Music and bicycles. Lunch downtown with friends. Opinions about the war.

20220501

This war has knocked the structure out of our lives. Oksana put some of it back last Wednesday, arranging for music lessons for Eddie and Zoriana. Eddie has been studying with Maria Pilipchuk for about four years now, and Zoriana is just old enough to start. Maria's regular classes have been canceled, and public transportation is working well enough that we can get together. It's a great opportunity.

All five of us went to her apartment for the first session. Oksana and Marianna stayed with Zoriana during her half-hour while Eddie and I went to the Yunost market around the corner to buy hake, salmon and some greens. With 20 minutes to kill, we thought of other things we needed, which included an innertube so that we could fix the flat on the 14 inch beginners bicycle.

The first thing Eddie did when we got home was head for my tools and fix the bike. The old innertube still had air in it – the problem was that the valve was crooked. I told him to throw it away, but he was curious about how the thing worked. We used a pair of forceps to get the valve out and darned if he didn't fix the old innertube as well.

Yesterday morning I offered to teach Zoriana how to ride. I envisioned rolling around the backyard just to get started. Nope. We went out to the street first thing. Zoriana loved it and pretty soon we were up at the corner. Then she wanted to go five short blocks down to the playground, which we did. This fearless little girl climbed 8 feet up to the top of the adult monkey bars – a structure for building upper body strength by swinging – and then had me push her on the round swing that she rides lying down on her belly.

After 15 minutes of that she rode home. She is doing the peddling herself, but I'm still running alongside holding on to her shoulder so she can keep balanced. When Eddie owned this bike, we had training wheels on it for a couple of years. We won’t do that with Zoriana. My guess is that after two or three more times she will be balancing just fine and riding the bicycle as it is supposed to be ridden.

They say you shouldn't compare children, that each one is unique, but of course one cannot be so disciplined. My grown son didn't change a tire until I made him do it, at about the age of 15. The younger daughter of that family steadfastly refused to try a bicycle, learning only when she got to college.

Yesterday Eddie and I took the red line Metro downtown for lunch with our ArtTalkers Toastmasters group. As Zoriana and I had found riding the blue line on Thursday, it goes only every 20 minutes, only one of the two entrances is open, and it skipped three stations.

The Khreshetik area was a good deal more alive than Podil had been. There were quite a few young people. The fast food outlets were open. Arriving right on time, at one o'clock, we were the first ones there. The others drifted in within 15 minutes, all with similar stories about having to learn how the public transit was working.

The topic of conversation was of course the war all around us. It is worth sharing stories.

Natalia had stayed in Lviv for two months, having been there on  a business trip when the war broke out. Life did not change for the first week of the war, as they as they sat in cafés and listened with incredulity about the attacks on Kyiv. Natalia, like me, had simply not believed that Putin would follow through on his threats. Once the rockets started to hit – enough to wake people up, not as many as Kyiv of course – people took it seriously and started to leave the city.

Natalia has talked to family in Mariupol. She said that many refugees from that city remain convinced by Russian propaganda that it is Ukrainians who have been shelling them for two months. Their news sources have always been limited. There is a free newspaper published by a Ukrainian oligarch. My recollection is that it is Kholomoisky, and the paper is called Vesti.  Please correct me if I'm wrong on either. Aside from that, there is Russian radio and television. At any rate, the news they received has always been shaped by Russians and oligarchs.

Natalia has been active in both Lviv and Kyiv taking care of IDPs - internally displaced people. She says she is amazed at how many of them have been successfully brainwashed and blame the Ukrainians for having started the war and destroying Mariupol. It is difficult to help people who refuse to see the reality of the situation.

This echoes what I heard after the war in 2014. Many of the refugees from the Donbass did not treat the handouts and free apartments they were provided in Western Ukraine with much respect. They believed the propaganda that they had been fed to the effect that the Western Ukrainians were the cause of the problem in the first place. My friend Petro’s parents offered a rental apartment in Lviv only to have it trashed.

I repeated what I had come to believe, that it had been the Ukrainian people themselves who rose up against the Russians in 2014. The military, intelligence agencies, and entire government had been so thoroughly shot through with Russian agents that it was not of much use in resisting the annexation of Crimea or the establishment of the People's republics.

I was surprised to hear that although they agreed that Yanukovych had done nothing to prevent these people from infiltrating the government institutions, and had himself weakened the military by selling and stealing military hardware, others in the government were also guilty. Especially Yulia Timushenko, the iconic figure whose head in photographs is always crowned in a blonde braid, who served as prime minister for a stretch. She made her fortune in the oil and gas business, and the assembled company agreed that she had made disastrous concessions to Russia to enrich herself. She is conspicuously invisible in 2022.

People expressed the opinion that Kherson and other cities in the south had surrendered to the Russians more quickly than was necessary. In one particular, they said that the road leading from Crimea to Kherson had been mined in 2014 to resist a Russian invasion. Ukrainian politicians had somehow decided only a couple of years ago to remove those mines, which facilitated this year's invasion.

I heard the opinion that Putin expected the war to be over in three days because he had so richly bribed so many high-ranking people in Ukraine. Having accepted his bribes, some of them were ready to accept the Russians. Many more simply took the money and told Putin what he wanted to hear.

That was the scuttlebutt around the luncheon table. I was content listen. How much of it is true I don't know, but I will venture that it is an accurate expression of people's feelings about their own government. Surprisingly, I do not think that the name Zelensky came up once. I expect we will get together next week and I will hear more.

The Epoch Times has a good article on where we stand with Covid at the moment. As the pandemic, whatever it amounted to, winds down more and more people are getting a good measure of the relative threats posed by the virus itself, the vaccines, and the draconian measures taken in the name of public health. We now have some perspective on the situation. We are coming to appreciate the short and long-term dangers posed by the disease. What is coming out more slowly are the dangers posed by the steps taken worldwide by the medical authorities to control it.

That's the news from Lake WeBeGone, where the strong man will be delivering a speech today on The Uniqueness of Western Civilization, a book he committed to review about four years ago.  The good-looking woman is spending much of her time in the garden as the kids play on the lawn, and Nadia is spending more time than anybody with granddaughter Marianna. The smile on her face absolutely belies the complaints that she utters from time to time. She is a proper Ukrainian grandmother doing what she was born to do.

Graham