Bob Homans March 22

20220322

Ukraine – 3/22 Sitrep
Compiled By: Robert Homans
March 22, 2022

Today’s sitrep goes in a different direction, to Poland and the refugees fleeing the Russian invasion of Ukraine.   This consists of 2 dispatches, one today and the 2nd tomorrow, both compiled by the wife and daughter of a friend of mine.

First, three interesting articles:

“How Ukraine’s Outgunned Airforce is Fighting Back Against Russian Jets” from the New York Times.  Ukraine will make good use of Poland’s MiG 29’s, either intact or, as some suggest, dis-assembled, and used as a valuable source of parts to keep Ukraine’s existing MiGs flying.   Private pilots are helping, by taking out the instrument panels from their planes and giving them to the Ukrainian Airforce.  Highways are being turned into runways.

“How Ukraine Swaps Living Soldiers for Dead Russians,” by Illia Ponomarenko for the “Kyiv Independent.”   Ponomarenko, and experienced war correspondent is embedded with a Ukrainian unit fighting in Sumy Oblast, in northern Ukraine near the Russian border.   His article describes the conduct of the war at a basic level.   The going rate is 6 dead Russians for 2 Ukrainian prisoners.

“Why the West Cannot Admit that Ukraine is winning?” by Eliot Cohen in the Atlantic.   Last night I was watching Bret Baer’s news show on Fox News.  Last night, and most every night, Baer starts his report on Ukraine by saying “the Russians are slowly advancing,” as if Russian victory is inevitable.   Only after speaking about Russia’s “slow advance,” does Baer list the litany of Russian reversals.    Last night, Baer also reported that Ukraine has used the war as an opportunity to shut down an opposition party, without mentioning that the opposition party in question is the Opposition Party – For Life, a pro-Russian Party headed by Viktor Medvedchuk, who is on the lam.   Members of the Opposition Party – For Life, including Medvedchuk, stand accused of taking money from Russia to finance the puppet government in Ukraine, that Russia hoped to install after their “lightning victory.”  It seems that the US media Is incapable of starting a report about the war, without the narrative that Russia is advancing.

Has Ukraine Shut Down Opposition TV Stations – In the same Fox News broadcast, referenced earlier, Brett Baer alleged that Ukraine, using the war as a pretext, shut down opposition broadcast TV Stations, and then combined the stations into the “United Channel.”   This is untrue and is yet another example of the misreporting by U.S. broadcast and cable news outlets that have plagued Ukraine for years.

The United Channel was established by necessity when, in the early days of the war the TV tower in Kyiv, used by all the broadcast TV stations in Ukraine, was damaged by a Russian air strike.   The broadcast stations got together, and they agreed to establish the United Channel.  Each of the broadcast stations were allocated a certain amount of time, and the United Channel had time for broadcasting critical information to Ukrainians.   Also, the TV news broadcast produced by BBC, for which my wife’s daughter is a co-host, is now available on the United Channel.   Previously, it had only been available on BBC/Ukraine’s YouTube channel.    Much as they may try, it seems that American TV news outlets cannot get over reporting disinformation about events in Ukraine.  

I am sure that if the Sutro Tower in San Francisco was ever damaged by an earthquake, that all the stations that use the Sutro Tower to transmit their programming would come up with a solution to stay on the air, just like the Ukrainian broadcast channels have done.   I somehow doubt that Brett Baer would report that such an event would be the result of nefarious collusion.

The Refugee Dispatches -

Subject: Velida’s March 18-19 Notes from the Border

‘Бог любит тройку’ (God loves a Trinity) as the Russian drinking expression goes, although from henceforth I think I’ll use the Ukrainian variant, Бог любить Трійцю.  Today brings a 3-in-one update from Velida - her Friday notes, her Saturday notes, and her Chicago Tribune OpEd than ran in print Sunday (requested by their editorial page chief, married to a college classmate of mine who had been following Velida’s border updates on Facebook and thought her take merited wider readership).

And ElinaAlem has posted another excellent video profile - No 9 of Sveta, the former embassy wellness instructor and Velida’s online exercise coach now settling in outside Mannheim, Germany. Someone left a comment on the YouTube page: “ This entire interview feels like a visual poem. It's beautiful, sad, and yet, hopeful. Ukrainians seem like exceptionally resilient people.” And that is why ElinaAlem is doing them.

Diaries in Exile episode 9 - Sveta

March 18 (Day 16 at the Border) - Uzbeks at Korczowa Crossing

“Kecharasis, Assalom Aleykum…(Excuse me, Greetings…)” I say as I navigate through the maze of cots.  Never did imagine I would speak Uzbek words on the Polish-Ukrainian border…

Friday we went back to Korczowa, the main road crossing from Ukraine.  When we came through Krakowiec-Korczowa on February 24 on our way to Warsaw, there was nothing additional in place.  In the past three weeks since Putin's wider war in Ukraine displaced more than 3 million refugees, more than 2 million flowing through Poland, much has changed.

While trying to ask a Polish policemen for directions to the big new intake center, instead of saying Pan (sir in Polish), as I had for the past 16 days along the border, I am suddenly saying Khun (sir in Thai). Polish-Ukrainian-Russian and now Thai, soon Uzbek.  It was fated to be an interesting day linguistically! 

The Korczowa refugee intake is in a huge Expo Center. The hulking warehouse-like building reminded of a larger, wider version of the Bangkok weekend market at Chatuchak, with rows of stores on both sides, but more wider and more spacious, and filled with rows and rows of cots.

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The place is staffed by Polish police and firefighters, both guarding and helping the arrivees. They are much more pleasant to deal with than the national guard at Przemysl/Medyka was earlier in the week. 

Armenians from Kharkiv: First, I encounter an old, handicapped babushka sitting on a bench, Svetlana, an Armenian from Kharkiv, and her adult children. Her son Sasha stands next to her with a bunch of plastic bags full of stuff like juices, water, snacks, collecting donated food.  When a German offered some Jacobs instant coffee, he jumped up and added that to his collection. They had just arrived from Kharkiv.

—“It is day 23 of the invasion. Why did you wait that long to leave?“ I ask Sasha.

--“My 16 year old son refused to leave without my ex-wife. My ex-wife refused to leave without her parents.  Her parents refused to leave period. I begged them to leave for days, but was not successful," replies Sasha nervously, smoking his cigarette but thoughtfully covering it with his hand so the smoke would not go my way. 

—"Where are you going next?” I continue.

—“Poznan, to my second/current wife who left 10 days ago.  But I am worried about my sister Olena. She needs to go to Egypt to her daughter, but is not sure the volunteers can help her.”

I lead the way.  But of course no one could figure out how to get to Hurghada, on Egypt's Red Sea coast, from Korczowa, on Poland's border with Ukraine, including me.

I make a quick call to a flight attendant friend. She told me to deal with a travel agency.  Another call to my friend Anna.  But in the end, not every challenge can be resolved on the spot or on the phone.  I decide they need to go to a larger city, to work through to a travel agency.  They decide to go to Wroclaw, much further away than Krakow from the border, but their choice.

4 hours later, when we are already back in Przemysl, we learn that they got off in Krakow because Olena wanted to find the travel agency there. I book them a hotel for 5 nights so they can have a little break before Olena finds the way to Egypt, and Sasha with his mother to a small room in Srem (a small town near Poznan) where his mother will be sleeping on the bed, and he and his wife on the floor…for the foreseeable future.  

Looking forward while looking back, Sasha explained: "We locked our Kharkiv apartment. Left my dog with my friends. And now I do not know where my dog is. Because my friends have fled their home too…

Olena turns out not to be comfortable working with her smart phone, or email. She really only understands Russian.  Getting her to Egypt's Red Sea coast where her daughter works, is going to be a challenge.  I hear of a program that helps refugees travel onward (will pay for tickets in fact) and ask our friend Andrzej the relentlessly positive Krakow lawyer to help her get to Hurghada.

Uzbeks from Khiva: Back to the Expo Center. While I walk among the cots, I start to see some interesting non-Ukrainian or western style clothing and hear the sound of a language I have not heard in years.

Four men sit around a cot. One of them reclines on it the way my Crimean Tatar grandfather used to do back in Uzbekistan, on the topchan, a raised platform. Since I was born and grew up in Tashkent, I decided to approach them, making my apologies bumping some at a turn (Kecharasis), and then initiate with the standard greeting, “Assalom Aleykum…”

--"Valeykum Assalom” came the reply greetings to me, courtesy of a blue-eyed man my age. He told me that he was from Khiva, Khorezm. 

Actually, it turned out all four were.  I spent the first 26 years of my life in Uzbekistan, and never made it to Khiva.  

Mansur had lived in Ukraine for the last 30 years in Sumy region. Ergash had lived in Chernihiv region for 25 years, and Umidbek in Lugansk region near Rubezne for 18 - all under assault by Russian invading troops.

Umidbek said for the last 2 weeks he had lived in the basement. The houses on his left, right, and behind were leveled. His house was not hit, a minor miracle.

They all had families. Mansur’s four daughters had been born in Ukraine. 

Now they are waiting, and waiting…When I told one that I was originally from Tashkent, they said: "let's go home together." Turns out that in order for the Uzbek government to send a plane for free passage home, they have to have 200 Uzbek citizens there. 130 have gathered; they still have 70 people to go.  

Meanwhile they live on those cots in the former Expo center.

They all love Ukraine. They were surprised that I had never visited Khiva, their beautiful home town rising from the Khorezm desert like a mirage out of A Thousand and One Arabian Nights.  

"Please come.  I have a place not far from the main square."  We all agreed that I will come and visit them in Khiva. “Potom” (later)

March 19 (Day 24 of War) Life choices and the nature of time – before and after Feb 24

Days pass in a different rhythm than what I considered normal life before February 24.  I said last night that I am tired and ready to return to my life back home in the United States, though I probably will be in Poland through the first week in April.  I also said that I wonder how I will react upon return.  Is this relentless repetitive experience helping traumatized people daily my new baseline normal?  How will I be able to cope with a return to life as before, slower, saner? At least I have that option available to me anytime, unlike 40 million Ukrainians.

Time marches on regardless, at different rates for different people, whether Ukrainians in Ukraine under bombardment and resisting Russian attack or on the move in other countries, or non-Ukrainians helping them.  Some are suspended, refusing to move forward.  Others may have to go in reverse or laterally, because the hoped-for Option A way forward isn’t working out.  Option B will stick for some. Others likely will have to try Option C or D in the coming weeks.

A Ukrainian friend of ours arrived in Washington this week to try to help sort out the logistics of needed assistance.  He also remarked that time no longer marks life in the same way.  Everyone sleeps much less, minimally, and are awake when they need to be, night or day.  The rhythms of a work week or weekends, even names of days of the week, also no longer have meaning.  There was life and time before February 24, and then the days after Putin’s wider war began.  So not Saturday.  Not March 19. But Day 24.  (or Day 17 for me working along the border).

Poland appears to have reached its de facto saturation point, after absorbing more than 2 million refugees (including 1 million children) in three weeks, absent construction of refugee camps, the least desirable option (but I saw young American soldiers driving up in big trucks with I-beams in Przemysl this week. Construction of something is coming).  Placement of new arrivals, including my efforts, will increasingly push westward – Germany, France, UK, and elsewhere (O Canada).

Looking for option B in Warsaw: Got a call last night from a friend that the first placement we worked on in Warsaw after arriving in Poland 24 days ago, for Katya, the student from Sloviansk who came across the border with us, was not working out 3+ weeks later, despite initial good will and hope for a lasting match.  

Differing expectations, incomplete communications, and Katya’s trauma all appear to play a part.  The Warsaw couple appears to have expected a stand-in daughter joining their family, but Katya did not fit the bill.   She has been traumatized for the second time in 8 years experiencing war and displacement, and once again having to start life over in a strange place away from friends and family.  

But at the same time, she is a determined, proud young Ukrainian who is spending her time in Warsaw volunteering helping her friends to flee from danger in Ukraine. Several towns where her friends were from have been completely leveled by Russian attacks in the past 24 days.  Katya already had signs of survivor’s guilt as we were driving from Lviv to Warsaw on February 24.  Elina Alem had (still has?) it too.  

We drive to the Medyka crossing point this evening to meet Elina Alem's other friend Katya, aka “Katya the boss,” a super dynamic 20-year old originally from Debaltseve in eastern Ukraine.  Katya is working as a volunteer on both sides of the border, based out of Lviv, helping facilitate the movement of people and items between Lviv and Poland thru the Shehyni-Medyka crossing point.  She pops over to say hey, give ElinaAlem a hug, and suggest Elina could join her shuttling back and forth from Lviv (I quickly interject: "no thank you"), before crossing back over into Ukraine.

Everyone we meet on the “safe” side of the Polish-Ukraine border exhibits survivor’s guilt to some extent.  The horrific stories coming out of eastern and southern Ukraine, in particular, only accelerate it for Ukrainians from those communities who are now living in safety.

Trust between strangers takes time to build, and the lack of expectations setting up front and effective communications in both directions sadly can undermine it.  Katya's Warsaw hosts did not give Katya extra keys, and with some of her volunteer activities lasting deep into the night, Katya did not feel comfortable to come home late and disturb them/wake them up to open the door – and so she stayed sometimes on her friend’s couch overnight, thinking that was courteous.  But the host couple interpreted it differently, exactly opposite in fact, feeling she was just disappearing, using them more like an occasional hotel.  

Many people—in Poland and beyond—are now genuinely opening their hearts and homes without thinking thru the implications or knowing if they are truly ready to do so for an extended period of time for strangers from a different culture and country traumatized by war, some for the second time this decade.  

I thought I was ready in 2004 to open our hearts and home to a third child.  We had talked about adopting for years, even before we were married.  But I had no idea emotionally what we were getting into by adopting a child starved of normal interaction and nutrition for two years of orphanage and foster family life, and it took years to regain balance.  

Adopting an infant is a commitment you cannot simply walk away from, though some try.  Integrating adult strangers on short notice into the same household, even temporarily, is more complex, with both parties exercising standing. Sometimes good will proves insufficient; some, perhaps many, initial matches will simply not work out in the days and weeks to come.  No blame game here.  Life is complicated.

The millions of Ukrainians who flee from Putin's war did not plan to leave their homes. They do not come to live and work and study in Poland, Germany, etc.  They are not economic migrants.  They run away from bombs and bullets, often leaving their family members, friends, pets, houses, lives behind. They all have PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) to differing degrees, even if they put on brave faces and smiles.

And they all want to go home, even if that home physically is no longer a building, but a pile of rubble, thanks to Putin’s bombs.

Suspended (by choice) in Korczowa:  One of the other Ukrainians I encountered in Korczowa on Friday/March 18/Day 23 was Nonna from Izium, a town on the Donets River in Kharkiv oblast just north of Sloviansk.  Izium is currently being brutally pounded by Russian forces.  Nonna brought her grandkids out with her.  Her husband and son stayed behind to defend their town.  Nonna got as far as Korczowa’s cavernous refugee intake center over a week prior.  But she refused to go any further. 

Nonna does not want to be resettled.  She told me that she would stay as close to the border with Ukraine as possible, so she could return home as soon as possible when the war is over. She would remain in Korczowa, she vowed, reeking as someone who had not taken a shower or changed clothes in over a week would.  Her concern was not her well-being, but that of her husband, son, and neighbors.  Conditions were absolutely abysmal in Izium.  “Izium needs food and water desperately.  Please help them,” she pleaded. 

I could have helped answer questions about her options to go elsewhere, but I cannot help those under siege in Izium.

Moving on (to Germany? Canada?): I keep telling girls (young women) in particular that they should not put their life on hold, looking back, but move on, looking forward. But that is easier said than done.  Canada opened up their version of refugee processing to all Ukrainians fleeing war this week. I have been delegating friends and family to help Ukrainians we know who have gotten out and are willing to take a further leap to North America to fill out the Canadian forms. Vica from Kyiv, whose Plan A was a job in southern Poland that started but will not continue, is now moving on to Plan B – O Canada, while staying with a Polish friend of ours (dziekuje Aniu).  Viktor the youth jazz band conductor originally from Kriviy Rih currently in a Germany monastery with his family, also now plans to pursue the Canada option.

Ukrainians fleeing Putin’s war need help and support in many areas.  Some just need a place to crash, sleep, and eat for several days (in Poland).  Others need help filling out forms.  Still others need assistance to help them get to certain places, navigating web sites and travel infrastructure in foreign languages and foreign lands.  Thanks to all whom I have pulled into the effort or have volunteered support – Poles, Germans, Spanish, Portuguese, Brits, Canadians, Americans, even some Aussies.

New cases keep popping up daily; people keep finding me.  Today it is…my brother currently working in Kenya.  He reaches out from Nairobi to ask for help for his dentist from Virginia, who has a sister Anya, her four-year old daughter, and a friend now in Warsaw.  “She has been in Poland for 24 hours and no one is taking care of them.”  I did not know my brother’s dentist in Arlington was Ukrainian before today. I ask for her sister’s number.  

Turns out Anya has just arrived at the train station after 14 hours travel (not 24), is tired, trying to figure out what comes next. They have a cousin in Szczeczin but Szczeczin seems saturated with refugees. I call the dentist in Virginia and explain they will be fine, and since Poland seems saturated, Germany now seems the better bet.  Now working that with German friends – one who graciously stepped out of a concert in Berlin to discuss details with me, and has a sister who is a Lutheran minister in Heidelberg who can help the new trio settle, since Berlin also seems saturated with Ukrainian arrivals.

And I am back to searching for a new match for Katya in Warsaw.  I have a possible lead in Poland for her Option B short term, but because of the saturation factor, she is starting to conclude that finding jobs will be super difficult, and may need to eventually move on to Option C, perhaps Germany, perhaps Canada.  Stay tuned.