This week I’m “liveblogging” my trip to Ukraine. Unlike traditional reports, these posts will be shorter and more frequent.
The Ukrainian border formalities were not bad at all…for me at least. One man was not so fortunate.
Ukrainian Border A Breeze For Me, But One Man Pulled Off Bus And Not Allowed To Depart Ukraine
We finally reached the Ukrainian – Polish border (Rivnens’ka) at 11:04 pm. We joined a queue of busses, flanked by cars to our left and lorries (trucks) to the right. After getting in line, several passengers jumped out.
A few of the men walked to the side of the road to urinate…so I did too (too much coffee earlier) while many stood outside in the freezing rain to smoke cigarettes.
An enterprising woman stood outside the bus with a small cart selling coffee (instant) and other drinks.
While I was urinating, the bus pulled away! It made a u-turn and started going down the road in the opposite direction we had just came in.
My heart skipped a beat. What was going on?
Thankfully, the bus came to a stop at a gas station down the road.
Whew!
I walked over to the gas station, where real restrooms were available…too late.
Several passengers poured into the convenience store to buy snacks, but I was still fueled from what I had brought onboard and returned to the bus.
It took 90 minutes, but eventually we inched up to the border station. There, we waited a bit longer and then were ushered into a lobby in which travelers were being stamped out of the country.
A border guard came up to me and started talking to me in Ukrainian. I shrugged, held up my US passport, and said I did not understand him. He nodded and walked away.
But there was another man in front of me in his mid-40s (so too young to leave the country without special clearance). Three guards surrounded him and began harshly interrogating him. He was clearly distraught and these guys, based on their body language, were not buying his story.
He pulled out a black folder filled with official-looking paperwork and the guards began examining it. He was traveling with an older man who stood by his side.
I reached the front of the line and was stamped out of Ukraine without a word. Rejoining the others on the bus we waited for the two men who were still in the border facility.
And waited. And kept waiting.
Nearly an hour passed. Finally, the bus departed and we left them behind. It was now after 2:00 am (though we would gain an hour back when crossing into Poland).
I can only imagine the younger man did not have his paperwork in order to leave Ukraine.
The two open seats have already been scooped up by folks looking to spread out.
Next stop: Polish border
Is that the freedom Ukraine is fighting for where citizens are enslaved and not allowed to leave and made to fight against their will because that doesn’t sound like freedom to me? It’s one thing for a country to have walls and ban foreigners from coming in but to prevent people from leaving who want to seek asylum or refugee status at gun point sounds like what the Soviets did. You just met the face of evil with those Ukrainian border guards, although, those who support them are almost just as bad.
Enslavement takes many forms.
Your assessment of the soldiers actions in Ukraine can as easily describe the attitude of Americans towards women, their bodies and their “right to choose”.
You might casually demur–“oh it is not the same…” But it is. Society has used circumstances in Ukraine to give itself the right to commandeer, just as politicians and MEN in general, in the US have imposed their will upon women.
And you can be certain that if war came to the US, the US Congress would promptly empower the military to conscript any man under 50–and perhaps older.
I’ve heard the comparison between women’s “right to choose” and male military conscription before and it’s an interesting one. Laws regulating what we can do with our bodies in terms of ethics or safety are not new such as restrictions on narcotics or incest. Yeah, I know, gross to bring that up but abortion isn’t an “equality” issue. (Men don’t have an abortion right we’re not granting to women.) In any case, a woman isn’t required to get pregnant and it’s not a federal law regardless.
What the Russian-Ukraine conflict illustrates, and I think a useful observation of the health of a society in general, is how working class men are treated that are necessary for the society’s defense and survival in wartime and peace. When COVID hit, people found out pretty quickly how “working class” folks kept them fed trucking food and stocking store shelves. The west imports millions of people because the businesses don’t want to pay for the cost of local labor. IMO, the right wing’s “supply side” economics which shored up corporate profits wound up importing a democratic party majority for our foreseeable lifetimes.
Soldier conscripts who don’t feel respected by society will have poor morale and this is reflected in their effectiveness (or lack thereof). In WWII, the Soviet:German frontline casualty ratio was 3.5:1. “Without the machines we received through Lend-Lease, we would have lost the war.” — Josef Stalin
From the feeds I’ve followed, Ukrainian mobilization has been a fraction of that of Russia along with Ukraine doing their best to properly equip and arm them to the front lines.
What a clown. What do you think the US did during WW2 to draft dodgers? They were either put in prison or rounded up and forced to join the military.
Russia is a terrible government and has been for many year and anyone defending it is either delusional or getting paid to do so.
Dear John, This country doesn’t ban foreigners from coming in, only illegal entrants. You’re one of the brain washed here who complain all the while the milk and honey drip from your mouth.
This is also a country that does not prevent you from leaving. You sound like would be happier elsewhere. We won’t miss you. Goodbye.
And in the USA you must register for the day after when you are 18. If you want to live here and there is a war you have to go fight. It’s the same way in about every country in the world.
@John Dogas In any conflict region you should expect to be met by soldiers at border crossings. If he had been given a pass he still would have been escorted for verification. I don’t know where you live but if you think mother Russia is a better choice I urge you to go. Please let us know how that plays out
@Maryland
It didn’t sound like he said Russia was better. But we didn’t give $100 billion to Russia in aid during the last 12 months while crowing about defending democracy and freedom. It’s two despotic governments having a border dispute and not our role to prop one of them up, with or without the bs ‘freedom’ rhetoric.
Border dispute? You know they initially failed in their attempt at Kyiv? If they succeeded it would have been the whole country. If you minimize country annexation by calling it a border dispute you obviously are oblivious to facts and have a strong Russian or anti-American bias. Do you also call it a “special military operation”?
Another of the brain-washed, but keep that milk and honey dripping from your lips.
This is as much a ‘border dispute’ as 9/11 was an ‘act of vandalism on a few high rises’.
Annexation of one despotic regime by another; call it what you will. Not something I want my government borrowing $100 billion to piss away on and flirt with a nuclear holocaust. It’s a strong minding my own business bias.
Thanks for your commentary Neville.
Two things Matthew:
1. Neville Chamberlain’s agreement with Hitler is credited by many historians with giving the UK time to prepare for war. A war they would have almost certainly lost in 1938. (Merkel has made similar claims recently about the Minsk agreements of 2015 and the subsequent arming of Ukraine). Chamberlain could well be the unsung hero of Britain, so your attempted insult falls a bit flat.
2. Armchair warhawks’ invocation of ‘Munich 1938’ is surely some version of Godwin’s Law and I’ve been hearing it my entire life (eg Kuwait 1991). The present situation seems much closer to ‘Sarajevo 1914.’ Are we really going to let the events of a non-strategic backwater light the match of a world wide conflagration?
Bob, you miss the point about PM Chamberlain. It’s not like he strategically made the agreement with Hitler knowing that Hitler would breach it simply so the UK could better prepare for war. Instead, he showed a colossal lack of discernment in stating,
As Winston Churchill later wrote:
The problem is not that as a byproduct of his stupidity, Britain had time to prepare for war. The stupidity was in making a pact with the devil in the first place.
And unlike the Iraq War redux, this is not a war of choice, a war of pre-emption. This is a sovereign nation that was attacked and whose enemy has expressed an intent to destroy it. The story does not end well when a menace moves west in the name of grabbing land that it claims historical attachment or entitlement to.
You are on the wrong side of history, Bob.
“Give them an inch and they will take a mile.”
Study history much?
I imagine you think that 100B would be better off spent on tax cuts for your “business.”
@JorgeGeorge Paez: Are you talking to Bob or to me?
@MatthewKlint
Umm, I was talking about real historians, not Chamberlain’s contemporary political opponent/successor. Chamberlain likely chose the best of a few options, none of which were good. So you think England should have declared war on Germany in September 1938? Over Czechoslovakia? A country that had existed for 20 whole years?
I mentioned the first Iraq war which was not preemptive, and was sold to us with fanciful propaganda about Iraqi soldiers pulling babies from incubators.
“The story does not end well when a menace moves west in the name of grabbing land that it claims historical attachment or entitlement to.” So you think the US will end badly then? Or are you talking about Ukraine and Poland, both of whose borders were moved west after WWII?
@JorgeGeorge Paez
No, actually I think the $100 billion should not be spent at all since we don’t have it and it is part of a trillion plus $ federal budget deficit.
And to both of you, I do study history much. Enough to know it is richer than the black and white propaganda being presented to us. I feel bad for the people of Ukraine and Russia, and I also think they are both poorly governed and not very free. I have no issue with any US citizen volunteering to fight over there, donating their money as they see fit, or even just hanging out in a 5-star western hotel there to get clicks for their blog.
I suspect when all is said and done, if nuclear war is avoided, that the borders of Ukraine will resemble the electoral breakdown of the 2010 election:
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Ukrainian_presidential_election
We’d probably be there by now if NATO wasn’t so willing to spill Ukrainian blood to weaken Russia.