Mid-Week Updates, No 37

End of Summer, No Peace in Ukraine, Migration Crises

Summer is winding down, but I still managed to get a swim in over the weekend. It was refreshing, yes, and it gives you an idea of what Wim Hof’s approach is all about: exposing yourself to cold temperatures is healthy. Like many things in life, doing it is not really the problem, but taking the first steps is what is hard, and jumping into the September ocean ain’t easy.

Ukraine

Zelensky is splattered across the front pages again as he is in New York to address the UN General Assembly and he managed to squeeze in a visit to wounded Ukrainian soldiers in a hospital in Staten Island. The dynamic that calls for peace continues to gain momentum and concurrent with it comes the rhetoric about Ukraine being an undemocratic, even fascist nation. Just scanning my ‘X’ feed and digging through the news these references keep coming up and you wonder if Russian operatives are hard at work to influence the debate in particular in the run-up to this week’s meetings at the UN. It is hard to put your finger on it, but this sentiment comes from both the hard right and the hard left. The former is betting on a more isolationist role for the US and an end to NATO, the latter is very comfortable with regimes that are anti-Western and equally would love to see NATO’s demise. All of them do put forward the notion that an all-out world war with nuclear escalation remains a possibility and in that they have point. Our luck has been the contained nature of the conflict so far. That may not last.

If we take the route to a peace settlement with Russia where land is traded for peace, then essentially we ignore and accept the human carnage that has rolled over Ukraine. It also takes a somewhat optimistic view of working with the new alliances that are being formed: Putin is now building out his country’s partnership with China and North Korea. Yes, that collaboration is gaining momentum and its founding principles are essentially anti-western and anti-democratic and that in the end effectively means: anti-human. It always ends with oppression and death.

And Ukraine is no stranger to that. One of the books I read over the summer was Anatoli Kuznetzov’s Babi Yar, which is an account of life in Kyiv under Nazi Germany occupancy during World War II. It starts with the mass killing of Kyiv’s Jews in what is now the suburb of Babyn Yar and where in the space of two days 33,771 people were murdered. After that the location where it happened remained an execution ground for the two years Germany governed Ukraine and it serves as an anchor around which the book is built. Kuznetzov makes it clear how the nation, after having suffered through the Soviet inflicted famine of the 1930s, was once more violated in unimaginable ways with a human toll that is truly beyond any comprehension. To frame Ukraine as a ‘fascist’ state because some elements collaborated with the occupying Germans is a stretch. It was a divided and destroyed nation that was and still is, much like Poland, a victim of being sandwiched between the Germans and the Russians. It was a strange experience to read about a war eighty years ago in a place where today again a brutal conflict is taking place. If you factor in Soviet rule including the Chernobyl nuclear disaster then Ukraine has not had a lot of breaks in the entirety of its history.

Past and present day horrors inform Ukraine’s stance and Zelensky would sell his own people down the river if he were to ignore their plight and their justifiable demand to return to peace within the country’s original and internationally recognized borders. And that includes Crimea. So yes, we need to look today’s horror in the face lest we forget. The documentary ‘20 Days in Mariupol’ is a vital document in that process, it is being positioned for an Oscar nomination and probably deservedly so. As time moves on it is key to remember how this war got started, how civilians were and are deliberately slaughtered and how that should inform our skepticism towards any peace deal being put forward.

Canada and India

It was weird to see it headlining on Monday on many international news sites, Trudeau announcing that India was directly involved in the murder of a Sikh nationalist earlier this year in British Columbia. Although no specific evidence of sovereign involvement was presented, Canada acted swiftly and expelled an Indian diplomat in a retaliatory measure. It did so after its key allies, the US and the UK, shrugged it off as neither wanted to risk a diplomatic row with India. Keeping India close while China is drifting away is a key piece of foreign policy in Washington and London.

Now without going into the merits of the case itself, why was this blasted across all news media? Trudeau has been burned before by overseas activity on Canadian soil - remember Michael Chong - and his cabinet may have taken the view that it was not going to get caught again in a similarly messy situation. Another explanation is domestic politics. Trudeau’s popularity is at an all-time low and the Conservative opposition is running high in the polls. The media blitz around this affair could be part of a more defined plan - together with cracking down on grocery prices - to change Canada’s domestic narrative. Expect more of it as Trudeau is desperate to get back on top of things in the weeks ahead.

Migration

Just like Spain has two coastal enclaves on Africa’s mainland, so does Italy which has two islands that are actually closer to Africa than they are to the Italian mainland. One of them, Lampedusa, has been run over by migrants with this year approximately 126,000 arrivals which is roughly double the number of arrivals of 2022. With limited options to return these refugees to where they came from there again is a humanitarian crisis brewing in the Mediterranean, like almost any recent summer now. Italy’s Prime Minister, Meloni, is asking for help to stop the massive influx of migrants, but also to get support to relocate their numbers across Europe.

It’s outside the scope of the weekly update to dive deep into this issue, but I want to spend more time on it going forward. It is a recurring theme in the US and most of Europe where to date all plans to deal with, limit or organize migration have failed. Even hardcore anti-immigration politicians (like Meloni) seem to be incapable to stem the tide, but also post-Brexit Britain is struggling as it has apparently lost control of its borders.

It is a hard issue as on the one hand politicians of all stripes seem unable of finding any solutions. It may be that is because most of them realize that there is nothing worse than economies that collapse because of ageing populations. Western democracies need an influx of immigrants, the question is how to get it right. More on this in the weeks ahead.