@JoseB: I am so sorry. What a horrible situation.
And to the OP: I agree with others here that it’s best for you to just stay quiet and wait for your friends to make the next contact, if they ever do.
My sympathies; that situation sounds terrifying.
Wow JoseB! So I assume she can’t leave, even with her Spanish passport? Thst sucks.
The problem is (1) no direct flights between Russia and Europe, (2) whether Russia will close its borders anyway.
Option (A) (direct flights) is not available. Option (B) would be to get out via some third country airline that is not yet blocked from the respective airspace; whether that is practicable is another question. Option (C) would be to try and cross by land a EU border, which would have to be either the Baltics or Finland, and from there west.
I have no idea what would be practicable, and how much longer Russia’s borders will remain crossable (even with a reasonably good passport like the Spanish one).
Also I have no idea what kind of expenses would have to be incurred, and whether it will be doable. I have no idea whether I would be able to help materially in that case.
Everything is extremely shitty.
The rather obvious advice would be to talk about anything other than politics. But right now, what else is there to talk about? Is a puzzlement.
Flights from A to B via C is a standard thing, you have to check that there are flights/seats available though. I would be at least as worried about whether anyone is going to be issued exit visas; they have traditionally been a problem, with some people waiting over a decade for a USSR exit visa.
As of a few days back, there was flights from Russia to Turkey and of course from Turkey to a lot of places. AFAIK there still is.
Also the train running between St. Petersburg and Helsinki.
is there any land transport from Russia to Poland?
@JoseB , so sorry to hear that your daughter’s in this situation.
With headlines like this, it might be best to err on the side of caution:
To give you some idea of what Russians believe is going on, see this BBC News article about a 25-year-old woman in Kharkiv named Oleksandra who tried to tell her mother in Moscow what is going on.
“I didn’t want to scare my parents, but I started telling them directly that civilians and children are dying,” she says.
“But even though they worry about me, they still say it probably happens only by accident, that the Russian army would never target civilians. That it’s Ukrainians who’re killing their own people.”
(BTW the article has an amusing photo of one of Oleksandra’s dogs.)
I don’t believe Russia and Poland share a border unless you are already in Kaliningrad. The Moscow–Paris express runs through Poland, though. But who knows how often that train is running right now (I just tried online and it said to talk to a human about getting tickets).
yes, you’d have to go through Belorus. Just wondered if that could be an option
Googling, it appears that Emirates is still flying to Moscow. And I suspect that flights to China or India might also still be available.
Similar story from CBC:
To be honest, these don’t sound that different from conversations I’ve had wit Americans when I was home from Iraq.
So, my friend did reach out to me. He asked for pics, which I sent. While no mention of the Ukraine conflict, he basically referred to it by stating that it was unlikely that we’d ever meet on either of our continents again, and that we should meet up again in another part of the world. I wanted to ask about his parents, but left it alone.