It’s been a year since the beginning of the latest and most open phase of the war in Ukraine. How has your life changed, if at all, by the war? Most people here don’t live in Ukraine or Russia, and so won’t have firsthand experience of the hostilities, but even if you’ve been affected in a minor or incidental way, feel free to share. This thread isn’t a contest to see who’s personally suffered most.
I suppose I can start with a few reports of my own:
I work in academia in Western Europe, and have plenty of Ukrainian and Russian colleagues and collaborators, some of whom live in their home countries and some of whom live abroad. Within a few weeks of the invasion, several colleagues in Russia wrote to me asking if I could offer them (and their students and postdocs) jobs. They said the situation in Russia was “really bad” and they were desperate to leave. I wasn’t hiring at the time, and didn’t know anyone else who was, but was happy to learn that two of them quickly managed to find positions at German universities.
Other Russian colleagues of mine, with whom I was jointly applying for research funding under an international cooperation program, wrote to me to say that they were against the war but were remaining in Russia. The program was suspended indefinitely by the local funding agency, thus torpedoing our application. (Too bad, as I was expecting it to pay my salary for the next three or four years.)
At the time of last year’s invasion, I was just finishing the first month of a six-month intensive Russian language course, partly in anticipation of this grant application being accepted. Once the war started, our teacher (a Russian citizen) started deviating from the curriculum in order to pontificate about how pleased she was that Russia was finally slaughtering all the Ukrainian Nazis. Quite apart from these unwelcome diversions, she was a thoroughly incompetent language teacher. My fellow students and I complained to the language school and got assigned to a different teacher.
The new teacher was also a Russian citizen but didn’t inject any politics into the classroom. We discovered her stance on Ukraine only when we got to the unit on Russian geography; she handed out a political map of Russia on which Crimea was absent, and when we queried her about this, she said she didn’t believe that Crimea was part of Russia.
My classmates and I were actually quite fortunate to have started the courses before the war. At the time, Russian was not a popular foreign language, and so there were only ever two or three of us in the class. But starting in March, the demand here for Russian-language competence skyrocketed due to the government and charities needing to urgently help thousands of Ukrainian refugees. (Nearly all Ukrainians can speak or at least understand Russian, and there are plenty of Russian language teachers here but almost no Ukrainian language teachers.) Soon the language school had half a dozen fully booked introductory Russian language classes; had we joined those we wouldn’t have gotten nearly the same level of personal attention.
Speaking of refugees, efforts to help them were very much in evidence in 2022. There were big signs at all major train and subway stations directing refugees to the processing centre. I walked past the centre myself once while on a business errand and saw the long lines of newly arrived people, some with cars but others on foot and carrying no more than a suitcase or two. The signs were taken down a couple months ago, as I suppose the exodus is largely over. I’ve spoken at length with several refugees. One of them is a university student who is continuing to attend classes remotely. Another one, the student’s mother, is married to a man who, like most others his age, was drafted into the Ukrainian army. She’s occasionally gone back (by bus) to visit him on leave.
A friend of mine is Ukrainian and has often spoken to me negatively about the war. Interestingly, her non-Ukrainian husband is even more resentful towards the Russians than she is. Like many Ukrainians, she prefers speaking Russian; she uses Russian exclusively with her daughter and had enrolled her in a local Russian-language preschool program. At her husband’s insistence, she cancelled the preschool registration and enrolled her daughter in a new Ukrainian-language preschool instead. I was a bit concerned for the kid, since she’s only four years old and Ukrainian will already be her fourth language. (I’ve since heard that so many Russian-speaking Ukrainians enrolled at this Ukrainian school that the teachers just end up speaking Russian to the kids anyway.)
The war’s biggest effect on my life has been a new family member, pictured below. As soon as the war started, animal shelters in Ukraine found themselves without the staff and resources to operate. Volunteers started loading the animals into their cars, driving them out of the country, and then giving them all away before going back for more. In May we got in touch with one such volunteer over the Internet and offered to adopt a cat. We ended up with Xenia, a skinny, worm-infested kitten just a few weeks old. We got her dewormed and vaccinated, and it was only a few days before she adjusted to her new home. She took almost immediately to our two ferrets, learning right away that they were much more fun to play with than her inanimate cat toys.
I know how to pronounce Kyiv now. Along with any number of places I was unaware of the existence of, like Mariupol. There’s a Ukrainian flag nailed to the side of my barn (one of many I see driving about; I’m in New England). I’ve contributed to donation drives. I have a considerably better understanding of the politics of Eastern Europe and Russia than before the invasion.
Various shortages attributed to the war have not affected me.
Basically not at all. I supposed some video games I might have played are understandably delayed because the studios were in Ukraine. How incredibly minor that is is just testament to how little I feel personally impacted.
The war is likely a cause, directly or indirectly, for a lot of high food prices, since Ukraine was a major agricultural producer. That one affects almost everyone.
It hasn’t affected my life circumstances directly, but it has caused me to completely re-evaluate everything I thought I knew about Ukraine, Russia, and Russia’s sphere of influence. I was surprised to realize how much of my own thinking had been influenced by Russian propaganda that was repeated by the Western world as fact. It just really changed my understanding of international relations, and of 20th century history (and later).
Basically I realized I didn’t know shit, and now I know maybe 5% better than I did before.
I don’t have any personal connection to either country. Most of the impact on me that I can identify has been a lot of anxiety about WWIII, Putin rattling his nukes, etc.
Oh, I’d completely forgotten about the prices. The biggest hit to us has been our gas and electricity prices, which have gone up by a factor of 4 or 5.
No. Given that Xenia was only a few weeks old and wormy, she probably didn’t have any previous owners but was rather picked up from the street as a feral cat. I suppose it’s possible that she did have owners from whom she was separated in fighting or bombing, but if so, they hadn’t tattooed or microchipped her.
The game I was playing heavily had its main studio in St. Petersburg. I stopped playing in March. They dropped that studio in April and opened/founded others in Belgrade and Warsaw but I just haven’t picked it up again.
The war has had no effect on me except for my donating of a lot of supplies to a Ukrainian acquaintance who was doing dozens of ferry flights between NYC and Warsaw (tourniquets, food, chest seals, winter gear, etc.) I also wrote a letter in Ukrainian that got posted on a Ukrainian website (hope my Google Translate didn’t make any embarrassing grammar errors.) So, aside from voluntary stuff, it hasn’t affected me at all.
Ah. I had thought she probably wasn’t feral because of being almost immediately so comfortable with being held, but I had misjudged her age – at only a few weeks old she would have tamed very fast. And if there are any humans missing her, it seems, as you say, impossible to tell.
– I’ve been directly affected, if at all, only by price changes; and I think price changes in the USA are being affected also by a number of other factors. I really wish I had enough money to donate. I have been reading a good deal about the situation, so I suppose I’m somewhat affected by increased knowledge base and time spent, but that probably came from learning about something going on somewhere else in the world.
Inflation affects everyone and no doubt the whole world is suffering from inflation which is higher due to this war pushing up oil, gas and food prices.
I’ve just had to renew my mortgage and my monthly repayments are about to go up by 20%.
My kid used to study at and was a peer tutor at the Russian School of Mathematics. She does neither now as she couldn’t support the owners “both sides” crap about the war.
Unfortunately the largest part of their clientele are Chinese- and Indian-American who seem perfectly happy with the invasion. So they seem to be doing just fine.
It’s made me sad because of all the people being killed. If it were confined to military only and those folks volunteered, then let them have at it. But that is hardly the case.
It’s also made me very aware of how little I can trust the press. The AP, whom I have always respected, seems to have quite an agenda now. So every day I look at the them, the NY Times, the Wash Post, the BBC, and then at the Russian Times, which is quite a paper! Especially the comments.
After all that I try and figure out what is really happening. It’s impossible. It just generates fear from all the references to nuclear war, and I don’t trust either side to give me a factual report. Like Voltaire, it’s better if I stick to tending my own garden because I have zero control over these events. I hope things work out, and I’m going to look for ways to donate money or materials to the Ukranians.
Here’s a weirdly specific example - we don’t get through a lot of mustard, but when I have mustard I want French mustard - as in, I’m buying it in France (we vacation there regularly). You can get an amazing variety of excellent mustards in France - er, did I say “can”? You used to be able to. It turns out that almost all French mustards are made with Ukrainian mustard seeds. You just couldn’t get mustard in France - there would be a polite sign saying one jar per household but as the shelves were empty - I mean completely - the sign was irrelevant.
Last trip - last September - I got lucky and found a jar (!); and in a tourist ship in Carnac we found some mustard with samphire and got some of that as well.
Not sure if the supply chains have been successfully juggled yet.
I’m not sure I have been affected directly. Given the opaque nature of the market, I’m not even sure if I can blame the war in Ukraine for the rising costs of good. I suppose the only want I’ve been affected personally is learning which of the people I know seem to support Russia. It’s weird, I grew up with the Soviet Union as the enemy, and it’s so odd hearing Americans supporting Russia and calling for Ukrainians to surrender, and even odder still from some of my relatives.
