The Long War #5
ODESA—I recently spent a day near the frontline in southern Ukraine with employees from Ukraine’s postal service, following the drivers through military checkpoints, and talking with the lovely ladies manning the post offices in the villages. Ukrposhta, Ukraine’s state postal service, does not just deliver packages (though I was told that those packages became heavier and more numerous since the war began). They also bring food, which the post offices then sell at subsidized prices, to villages where shops have often closed because of the war. They, most importantly, bring literal bags of cash for isolated locals who have no other way of getting their pension (sidenote: if you’re an editor and find this interesting—and it definitely is—feel free to reach out, I’d love to write a full piece about it).
It is a dangerous job, taking the drivers on dirt roads sometimes no more than a handful of kilometers from the frontline. The 2-cars convoy I was following that day ended up in Bereznehuvate, a small town about 20 kilometers from the Russian positions that was shelled a few hours after we left (and then again on August 14).
So why do that? On roads now almost exclusively used by either military vehicles or humanitarian workers, the white and yellow cars of Ukrposhta are one of the few remaining touches of normalcy. It still operates there as a way to prevent these villages and their inhabitants from being completely cut off from the rest of the country, from becoming nothing but a warzone. The burlap bags of cash stamped with the words “National Bank of Ukraine” that Ukrposhta cars carry to these villages also represent a lifeline for thousands of isolated locals and, I’d argue, a signal from the Ukrainian authorities in a country where pension payments are a big deal.
But it’s also a very poorly-paid job, around 200€ a month for the drivers, at a time of rampant inflation and increasing economic uncertainty. The drivers I talked to that day readily acknowledged the importance of their job, just like they openly admitted they were doing it because there was nowhere else to work. This wasn’t false modesty or a figure of speech either: 80% of Mykolaiv inhabitants lost their jobs, according to the city mayor, and there is little hope that the situation will get any better as the war grinds on and winter approaches. Hearing this, it’s hard not to wonder how long can a country in this situation hold on. Hard also not to think that the less flashy financial aid that will allow Kyiv to keep paying its workers and keep the economy afloat might become just as important (if not more) as weapons.
Something to read
🏥 (Wall Street Journal) War Thrust This Ukrainian Psychiatric Hospital Onto the Front Lines
🚗 (Reuters Institute) As Putin’s troops attack Donbas, local journalists keep reporting on life and death
🎤 (CNN) A three-week drive around Ukraine's front lines taught me this: The tide of the war is unlikely to turn any time soon (Nic Robertson provides an excellent, sobering, on-the-ground assessment of the war that matches closely with what I’ve seen in the frontline areas. His emphasis on the sheer emptiness of a significant chunk of the 1,000 kilometers-long frontline is I think an underreported but crucial point)
🐎 (Histories) 'Jerusalem of the North', 1835 - An American explorer in Kyiv (This piece was published by the “Histories” newsletter the day after Russia began its invasion of Ukraine, but I only found out about it a few days ago. It’s a fascinating description of Kyiv as seen in 1835 by American explorer, diplomat and writer John Lloyd Stephens. Back then it was apparently a city that did not “possess any such attraction as to put in peril the faith and duties of husbands”.)
👷 (openDemocracy) Ukraine could abandon key labour principle as part of EU drive (The idea that the war has put internal politics on pause is, of course, wrong, and the Ukrainian government is moving forward with policies that are worrying Ukrainian unions. This has been for several years a blind spot of Ukrainian politics, where the focus on vaguely-defined “Western reforms” led to a string of neoliberal policies that would probably be widely criticized in many Western countries).
✔️ (Valery Pekar / in Ukrainian) Mapping changes in Ukraine over the last 100 days (Apparently a recap of a conference held by the university Kyiv-Mohyla and the Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv, this piece lists more than 100 changes that the participants believe happened in the country since the beginning of the war. It’s a bit of a messy list, but here are some points I found noteworthy (brace for awkward Google translation):
Reduction of digital transparency in state bodies (closing of registers, etc.); Legitimation of “manual control” by state authorities; Emergence of the “twice internally displaced persons” (2014 and now) phenomenon; Increase of the population’s territorial mobility, with large meetings of Ukrainians from different places taking place; Legitimization of the idea of collective responsibility in society (primarily towards Russians, but not only); Two latent, parallel processes can be observed: an authoritarian tendency with the strengthening of the role of the central government, and a more chaotic tendency, with diversification and networking from below. These two modes of existence of society coexist and are currently in unstable equilibrium; In society, old dividing lines have become dulled, but new ones have appeared: between those who fought and those who did not fight, between those who left and those who stayed, between those who perceive the war empathically and those who closed themselves from the war, etc.).
Something to see
Something to listen to
Some Soviet-Ukrainian funk from the 1970s and 1980s, because why not?