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Ukrainian war - have you been affected?

Mrs Frank's five year old cousin in St Petersburg knows what's going on with this war so Putin's media blackout is clearly patchy at best.

e2a: Mrs Frank doesn't know if or when she'll ever be able to go back to see her family. Even having posted on social media about opposing Putin and this stupid war would put her at risk with the current regime in place over there. Life for ordinary Russians seems to be turning to shit at an alarming rate.
 
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Parents of the brother and sister staying at my parents' place in Slovakia have now reached the house - they can't convert any hrivnia cash but the agent who looks after the house is going to help them all open Slovak accounts tomorrow so they can transfer over their money. One of the younger people has an 8 year old who can start going a local school tomorrow - language barrier shouldn't be too bad as my mum tells me Ukranian is relatively close to Slovak.
 
Paid for another 5 lessons, said that if the internet gets shut off to consider it a gift. We'll see in 3 months :(
 
Not personal to me really, but in and out of Prague Hlavní Nádraží station today. The Czech authorities and ČD seem to have a pretty good operation for helping Ukrainian arrivals, but it's still heartbreaking to see, and especially poignant that they arrive and are dealt with on the platform near to the Kindertransport statue.
 
Spoke again to our developer in Lviv, who said a few really interesting things.

The authorities want him to continue working for us and not fight yet as his economic contribution is much more important than what he could do on the battlefield right now.

One of his neighbours is a veteran of the Donbass war - he's an important commander at the front - he recently came back with shrapnel in his head - doc took the shrapnel out and sent him back after a couple of days - will to fight is high.

He showed me the app on his phone that they use for air raid alerts. In the beginning, when he was in Kyiv, he slept in his bath when an alarm went off as they have been told to keep two walls and some other cover between them and the exterior.

We talked a bit about Russia and he said one thing that I thought was very telling indeed. We were discussing memories of WW2 and how that is affecting behaviour now and he said that when the rest of the world looks at WW2 they say "never again" but when Russia looks at WW2 they say "let's do it again".

That's not the whole conflict there but it explains a huge amount of it, and perhaps bits and pieces that are not so obvious in the West.
 
Plumdaff said:
Not in Ukraine but Russia, a work colleague has a brother in Moscow who is trying and failing to leave. Made even harder as even if he manages it, can his Russian wife leave, and will she want to leave her elderly parents, who wouldn't leave if they could. They are very worried and trying to get plane tickets to them as there's no way there atm of getting hold of that amount of money.

I don't know why, but beyond all the bombing it was a video of the panic at Kyiv train station that snapped something in me. It's tragic and awful and you're powerless.
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Work colleague's brother decided to stay. His life is there, all their assets are in roubles, and the British government isn't exactly helpful and welcoming in these circumstances. He's got a burner phone he's using to text that he's OK once a week. He's too concerned about being a potential target as an expat to do or say any more.
 
Bit of good news for the thread. The Ukrainian woman my mum has been speaking to for a few weeks (through some church project to find places for refugees to stay, I think) just got her visa application approved. She should get here this weekend.
 
Yesterday we went to meet two Ukrainian families who have gone to stay with my dad's mate in Cornwall. They're keen to get started on the process to extend their six months visas as they have no idea how long it will take. Mrs Frank is going to help them with that hopefully.

Apparently you don't get a family visa, each individual needs to apply for themselves. The youngest kid is two years old ffs :mad:
 
frogwoman said:
2 people I know out there including a mate I'd known since 2009 seem to have gone full Z :(
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As I've said in another thread, this shouldn't come as any surprise. I knew people who were liberals during Perestroika, purely, in hindsight, because they saw opportunities, but full-on nationalists after Yeltsin shut down and then bombed his own parliament, to the, generally speaking, applause of the west. Russians, again generally speaking, have their eye on all possible eventualities.

We have to remember that it is a country like no other, although Mrs RD, who lived and worked in Kenya in the 1980s, sees some similarities in terms of how people tend to position themselves politically and socially.
 
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