viewings, and by evening, they had rented their first apartment.

In the summer of 2024, the couple visited a country villa which a former diplomat had turned into a bed & breakfast. Olya was enamored by the decor, the details, the antiques, even the porcelain. They were greeted like family, and fed. I can envision the fireplace room filled with books as Olya describes the experience. And then something clicks.

Olya said to Ilya, “I want to work in hospitality. I can imagine a house or a hotel.” She was afraid to tell him her dream. She had once run a business in St. Petersburg in event decorations. But this would be something totally new. Olya used to make YouTube videos about the history of various hotel brands.

Ilya’s response? “Let’s do the math.”

The couple quickly realized they could not do a country house model as they are city dwellers. It would be prohibitively expensive to buy properties. Ilya had seen a video on YouTube about a guy in California who rented out 25 apartments as short-term accomodation. He realized the key was scale.

The couple’s company now rents out six apartments, and plans to have 30 by the end of 2026. They attracted a third partner who helped with the initial investment in the form of a loan which he is paid interest on each month. The company is operating totally legally, paying all its taxes. The first property was a great choice — with a beautiful balcony, a balcony which alone sells the property to tourists, Olya explains. She says she can turn a long-term rental into a short-term accomodation within three weeks. She has an eye for all the little details.

The couple have a business plan. They hope to average €120 per night over the year, although there is of course seasonality. They have a two-night minimum stay, as they realized one-night stays tended to trash the properties. They must have reviews, and good ones. They need at least 75% occupancy. It was tricky to find good cleaning staff. Laundry is a hurdle they are still working on. They realized that many local dry cleaners could not provide reliable quotes and turnaround time for all the bedding and towels. At the moment, the couple are doing this washing themselves, at home, but on their plans for 2026 is to explore the possibility of opening their own laundromat. They have outlined which part of the city they want to rent in (historic city center).

Ilya is still consulting on some IT projects; Olya is 100% dedicated to the apartment business. In terms of competition, the couple explain there is another Russian-founded company which already has 36 apartments. They are happy this example exists because it means succcess is possible, and Olya came up with her idea without knowing about their direct competitor.

I ask the couple about work-life balance. They try to take a “shabbat” on Saturdays, as most apartments are rented from Friday to Sunday. I ask how their son is adjusting. At first they sent him to an expensive English-language school which they did not think was worth the tuition fees. He is now attending a new Russian-Serbian private school with instruction in Russian but with Serbian language and history. So far, that has been a positive experience.

This power couple (they really do come across like they will make a success of whatever they try, given their super analytical approach) also do not have a visa to travel to Europe, and really hope to be able to stay in Serbia and grow their business. Ilya and Olya say they feel respected by locals when they learn the couple have opened a business in Belgrade. They say some locals are now looking at what it working for Russian-owned businesses, for example new cafes and restaurants, and are now trying to immitate some of those success factors.

The couple even held an annual strategic planning session with their business partner, in addition to their weekly team meetings. They seem to have developed a magic formula for separating personal from the professional (this feels very rare), and are both strong personalities which complement each other’s skill sets (Ilya’s focus on the numbers, Olya’s vision and feel for what customers want). They tell a story from long ago when Olya had her own business in St. Petersburg, and wasn’t as good at tracking cash flow. After what she thought was a really successful month, she realized she didn’t have enough cash to pay her expenses. She makes a joke that it was like “butterfly, butterfly, money” which I am not sure if I can translate properly, but the moral of the story being that Ilya stepped in with a short-term loan and also taught her the importance of tracking everything.

Ilya and Olya appear accutely aware they are lucky to be able to build a new life in Serbia. They mention that unlike Ukrainians, Russians didn’t lose their homes. Olya tells me about a family she knows, a mother and child, who have not been able to apply for even a temporary residence permit, as the child’s father is an FSB officer, and refuses to give the mother permission. He tortures them from a distance by making them have to do the “visa run” every 30 days.

In short, it isn’t easy, but those who want to are trying to make it work.

I thank Ilya and Olya for their time, understanding in their case it is a particularly precious commodity. That evening I line up for a burrito at a fast food place near my hotel, lacking the energy to even go to a restaurant, and I overhear a group of Mormon missionaries ordering in English. What a world, I thought to myself.

Many, many other Russians reached out to me and I was not able to meet with all of them. One opened a roller-rink for kids. Another is operating a sailing school. A third has opened Ura! selling pelmeni (traditional Russian meat-filled dumplings). A fourth opened Science Hub.

Already back in Vienna, I read Egor’s story, a young Russian man who borrowed €3000 from his step-father and started a very successful business in Belgrade, taking a chance with the one chance he got (his step-dad said he simply could not afford to loan him any more). Egor bought a used Renault for €2000, and bought a commercial vacuum cleaner for €700, and with that he started a cleaning business which now employs 25 people and has over €10,000 in vacuum equipment alone.

In a promotional videos on his Shine Cleaning Instagram, Egor is seen speaking really good Serbian wishing his customers a happy new year. Imagine taking just €3000 and starting a profitable business which can actually grow. That is unheard of here in Austria, for example, where regulatoins and taxation strangle any dreams of micro-entrepreneurship amongst young people, unfortunately.

I hope this series has been informative. I have thought a lot over the past few years about how much has been said about the fates of Ukrainians who had to leave their homes because of Russia’s attack on their country. I have shared many of their stories. I thought it was relevant to share some of the stories of the Russians who looked at their country’s politics and decided to vote with their feet the only way they could: by leaving. With EU doors shut to them.

Russia has also bled some of its brightest, and not on the battlefield. For now, the Serbian reaction to the Russian “invasion” has been one of curiousity and cautious optimism. I did not hear a single story about resentment, along the lines of what I hear often from Ukrainians when they describe how their children are sometimes treated in local schools in Austria, for example. Perhaps it is cultural. Perhaps it is because people in the former Yugoslavia know what war means. There is a recent memory, as one local explained to me this week.

From an economic point of view, in my three days as a novice observer, I see no reason why a country like Serbia would want to join the EU. It is ironic that the position which enriched Tito’s Yugoslavia for so many years, of being a bridge between east and west, and taking money from both sides, which worked until it didn’t, is not that dissimilar to what Serbia’s government is doing now. There are clearly economic benefits from this influx of young, entrepreneurial migration from Russia. Yet Serbia still holds ties to Russia, while also courting the EU. The EU promise reminds me of a couple who have been engaged for ages, for years, and everyone knows the wedding will not actually happen. I turned on the evening news one night and although it definitely has that “state TV” feel which is endemic in this part of the world, it sort of tried to tell the Russian and the Ukrainian perspective. America and China. To be fair, you cannot really blame a small, landlocked country for hedging its bets. Things are far from perfect, and there is a real protest movement against what citizens see as institutionalized corruption (I would perhaps describe as “autocracy-light”) in Serbia which they say has gone on for far too long.

But I had never seen Belgrade looking as good as it does now. And I had never heard so much Russian being spoken on the city’s streets.

I am obviously not a journalist, but this work is my best, untrained immitation of the craft. If you enjoyed this report and others like it, I would be grateful if you might consider supporting with paid subscription. It is a labor of love, but not withut expenses. Thank you.