In the Shadow of Vladimir Putin’s Mother

The Russians are subjecting Ukrainians to the same hell the Nazis subjected to Leningraders—including the Russian president's family.


David Wood
COMMON SENSE

Maria Shelomova Putin and her son, Vladimir Vladimirovich, in 1958.

The images are eerily familiar.

Elderly women huddled against bitter cold picking their way through rubble spilling from the smoking ruins of a blackened apartment building. Stiffened bodies lying grotesquely askew on broken pavement. Household belongings strewn on the ground, backlit by roaring flames. Hollow-eyed children struggling from bomb shelters to line up for food, water.

This is not Ukraine today, but Leningrad under siege by the Wehrmacht during World War II. For 872 days, from 1941 to early 1944, Hitler’s Nazi forces sought to pummel into submission the city now known as St. Petersburg. But against the brutal German campaign to force them to their knees, the people of Leningrad held. Under vicious attack by aggressors to whom they had done no wrong, Leningraders were empowered by moral certainty. They were in the right, and they knew it.

The cost of their defiance is almost inconceivable. Buildings and homes, hospitals, schools and museums were smashed beyond recognition. Pleas to allow humanitarian relief to reach the city were rebuffed. Refugees fleeing along the one escape route were gunned down. During the first winter when the outside temperature fell to 40 degrees below zero Fahrenheit, 100,000 people a month died of hunger, disease and cold. Daily rations were three thin slices of bread adulterated with sawdust, if you could get them. When the siege was lifted, only 700,000 Leningraders of the city’s prewar population of 3.5 million remained there alive.

One of the survivors was the woman who would become Vladimir Putin’s mother.

Like thousands of other parents, Maria Shelomova Putin had sent her young son Viktor—the older brother Vladimir Putin would never know—to live in a children’s shelter while she scavenged for food. Viktor died there of diphtheria. Maria, weakened by lack of food, fainted near a pile of corpses and awakened just in time to avoid being dragged off to a mass grave.

Towards the end, Maria was too weak to walk. Her husband, Vladimir Spiridonovich Putin, was badly wounded at the front by a German grenade. But they endured. Seven years after the war ended, Maria and Vladimir had another son, Vladimir Vladimirovich. He grew up to be the president of Russia.

If Vladimir Putin didn’t experience the siege directly, he surely absorbed the gritty persona of the bare-knuckle survivor. Though much of his life is obscure, what he has allowed to emerge “is very much the mythology of a child of post-siege Leningrad, a mean, hungry, impoverished place that bred mean, hungry, voracious children,” writes author Masha Gessen. 

Indeed, Putin likes to portray himself as a thug. “I was a hooligan,” he proudly told officially sanctioned biographers in 2000. Referring to the Chechen guerillas Russia was then at war with, Putin said, in September 1999, three months before Boris Yeltsin made him president of Russia, “If we catch them in the toilet, we will rub them out in the outhouse.”




A guest post by
David Wood
Journalist and author covering war for 35 years, Pulitzer Prize in 2012 for a series on the Americans grievously wounded in war. Website: davidwood-journalist.com

Op-Ed: Climate research funded by fossil fuel profits discredits universities and hurts the planet

PICTURING ECOCIDE

A flare burns natural gas at an oil well on Aug. 26, 2021, in Watford City, N.D.
(Matthew Brown / Associated Press)

BY ILANA COHEN AND MICHAEL E. MANN

APRIL 3, 2022 

Last month, more than 500 leading academics, climate experts and university affiliates called for an end to the fossil fuel industry funding university climate research. The reason: Faced with the climate crisis, the academic community must play a leading role in developing a renewable-energy future. Brokering financial partnerships with polluters prevents universities from fulfilling that goal and conducting conflict-free research.

The movement to get large institutions to divest from fossil fuel companies has gained enormous steam. Harvard — the world’s richest university — major philanthropic organization the Ford Foundation and the European Union’s biggest pension fund, ABP, all made divestment commitments since last fall. Universities in the U.S. and the United Kingdom should build on that momentum and once again take a firm stand against oil and gas companies, which are blocking the transition to clean energy to protect their profits.

To do so, the schools should ban funding from the fossil fuel industry for research in areas where it has a clear financial stake and history of spreading misinformation: climate change as well as environmental and energy science and policy.


OPINION
Editorial: What’s better than a ban on Russian oil imports? Ending our dependence on fossil fuels
March 9, 2022

Despite the wealth of evidence showing that oil and gas drilling is responsible for most of the world’s destructive warming, the fossil fuel industry is ferociously fighting to keep its business model alive. It is lobbying against science-backed climate policy that would reduce the use of oil and gas; spreading misinformation, including climate science denial; and launching marketing campaigns — greenwashing — to suggest its business is based on sustainability even though it isn’t meaningfully reducing planet-warming emissions.

By funding academic research, especially around climate change, the fossil fuel industry diverts attention from these activities and their devastating consequences. University research partnerships allow these companies to misrepresent themselves as supporting the energy transition while actually doing what they can to slow it down.

Fossil fuel money also threatens academic independence. When funding comes from corporations with a fundamental conflict of interest, skewed research outcomes follow. That has been well documented in other industries including pharmaceuticals and tobacco. Common safeguards, such as having researchers self-report funding sources or having research institutions and publications publicly disclose their funding sources, often fail to mitigate the problem.

Yet such research partnerships funded by major oil companies abound. Take Stanford’s Global Climate & Energy Project, sponsored by Exxon Mobil and the world’s largest oil-field services company, Schlumberger; and MIT’s Energy Initiative, whose sponsors include Exxon, Chevron, Shell, Eni and ConocoPhillips. Cambridge University meanwhile hosts a Schlumberger research center.

Encore Theater at Wynn Las Vegas is a world-class entertainment venue that is home to legendary resident headliners.

Just as with divestment, it would be up to universities to decide what form the ban on fossil fuel funding would take. At a minimum, the ban should include funding for climate change, environmental and energy policy research from the world’s top 200 publicly traded coal, oil and gas companies and their subsidiaries. It should also include companies exploring for further fossil fuel reserves and investing in new fossil fuel supply projects, which ignore the International Energy Agency’s conclusion that we need to wean off fossil fuels to reach net-zero emissions by 2050.

And universities should additionally reject climate-related research funding from organizations, such as Koch Industries and the Sarah Scaife Foundation, that have funded or otherwise supported climate change denial.


OPINION
Second Opinion: Anti-apartheid divestment built a movement of people. That’s what the climate crisis needs
Feb. 13, 2022

It’s more crucial than ever that universities produce objective climate research and end the conflicts of interest posed by fossil fuel money.

The latest report from the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found that a failure to take rapid climate action globally will lead to catastrophic climate breakdown. This failure will undermine the possibility of a livable future and disproportionately harm the communities of color and poor communities most vulnerable to and least responsible for the climate crisis. Russia’s war on Ukraine has shaken the energy market by disrupting oil and gas imports, showing the instability of fossil fuels. It’s clear we need rapid, massive investment in renewable energy, and academic research has a vital role in informing this shift.

University administrations must also understand the grave disservice they do to the public by taking money that undermines academic independence. Even the mere perception of this independence being compromised is enough to threaten the credibility that universities bring to climate discourse. It limits their capacity for institutional climate action.

The funding ban we’re calling for is not unprecedented. Numerous public health and research institutions have rejected tobacco money because of the public health consequences of the industry’s products and its record of spreading disinformation about those effects. The fossil fuel industry is using the same disinformation tactics. How long will it take universities to reject the industry’s attack on higher education’s core values of rigorous research in the public interest?

Defenders of industry-academic partnerships might counter that at least some research proposals from fossil fuel companies are offered in good faith, and cash-strapped academia needs whatever funding it can get. But the industry cannot claim good faith in funding green research at schools while putting just a fraction of its own investments into renewable energy. And compromised research programs that prop up climate delay and denial are worse for the credibility of universities, and the security of our planet, than no programs at all.

Our universities can’t responsibly tackle the climate crisis unless and until they stop taking fossil fuel money for climate and energy-related research. Universities need to lead. This is their moment to choose between a just and sustainable world, or profit-driven fossil-fueled devastation.

Ilana Cohen is an organizer with Fossil Fuel Divest Harvard and Cambridge Climate Justice and a coordinator of the Fossil Free Research campaign. 

Michael E. Mann is a professor of atmospheric sciences and director of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State University. His latest book is “The New Climate War: The Fight to Take Back Our Planet.”

UN Seabed-Mining Watchdog Doing Business “Behind Closed Doors”

Conservationists consider deep-sea extraction a “scientific and political minefield.”


MICHAEL MECHANIC

Senior Editor

Mother Jones

A deep sea mining ship docked in Rotterdam, the Netherlands.

Charles M. Vella/SOPA Images via ZUMA Press

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The UN-affiliated organization that oversees deep-sea mining, a controversial new industry, has been accused of failings of transparency after an independent body responsible for reporting on negotiations was kicked out.

The International Seabed Authority is meeting this week at its council headquarters in Kingston, Jamaica, to develop regulations for the fledgling industry. But it emerged this week that Earth Negotiations Bulletin (ENB), a division of the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD), which has covered previous ISA negotiations, had not had its contract renewed.

While the ISA negotiations are filmed live via webcam, the absence of ENB—which would have created a permanent independent record of proceedings—was described as a “huge loss” for stakeholders.

Some states, including Germany, are also concerned that the ISA is developing its mining standards and guidelines behind closed doors, and that current knowledge of deep-sea ecosystems and the potential effects of mining on the marine environment are insufficient to allow it to go ahead.Scientists warn the damage from mining various metals from the sea floor would be “dangerous,” “reckless,” and “irreversible.”

Scientists have warned that the damage to ecosystems from mining nickel, cobalt and other metals on the deep-seabed would be “dangerous,” “reckless,” and “irreversible.” One estimate suggests that 90 percent of the deep-sea species that researchers encounter are new to science.

As opposition to deep-sea mining grows, the ISA is facing resistance over its rush to develop a roadmap to be adopted before July 9, 2023. The plan was prompted in June last year, when the island of Nauru informed the ISA of its intention to start mining the seabed in two years’ time, via a subsidiary of a Canadian firm, The Metals Company (TMC, until recently known as DeepGreen Metals). This invoked an obscure clause of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, which said the ISA must finalize regulations within two years of such an announcement.

Google, BMW, Volvo, and Samsung SDI, a battery subsidiary of the electronics firm, have joined a World Wildlife Fund call for a moratorium on mining the deep sea, which will affect the potential market for deep-sea minerals used for car and smartphone batteries.

The ISA said ENB’s contract was not renewed due to budget cuts. The IISD, meanwhile, said it was now fundraising to be able to cover the next round of negotiations in July. “Transparency of the talks are important, especially for small islands and developing countries who can’t always attend,” said the IISD’s Matthew TenBruggencate.

Germany and environmentalists also expressed concern over a lack of transparency by the ISA’s legal and technical commission (LTC), a body charged with developing standards and guidelines for the mining code, which meets behind closed doors.

The LTC comprises 30 members. A fifth of them work for contractors for deep-sea mining companies.

Germany said the mining code “still lacked binding and measurable normative requirements” for marine protection.

In its opening remarks on the ISA’s website, Germany highlighted the absence of stakeholders’ comments, or marked-up changes in the LTC’s draft standards and guidelines document. “In order to be transparent and allow for a proper debate, a mark-up document as provided by the facilitator regarding the draft regulation would be very helpful for our negotiations,” it said. “Therefore, we suggest that the council request such a document.”

Germany also said the mining code “still lacked binding and measurable normative requirements” for marine protection. It argued that, because the current standards, guidelines and regulations do not yet contain “specific environmental minimal requirements” for measurable pollution, sediment plumes, biodiversity, and noise and light impacts, the code as it stands would not regulate future mining effectively.

“The current state of knowledge is, in our view, insufficient to proceed to exploiting mineral resources,” it said.

It supported the EU’s formal position that marine minerals “cannot be exploited before the effects of deep-sea mining on the marine environment, biodiversity and human activities have been sufficiently researched, the risks are understood and technologies and operational practices are able to demonstrate that the environment is not seriously harmed, in line with the precautionary principle.”

Other states, including Belgium, the Netherlands, Costa Rica and Chile, adopted similarly precautionary approaches, highlighting the gulf in scientific knowledge of the deep sea. On the other hand the UK, which is no longer part of the EU, has been pushing ahead for rapid development of regulations, according to observers.

The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs said the UK government was engaging in ISA negotiations to ensure that high environmental standards were adopted in deep-sea mining regulations. “Any ongoing conversations in support of this should not be interpreted as support for deep-sea mining,” a spokesperson said.

Duncan Currie, an international lawyer with the Deep Sea Conservation Coalition, which is tracking the negotiations, said he was “very concerned” by the various failures of transparency. “There is no transparency of the LTC, who meet behind closed doors. It sounds like an innocuous body, but it is in essence the decision-making body within the ISA.”

Currie wants to see a moratorium on deep-sea mining, akin to that set up by the Antarctic protocol. “The whole area of deep-sea mining is a scientific and political minefield. There should be a moratorium put in place.”

Also missing from the proposed standards and guidelines was the possibility not to continue with mining.

Greenpeace, an observer at the talks, called for reform of the ISA’s secretariat, which it accused of bias towards allowing mining to take place, to the detriment of the environment.

“There are a herd of elephants in the room,” said Arlo Hemphill, an oceans campaigner for Greenpeace USA. “There’s not enough time to get it right, and there is not the science to get it right.”

The ISA secretariat was approached for comment but did not respond.

SOMALIA VS SOMALILAND

Why is the American right waging a stealth neocolonial assault on Somalia?

In the 19th century, my homeland was carved up by imperialists. Now that's in danger of happening all over again

COMMENTARY
By MOHAMOUD GAILDON

SALON
PUBLISHED APRIL 3, 2022 

Muse Bihi Abdi, presidential candidate for the ruling Kulmiye Party, after casting his vote during the 2017 presidential election in the self-proclaimed state of Somaliland. (AFP via Getty Images)

On March 14, the conservative Heritage Foundation played host to the president of Somaliland, a breakaway region of Somalia "whose self-declared independence ... is not internationally recognized," in the words of a Freedom House report. Three days later, three U.S. senators, Jim Risch, R-Idaho, Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., and Mike Rounds, R-S.D., introduced a bill titled the Somaliland Partnership Act. Their bill paints a rosy picture of Somaliland and calls for much closer U.S. engagement with it. This bill relies on a combination of faulty and incomplete information. (The Freedom House report cited above says that Somaliland "has seen a consistent erosion of political rights and civic space," with minority clans subject to "political and economic marginalization" and a serious social problem of violence against women.) More concerning, however, is that if this bill is passed it will take Somalia, a poor country already mired in much turmoil, down an even more perilous path.

In a nutshell, a partnership with the U.S., as envisioned in this legislation, would provide Somaliland with the financial and military wherewithal it needs to make separation from Somalia a fait accompli. It would also lend Somaliland a mantle of legitimacy. The persistent claim by the leaders of Somaliland that it is a de facto country in full control of its "territory" is not true: The two communities through whose territory the presumed border of separation runs are staunchly against Somaliland's secession. Without the consent of these two communities (the Warsengeli and Dhulbahante tribes), Somaliland's secession cannot be a reality on the ground, as Risch's bill claims it already is. And since no consent is forthcoming from these two communities, violence and conquest are Somaliland's only option. Why would the U.S. involve itself in such a combustible mix?

The answer is given here: "Recognizing Somaliland's independence would enable the U.S. to hedge against further deterioration of its position in Djibouti, which is under Chinese sway," writes Joshua Meservey of the Heritage Foundation. Similarly, Risch's rationale for his bill stresses the importance of Somaliland's "geographic location in the Horn of Africa and next to the Gulf of Aden." So the Heritage Foundation and several U.S. senators have decided to bypass Somalia's legal authority and deal with a secessionist entity, without regard to what might follow, for what they perceive as America's strategic interests.

RELATED: Africa and the Ukraine war: Cold War hangover is keeping many African nations neutral

To me, this seems a flashback to a series of decades-long events related to me, as a child, by my father and other elders of my family. I grew up in a house steeped in the history of the conflict with Britain as it barged into our land and ruled our people. I am a great-grandson of Sultan Muhammad Mahmud Ali (nicknamed Awl), the sultan of the Warsangeli tribe, who in 1886 entered into a "protection treaty" with the British government, one of six such treaties with Somali tribes that formed what was called the Somaliland British Protectorate, which existed until 1960.

In colonial days, foreign men drew lines on paper to divide the Somali people without their knowledge. Thanks to conservatives in Washington, today it's happening again.

Back then, foreign men drew lines on paper to divide Somalis without their knowledge. Today, men in Washington — and they are once again almost all men — are working to decide the fate of Somalis as one aspect of global competition with China. Those like Risch and the Heritage Foundation are throwbacks to colonial times, hellbent on reordering Africa as they see fit. For them, Somalia is fair game, a guinea pig, something to be altered with the stroke of a pen. If their intentions were sincere, they would be interested in talking to all sides of this particular conflict and they would not have so smugly ignored the government of the Federal Republic of Somalia. It is no secret that government is frail and unstable, but that is not a good reason for undermining it still further.

In American right-wingers eager to exert power in the Horn of Africa, President Muse Bihi Abdi of Somaliland has finally found dancing partners in his quest to open a wound that healed long ago. The border he wants to revive in order to secede from Somalia carries a history of humiliation and pain, not suffered by him or his tribe but rather by the tribes in the east of what he now likes to call Somaliland.

When the original Somaliland protectorate voluntarily united with Somalia in 1960 and the colonial border between them was erased, it was a great moment. Communities torn apart for decades were finally free to move and mix in the vast land of our ancestors. It is that very border that Bihi and his allies now want to revive, with the comforting knowledge that neither they nor their tribesmen will feel the knife's edge of separation if things go their way. Neither Risch nor the Heritage Foundation has ever spoken to those whose lives or families would once again be torn asunder. In the tradition of long-ago colonial administrators, they are scribbling words on paper in cozy offices thousands of miles away from the people whose fate they are deciding.

Somaliland's narrative of independence is based on a deceptive mix of truths, half-truths and outright lies that it has been unable to sell to the Somali people, the African Union or anyone else in the world except — again, for political reasons — the would-be independent island of Taiwan. It's no wonder that Bihi has found a receptive ear and a helping hand in the Heritage Foundation, known for climate-change denialism, efforts to suppress the votes of minorities in the U.S., and fueling the moral panic over "critical race theory." It is deeply unfortunate to see the self-described leaders of Somaliland seeking validation from forces in the United States aligned with a racist and neocolonialist agenda. But there's not much room for pity when the fate of so many poor Somalis hangs in the balance. There's only room for good people to stand up and tell the American right: Hands off Somalia.

Read more on U.S. foreign policy and Africa:
Why doesn't the Arab world break with Putin? Consider Sudan's example
"There is no generic Africa": Chiwetel Ejiofor fell in love with Malawi for his directorial debut
Trump goes full white supremacy with South Africa tweet: Does he want a "race war"?

MOHAMOUD GAILDON
Mohamoud Gaildon is a Somali-American medical physicist. He has worked in a number of major hospitals including Memorial Sloan-Kettering, Beth Israel and Mount Sinai in New York City. He is now a senior medical physicist at St. Francis Medical Center in Peoria, Illinois, and is also the author of a novel, "The Yibir of Las Burgabo."MORE FROM MOHAMOUD GAILDON

Viktor Orbán’s New “Pro-Refugee” Stance Is Opportunistic — and Still Racist

Ahead of today’s Hungarian election, Viktor Orbán has boasted of his solidarity with Ukrainian refugees. The anti-immigrant premier has folded to public sympathy for Ukrainians — but the welcome doesn’t extend to everyone fleeing war.

Refugees from Ukraine waiting to disembark at Hungary’s Záhony train station. 

(Courtesy of author)

BY ERIN O’BRIEN
JACOBIN
04.03.2022

On March 3, a week after Russia invaded Ukraine, Hungarian premier Viktor Orbán traveled to his country’s frontier with Ukraine to meet arriving refugees. In the small border town of Beregsurány, he visited makeshift refugee camps and shook hands with Ukrainians fleeing the war, as well as the Hungarians helping them.

“Nobody will be left uncared for,” Orbán told the gathered journalists.

He praised volunteers’ work and said Hungary would help to both resettle Ukrainian refugees and return home those from “third countries” such as India and Nigeria — whether they wanted to go or not.

Hungary has, up till now, been anything but a haven for refugees. As the leader of the ultraconservative Fidesz party, leading the government since 2010, Orbán has overseen a domestic policy that disparages refugees and migrants, employing racist epithets and stereotypes to justify their exclusion. Orbán and Hungarian authorities have been especially brutal toward the mostly Muslim migrants arriving in the aftermath of wars in Syria and Afghanistan — repeatedly calling them “invaders” and “a poison.”

Just weeks before Orbán shook hands with Ukrainians fleeing war, refugees from Morocco and Afghanistan were illegally beaten and pushed back from the Hungarian-Serbian border while trying to enter Europe via the Balkan route. Orbán has also overseen the construction of a razor-wire fence along that same border — finding much to agree on with Donald Trump and his call for a border wall.

Orbán’s policy on Ukraine might thus be read as a seismic policy shift. However, when analyzed in the context of his former policy and today’s general election, it becomes clear that this is a continuation of his previous racist policy — while also trying to distract from his ties to Vladimir Putin.
Racist Response

As prime minister, Orbán has overseen one of the most brutal and racist responses to Europe’s “refugee crisis.” At the height of the conflict in Syria and Iraq in 2015, refugees came to Europe from those countries in unprecedented numbers. An estimated 1 million people took the Balkan route into Western Europe through Turkey, where most ended up staying. Some continued on dangerous routes to Bulgaria or Greece, and finally into Eastern Europe through countries like Hungary.Just weeks before Orbán shook hands with Ukrainians fleeing war, refugees from Morocco and Afghanistan were illegally beaten and pushed back from the border.

Orbán solidified his rule, and the power of his Fidesz party, through the vilification of these migrants. In 2015, Hungary built a razor-wire fence along its border with Serbia, and images of migrants living in squalid conditions in Hungarian refugee camps circulated widely on social media. Authorities were even filmed throwing food at migrants, as if into a pen.

These real examples of abuse were coupled with equally abusive rhetoric and propaganda. In the lead-up to a referendum on immigration in 2016, posters plastered around Budapest linked migrants to the Paris terror attacks and violence against women. One posted in the capital superimposed a stop sign over an image of a crowd of non-white men and boys.

“Did you know that since the start of the immigration crisis, harassment of women has increased in Europe?” another government poster read.


Also in 2016, his government unilaterally legalized the pushback of refugees — the practice by which police are allowed to physically repel those seeking asylum at the Hungarian border. Pushbacks violate the European Convention of Human Rights, to which Hungary has been a party since 1992.

These practices have continued even as the number of migrants arriving from the Middle East has ebbed, largely as a result of the EU’s deal with Turkey deal to keep migrants in that country, effectively outsourcing border control. This winter, according to reporting by Al Jazeera, migrants were continually pushed back along the Syrian border, with some violently beaten by police.

One Moroccan migrant reportedly had his hands tied behind his back and was forced to the ground and kicked by police in Hungary. Just one week before the war broke out, over one hundred migrants were living in an abandoned milk factory in frigid, squalid conditions near the Serbian-Hungarian border after being denied entrance to Hungary.
A Different Kind of Migrant

However, this war — and the ensuing migrant crisis — is different. Where the influx of mostly Muslim, non-white migrants from the Middle East allowed Orbán to harden his xenophobic, far-right base, Hungary is now facing a war in a bordering country and the arrival of hundreds of thousands of mostly white women and children. Locals are sympathetic, and Ukrainian refugees a cause célèbre.

Orbán has shifted his campaign for the April 3 election to reflect this. Where, in the weeks leading up to the Russian invasion, his central focus was on anti-LGBT sentiment and “traditional values,” with Ukraine and Russia figuring nowhere in his and Fidesz’s platform, the crisis has now come to the fore. Posters plastered around Budapest and campaign rhetoric now present Orbán as a safe choice for Hungarians and a champion for those fleeing the war, whereas the opposition is cast as warmongering.

“The opposition has lost its mind,” Orbán told supporters at an election rally. “They would walk into a cruel, protracted, and bloody war and they want to send Hungarian troops and guns to the front line. We can’t let this happen. Not a single Hungarian can get caught between the Ukrainian anvil and the Russian hammer.”

The explanation for this is partly political — recent polling by International IDEA shows Fidesz still in the lead, but with its 41 percent score only giving it a narrow advantage over the combined opposition of 39 percent. Support for Ukrainians in Hungary is also now widespread, with many civilians and civil society organizations mobilizing to help the influx of refugees. Support for Transcarpathian ethnic Hungarians in Ukraine also gels with Orbán’s nationalist base.

The other explanation is that the acceptance of Ukrainian refugees does not run counter to Orbán’s xenophobic position on migrants. These are, in the main, white, Christian, non-Muslim refugees. Yet Roma refugees, for example, are being subjected to harsh treatment. Speaking at the border on March 3, Orbán claimed he can “tell the difference between who is a migrant and who is a refugee.”

“Migrants are stopped. Refugees can get all the help,” he said, justifying the seeming dissonance in his previous and current stance. Muslim refugees are migrants, in other words; Ukrainian refugees are recognized as such and provided with support. Emphasizing the difference between the two groups enables Orbán to curry public favor while not compromising his hardline stance on Muslim, non-white migrants. The experience of Muslim migrants on the Serbian border confirms this.
Eastern Opening

On March 7, at the train station in the Hungarian border town of Záhony, a railway worker ceremoniously removed a meter-high portrait of Vladimir Lenin from the station and placed it in the back of a pickup truck. Standing before a crowd of reporters, he said that the station no longer had use for the portrait and would use the room concerned for refugees.

Orbán’s shift toward sympathy for Ukrainian refugees has also been a means to distract from his ties to Putin and Russia itself. Orbán first came to the fore of Hungarian politics as a young rebel leader in the late 1980s, famously calling on Soviet troops to leave his country. He rose in popularity as a stanch anti-Soviet, anti-Russian, anti-communist leader who hoped to bring Hungary closer to the West.

In the early years of his career, he emphasized that Hungary’s closest allies were the United States, NATO, and West European countries, while intentionally distancing Hungary, and himself, from Russia and other post-Soviet states. However, over three decades in politics, Orbán has shifted his attitude toward and relationship with Russia.

In 2009, Orbán paid a friendly public visit to Saint Petersburg to meet with Putin and “get to know him” for the first time. Just before he was reelected as premier in 2010, members of Orbán’s inner circle reportedly visited Moscow to strengthen business and political ties between the two countries.

A rail employee removes the portrait of Vladimir Lenin formerly hanging in the Záhony train station. (Courtesy of author)

Following his reelection, Orbán displayed a markedly friendlier approach to Russia. Initially, Fidesz dubbed its policy an “eastern opening,” not explicitly mentioning Moscow. However, according to reporting by Hungarian investigative outlet Direkt36, Orbán and his allies saw a closer alliance with Moscow — and Putin — as a way of bettering Fidesz’s standing both domestically and globally.

“Orbán’s power and popularity depend on his relationship with Russia,” said Szabolcs Panyi, an investigative journalist at Direkt36 who has long worked on Orbán’s ties to Russia.

This manifested itself in softer rhetoric towards Moscow and greater animus toward the “West.” Where before, the USSR was the great adversary against which Orbán united his base, he now increasingly accused Brussels of coming for Hungary. “We refused to be dictated by Vienna in 1989 as well,” he said in a speech in 2011. “Nor will we let anyone dictate us from Brussels or from anywhere else.”


The most distinct turning point in Orbán’s stance on Russia came on January 14, 2014, when he announced — from Moscow, accompanied by Putin — that Hungary would acquire a nuclear power plant from Russia with the support of a €10 billion loan from that country, to be paid off over thirty years.

The eight years since then have only seen the further entanglement of Russian and Hungarian business, political, and security interests. Hungary has become a hub for Russian intelligence activity in Europe, and Orbán’s is the only executive in the EU that has not quit International Investment Bank, known as the Russian government’s “trojan horse.”

This relationship has trickled down even to the metro cars purchased by Budapest in 2017. According to reporting by Hungarian outlets, Russian officials were involved in mobilizing against the city’s young transport minister to sideline him and usher through a €200 million deal to buy used Russian railcars. Despite better deals offering more up-to-date technology, the city — under pressure from interests linked to Orbán and his party — purchased the Russian cars for its M3 metro line. They have malfunctioned since being put into operation.

Ties with Putin have also enabled Orbán to ensure low-price energy for households via Russia’s state-owned Gazprom, also helping him inspire a more favorable view toward the Kremlin among his supporters.

Just three weeks before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Putin hosted Orbán in Moscow, where the Hungarian leader requested, among many things, an expansion of his country’s fifteen-year contract with Gazprom amid rising energy prices in Europe.

Orbán and his government maintained this pro-Russia stance as Russian troops massed on Ukraine’s borders this winter and through the first weeks of the war. State-run channels — which investigative journalist Szabolcs Panyi says are essentially propaganda for Orbán’s government — echoed Russian claims, among others, that Russia was clearing Ukraine of Nazis.

However, as public sentiment turned in favor of Ukrainians and the April 3 election neared, Orbán and his followers were forced to fall in line, both with the people of Hungary, who mobilized widespread support for Ukrainian refugees, and with their European counterparts.

Enter a confused government message and position that expressed sympathy with refugees while failing to condemn Russia or cut ties with Putin’s inner circle. As of mid-March, Panyi said, the government hadn’t figured out its messaging.

“I think that the Hungarian government still hasn’t found its message and how to relate to this conflict,” Panyi said. “For example, when the invasion started on Thursday and Friday, Orbán gave an interview. He talked for about thirty minutes about the conflict, but he did not mention Russia or Vladimir Putin.”

Certainly, the government’s actions run counter to its supposed pro-Ukrainian migrant stance. As European allies have taken steps to sever energy and economic ties to Russia, Hungary has demurred. After speaking about the importance of Ukraine’s “territorial integrity” following the Russian invasion, Orbán said on March 3 that his country would not veto EU sanctions on Russia. The integrity of the EU was paramount, he said. However, last week Hungary rejected sanctions on Russian energy shipments, saying it would “endanger Hungary’s energy security.” Such sanctions would also directly threaten Orbán’s low-cost utility scheme, central to his bid to stay in power after today’s election. Hungary is also not supplying arms to Ukraine or allowing the transit of weapons to the country through its territory.

Politicians in Poland and the Czech Republic have sharply criticized Orbán’s failure to cut ties with Russia over the war in Ukraine and for his comparatively muted refugee response. “The Hungarians must be punished for their pro-Russian stance,” tweeted Krzysztof Gawkowski, leader of the parliamentary group for Poland’s left-wing party Lewica. These comments came as Poland, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia each declined invitations to a Budapest summit to discuss Hungary’s position. The Czech defense minister even accused Hungarian politicians of finding “cheap Russian oil more important than Ukrainian blood.”
Welcome for Some

Orbán’s tempered stance toward Russia suggests that his attitude towards Ukrainian refugees is a rhetorical shift — seeking to curry favor and votes in the lead-up to today’s election, which is more contested than usual. But the hollowness of his new “pro-refugee” stance is also echoed in the experience of citizens of African countries fleeing Ukraine and now stuck in Záhony.

When I was in this town on Hungary’s border with Ukraine on March 7, I spoke to a young doctor from Zimbabwe named Chennai. She had been at the Hungarian Reformed Church reception center for several days and looked at me with surprise when I asked her what her plan was.

“I have no plan,” she said, “Maybe I will go to America.”

She and her boyfriend had been told by Hungarian authorities that they could be resettled back to Zimbabwe, but were not given work or resettlement options in the country. When we met in the school-turned-refugee-center, she said she was waiting for a bus — any bus — to Europe. She’d heard that there were shortages of medical staff there and in the United States, and thought she might be able to find work.


Where Ukrainian people were immediately offered aid and work opportunities in the country, she and her partner were offered little. The only people left at the reception center when we spoke were Chennai, her boyfriend, and several Nigerian refugees who, like Chennai, had fled Kharkiv. None of them wanted to go home, but none knew where else they could go — and they certainly did not intend to stay in Hungary.

Orbán’s shift and the welcoming of Ukrainian refugees have not forced him to shift his racist stance toward non-white refugees, nor cut any of his long-standing ties with Putin. In other words, he’s playing the welcoming host while remaining a beneficiary of Russia’s energy and security infrastructure. If, as many observers are already doubting, today’s elections are fair, they will show whether his ruse has worked.

With thanks to Flora Garamvolgyi for her help with reporting.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Erin O’Brien is a freelance journalist based in Istanbul, Turkey, covering politics and culture.

Stellantis announces hundreds more job cuts at Belvidere, Illinois plant, as layoffs continue to roil global auto industry

Marcus Day

WSWS.ORG

Stellantis NV, the world’s fourth-largest automaker, is planning to cut hundreds more jobs at its Belvidere assembly plant in northern Illinois, according to a letter sent to workers by United Auto Workers Local 1268 on March 25.

Exterior of Belvidere Assembly (WSWS Media)

A Stellantis spokesman told local news station WREX that the company was “making additional staffing reductions to operate the plant in a more sustainable manner.” The cuts will be achieved through a combination of early retirement packages and involuntary layoffs, the company said.

The Belvidere factory, which produces the Jeep Cherokee SUV, has already suffered thousands of layoffs over the past three years, with five rounds of job cuts in the last 13 months alone. The plant is currently operating with 1,812 hourly workers on just one shift. As recently as 2019, the plant, then operated by Stellantis’ predecessor Fiat Chrysler, had more than 5,000 workers across three shifts.

Stellantis is seeking to reduce employment at Belvidere to “603 non-skilled and 199 skilled trades employees,” the UAW local wrote in its March 25 letter to workers. The company was planning to issue WARN layoff notices to 579 employees beginning March 28, the letter stated, raising the question of whether more cuts are planned later this year to reach the company’s targeted headcount. The layoffs will impact those even with decades of seniority at the plant, as far back as 1994.

Beyond Stellantis, the layoffs will almost certainly cascade throughout the local supply chain, threatening jobs at plants operated by parts producers such as Magna, Syncreon, and Android Industries, as well as others.

Seeking to chloroform workers and block a struggle in defense of jobs, UAW Local 1268 wrote, “We don’t believe they will be able to make all these cuts, don’t make any irrational decisions at this point. We believe this is completely unobtainable and we will know more in the near future.”

Local 1268 officials said they were scheduled to meet in Detroit last week with the UAW vice president for Stellantis, Cindy Estrada, to discuss the layoffs. Such talks, however, have the character of a conspiracy against workers aimed at ensuring an “orderly” draw-down of jobs at the plant and preventing a serious struggle by workers. Estrada—who recently announced she would retire at the end of her term, and had previously been named as a target in the federal corruption investigation into the UAW—is notorious for having repeatedly negotiated painful concessions behind autoworkers’ backs, including outsourcing jobs at GM’s Lake Orion and Lordstown assembly plants.

The savage attack on jobs at Belvidere by Fiat Chrysler and then Stellantis have already had a devastating impact, confronting workers and their families with impossible decisions to either uproot and transfer hundreds of miles away, live apart indefinitely or take lower-paying jobs in the area.

Until recent years, the Belvidere plant had been the largest private employer in the region and one of the few remaining sources of relatively better-paying manufacturing jobs. The unemployment rate in the economically hard-hit Rockford metro area, which is roughly 90 miles northwest of Chicago, stood at 7.9 percent as of February 2022, the highest among major urban areas in Illinois and more than 50 percent higher than the state average.

Pointing to the widespread social, economic, and political crisis in which the layoffs are taking place, a veteran worker at Stellantis Belvidere told the WSWS Autoworker Newsletter, “All of this, including the pandemic and war in Ukraine, is looking more like an economic collapse that’s going to make the recession look like a walk in the park.

“Homelessness is at an all-time high already and it’s only growing,” he continued. “Even when Wall Street takes a nose dive the billionaires, hedge fund managers and too-big-to-fail financial institutions will be insulated from the fallout that is to follow.”

Consumer prices are surging, and the Federal Reserve is moving to raise interest rates to counteract rising wages. Under these conditions, the ruling elite is seeking to distract attention from an increasingly disastrous domestic situation via the rapid escalation of a war drive, he said. “What better way to distract people than to antagonize WWIII.”

Chip shortage, supply chain disruptions continue to idle plants

Intermittent layoffs have continued to grip the global auto industry more broadly, causing considerable uncertainty and financial strain for workers.

In addition to Belvidere, Stellantis announced recently that it would be indefinitely laying off 98 workers at its Sterling Stamping plant in suburban Detroit, where five workers died of COVID-19 in 2021. The company’s Jefferson North Assembly Plant in Detroit is also temporarily shut down until May for scheduled retooling. In Canada, the company is planning to cut the second shift at the Windsor, Ontario van plant later this year.

General Motors announced Thursday that it would be idling its Lansing Grand River assembly plant in Michigan next week, with a spokesman ascribing the downtime to parts shortages unrelated to semiconductors. GM had previously announced that it would be temporarily shutting down its Fort Wayne, Indiana, assembly plant for two weeks beginning April 4 due to a lack of microchips. The Fort Wayne plant produces the lucrative Chevrolet Silverado 1500 and GMC Sierra 1500 pickup trucks.

Ford also announced in recent days that it would idle its Flat Rock assembly plant in suburban Detroit for one week beginning Monday, also due to a chip shortage.

Even as workers at plants such as Belvidere assembly and GM’s Fairfax assembly have faced near-continual layoffs, workers at plants that produce the auto giants’ top-selling, highest-margin pickups and SUVs, such as Stellantis Sterling Heights assembly, have faced relentless demands for overtime, with their plants driven to run almost non-stop.

The impact on autoworkers’ jobs extends internationally, with supply chain disruptions exacerbated by the US-NATO conflict with Russia in Ukraine. Ukraine is a major exporter of neon gas, which is critical for microchip production, and international transportation routes and trade have been snarled by the conflict and US-led sanctions against Russia.

Stellantis CEO Carlos Tavares said this week that the company’s van plant in Kaluga, Russia, operated as a joint venture with Mitsubishi, will soon run out of parts and be unable to operate. The company’s Jeep plant in Melfi, in southern Italy, will also a face a slowdown beginning next week due to a worsening chip shortage, with roughly 1,500 workers furloughed a day.

Despite the automakers benefiting from rising prices and reaping bumper profits—with Stellantis seeing its earnings nearly triple from 2020 to 2021—a brutal new wave of restructuring is being prepared, as the corporations engage in a furious struggle to dominate electric vehicle technologies and markets.

The Detroit Three—GM, Ford and Stellantis—have all announced massive investments in EVs over the coming decade, which they expect to offset by dramatically intensifying the exploitation of workers. Stellantis has stated that it will invest $35 billion in EVs by 2025, while at the same time targeting double-digit profit margins.

Stellantis CEO Tavares and his counterparts are all attempting to extort massive tax breaks from local, state, and national governments, in return for promises—easily broken—for new investments in EV manufacturing facilities. Auto industry analysts have for years put a question mark over the future the Belvidere plant, which is situated far from the core of Stellantis’ operations in the Detroit area. To attract renewed investment to the plant as well as other EV makers, Illinois’ billionaire Democratic governor, J.B. Pritzker, signed a package of major corporate tax credits last year. Press reports in recent months have indicated that Stellantis is considering assigning production of new Dodge Charger and Challenger EVs to Belvidere.

The company recently announced that it would be investing $4 billion to construct a battery facility in Windsor, just across the border from Detroit, as part of a joint venture with LG Energy Solution. Ontario Premier Doug Ford boasted that the province put up “hundreds of millions” of dollars in incentives to lure the company. Stellantis is also reportedly searching for a US location for a second North American battery plant.

The UAW, with the support of the White House, is seeking to expand its reach into the new battery plants and other EV facilities, offering its services as a “reliable partner” to the automakers and hoping to secure new dues streams. In remarks at a press event this week, UAW President Ray Curry noted that the battery plants “are joint ventures, and they are apart from the national agreements,” meaning that workers at these facilities will face even more brutal conditions and ultra-low wages.

Heading into the Detroit Three contract negotiations next year, the automakers and the UAW are preparing a similar strategy to the one they carried out in 2019 and in previous years. Massive concessions will be demanded to “save jobs,” with the future of Belvidere or other plants held as ransom. In fact, this is already being carried out in Europe, where Ford is working with the Spanish and German trade unions to pit plants against each other in a fratricidal concessions bidding war, with the losing plant slated to be shuttered. But as previous experience shows, no amount of concessions will provide a guarantee against plant closures and layoffs.

The assault being planned against autoworkers threatens to eclipse even the attacks of preceding decades, as brutal as they were. With the enormous capital investments required by the transition to EVs, the auto companies must extract even greater profits. Further, the enormous amounts of resources being channeled by capitalist governments towards war must be paid for by workers, who face an historic battle.

The struggle to defend jobs and secure a massive improvement in workers’ pay and working conditions requires new organizations, rank-and-file factory committees independent of the pro-corporate UAW. With workers confronting powerful transnational corporations, a key task of these committees is to link up and coordinate workers’ struggles across national borders, and combine the fight for higher wages and better working conditions with the fight against war.

Global food crisis fuels international class struggle

Eric London@EricLondonSEP

WSWS.ORG

1 April 2022

The war between the US-NATO and Russia in Ukraine has lit a fuse to the powder keg of the global class struggle. In the span of just a few weeks, the war and unprecedented US and EU sanctions against Russia have profoundly destabilized the world’s productive forces, throwing already-frail global supply chains into disarray, strengthening inflationary tendencies, and crippling global food and gas production.

People queuing for kerosene in Kandy, Sri Lanka on 22 March, 2022 [Credit: WSWS Media]

A social and economic crisis that was worsening before the war began has now metastasized, bringing billions of people to the precipice of destitution and hunger.

Shock is beginning to give way to action. Significant strikes and demonstrations are breaking out across the world in the largest wave of social protest since before the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The imperialist politicians and geo-strategists who spent years drawing up the blueprints for war are discovering that despite all their careful planning, they set their bloody plans into motion on top of a massive social fault line.

The protests are heterogeneous in terms of race and religious background, international in scope, and are based in a working class that is larger, more urban and more interconnected than ever before. In more advanced and less developed countries alike, the protests revolve around the same demand: the rising cost of living is intolerable, conditions must change, and they must change now.

This is the social force that has the power to stop the drive to world war and prevent nuclear disaster. This global movement is unfolding by the hour.

On Thursday night, a large demonstration blocked the road to President Gotabaya Rajapakse’s private residence in Colombo’s outer suburbs, demanding his resignation. The right-wing government is implementing a ruthless IMF austerity regime as masses of people struggle to find medicine, food, milk and gas.

Diesel fuel has run out, currency is scarce, and long power outages blacken the country. A 31-year-old school teacher in Batticaloa told the Indian Express, “On Sunday I stood in a gas queue starting at 4 am. There is a shortage of milk powder. One has to struggle for rice and daal. There are no candles and many medicines have disappeared. I have a salary, but can we eat money?”

Similar movements are developing across the Middle East and North Africa, where Ukraine and Russia provide the bulk of wheat and cooking oil and where Ramadan, the Islamic holiday of fasting and feasting, is set to begin.

The United Nations declared Thursday that social conditions are “at a breaking point” across the region due to food shortages. The New York Times wrote Thursday that scarcity and price increases “crush household and government budgets alike in countries that had nothing to spare, raising the possibility of the kind of mass popular unrest not seen since the Arab Spring protests a decade ago, which stemmed in part from soaring food prices.”

In Egypt, the Times noted nervously, “videos of ordinary people venting about food prices have gone viral on social media under the hashtag ‘revolution of the hungry.’”

The US-backed al-Sisi dictatorship has deployed the military to distribute food and set price controls for bread. Al-Sisi addressed the nation and urged the population to “rationalize” food consumption during Ramadan.

In Tunisia, where workers first sparked the Arab Spring, the Middle East Eye wrote Thursday that “strikes intensified last week,” and as a result, “Ezra Zia, US undersecretary of state for civilian security, democracy and human rights, visited the country.”

Food riots involving thousands of people took place across Iraq last week as the country, still reeling from a US invasion and occupation that killed a million people, was gripped by a serious shortage of food and flour.

Protests are also developing south of the Maghreb, in African countries where the working class has exploded in size and social weight and whose backbone includes many young people with the Internet in the palms of their hands. The average sub-Saharan African spends 65 percent of his household earnings on food. On Wednesday, the head of the Africa Development Bank said of the surge in food prices caused by the war in Ukraine: “If we don’t manage this very quickly, it will destabilize the continent.”

Protests in Sudan over shortages worsened by the war have coincided with powerful strikes of teachers and youth. Yesterday, a mass protest took place in Khartoum over the military government’s inability to stop the spiraling cost of living and where one 23-year-old protestor was killed.

In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, according to a report published Thursday by Al Jazeera, “rising fuel prices, worsened by the COVID-19 pandemic and more recently the Russian invasion of Ukraine, have sparked fears of increased social unrest,” forcing the government to reshuffle the cabinet to preempt social anger.

In South Africa, where large riots took place last summer, the head of a major youth non-profit described the social situation as “a time bomb that is ticking and could explode in our faces at any given moment.”

This movement is also developing in the world’s imperialist centers. In Spain, a weeks-long strike by truckers has brought international shipping to a standstill and galvanized broader support in the working class over the rising cost of living. The PSOE-Podemos government has ordered grocery stores and retailers to limit what customers can purchase, as the major business confederations demand action to prevent an imminent social explosion.

In Germany and Austria, diesel will now be rationed. Large demonstrations over the cost of living took place last month in Albania.

In the United States, the cockpit of world imperialism, the emerging strike movement is driven above all by inflation and the spiraling cost of living. Five thousand teachers are on strike in Sacramento, California, following a two-week strike by teachers in Minneapolis, Minnesota in March.

In an ongoing strike by 600 oil refinery workers in Richmond, California, workers explain they cannot afford to fill their own cars with the gas they refine.

Fifty thousand grocery store workers in California are slated to strike in the coming days, while a contract for tens of thousands of dock workers on the west coast expires in a matter of weeks.

In the US and Canada, the government has banned or blocked major strikes by rail workers at BNSF and Canadian Pacific.

Rising prices in the main imperialist countries will intensify the class struggle as the war continues. According to Thursday’s US Commerce Department data, inflation will cost households an average of an extra $433 each month, or $5,200 in the next year. Given that half the country has less than $500 in emergency savings, workers will be driven into struggle by urgent necessity.

The impact of the war on living conditions is going to intensify dramatically in all countries in the coming weeks. Strategic food reserves are woefully inadequate in all countries excepting China.

Making matters worse, Ukraine and Russia are not only leading producers of staple food and oil, but Russia and Belorussia also lead the world in the production of most fertilizers, which Putin has announced will be subject to strict export restrictions in response to US and EU sanctions. This could cut global crop yields in half.

With the pandemic and the threat of world war as the immediate backdrop, a social reckoning of historic proportions is past due. Since the Arab Spring and the global protests of 2018–19, the ruling class’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic has prioritized profits over life and led to the deaths of 20 million people.

Stopping war means ending capitalism, and this requires political leadership. Unlike in an earlier period, the international working class owes no political loyalty to the parties of Stalinism, Social Democracy and bourgeois nationalism, which are seen as directly responsible for existing conditions of poverty and inequality.

In each country, the trade unions are a block on this developing movement, serving the capitalist governments and corporations by isolating workers, preventing them from striking, and demanding that they support the US-NATO war drive, no matter the dangers and no matter the cost to working people.

Representatives of the middle-class pseudo-left who once professed verbal support for socialism are now cheerleaders for NATO’s wars and zealous defenders of the trade unions.

The dangers of world war are great, but the road is open to the Trotskyist movement to transform this objective movement into a self-conscious movement for socialist revolution.

Spontaneous protests, no matter how militant, are insufficient to change social conditions. The Socialist Equality Party must be built in every country, and the historical experiences of the international working class must be brought into the developing struggles so that they acquire a self-consciously socialist and anti-war character. On this basis, a working class strategy of socialist revolution can develop even more rapidly than the ruling class’s strategy of imperialist destruction.

Ukrainian Refugees and Europe: A Marathon, Not a Sprint

This marathon can only be won with EU-wide solidarity towards the most affected member states as well as transatlantic burden-sharing based on our common values and principles.


April 2, 2022 

by Viktor Marsai Kristóf György Veres

As the United States pledges to take in 100,000 Ukrainians fleeing war and send $1 billion in aid to help the European refugee effort, the immense shadow of a protracted humanitarian crisis looms over the European Union (EU).

In recent weeks, the Russian invasion of Ukraine unleashed a deluge of refugees upon Europe the size of which is comparable only to the massive displacement of people at the end of World War II. At the beginning of the armed conflict, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) estimated that up to 4 million people might flee the embattled country, however, this initial projection was surpassed in a mere month—with no end in sight. To put 4 million refugees in context: this is the number of first-time asylum applications filed to the EU between 2016 and 2021.

Shortly after Russian bombs started falling on Ukrainian cities, a decisive and unified European response swiftly emerged based on an immense wave of solidarity that seemingly engulfed every nation in the EU. Frontier countries—Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, and Romania—opened their borders with a warm welcome, while governments, NGOs, as well as private citizens, acted in concert to pool every available resource to alleviate the suffering of Ukrainian refugees. A united EU fired broadside after broadside of sanctions at the Russian economy and elite; in addition, the twenty-seven member-states triggered the Temporary Protection Directive with a unanimous vote that gives temporary residence status to Ukrainians in the Union.

However, initial crisis management was made much easier by the means as well as the attitude of the first wave of Ukrainian refugees. Since the start of the Russian aggression, the Budapest-based Migration Research Institute (MRI) conducted a series of interviews with refugees arriving to Hungary, and it turned out that a large number of them crossed into the EU with a clear “action-plan.” Using their sometimes not-that-modest resources, they slowly made their way to relatives or friends already residing in the EU who would help them organize their “temporary” life outside of Ukraine. Consequently, a large number of them didn’t really need to rely heavily on government- or NGO-provided shelter, food, or medical supplies. Initially considering their stay in the EU as a transitory situation that would only last for weeks also made them reluctant to seek help through official channels.

However, a quick end to the war, and consequently a speedy return of refugees to Ukraine, seems more and more improbable. The quasi-stalemate in fighting, the increased Russian bombardment of civilian targets, the intensifying combat in urban centers, as well as inconclusive peace talks all point toward a protracted armed conflict that would hurl millions more westwards. Filippo Grandi, the UNHCR, recently warned that Russian occupation of Kyiv as well as the extension of the carnage to western Ukraine could result in a second wave of refugees, this time a more vulnerable lot, lacking resources or foreign contacts to rely on. Currently, there are approximately 6.5 million internally displaced persons in Ukraine who might eventually decide to cross international borders and become refugees, if Grandi’s dire predictions prove to be accurate

After the “yes we can” optimism of the first weeks, ominous articles are starting to pop up about insufficient capacity in frontier countries: Polish stadiums and Czech reception centers, for example, are being overwhelmed by Ukrainians looking for shelter. As more and more vulnerable groups are arriving, those already here are running out of their resources and are slowly realizing that their stay is going to last longer than a few weeks. With pressure steeply mounting on government-provided services for refugees, and with crisis-fatigue setting in, Europe is slowly realizing that the Ukrainian refugee crisis is a marathon that the EU has tried to sprint its way through.

Preparing for a prolonged stay of refugees—who will have to be integrated—the EU recently proposed to reallocate $3.74 billion for housing, education, employment, and healthcare for Ukrainians, with national governments following suit one by one. Hungary, for example, recently proposed to provide additional funding for public schools taking in Ukrainian children, as well as to subsidize accommodation expenditures for refugees. Similar measures across the EU, coupled with extra strain on the union’s universal healthcare systems, will cost billions and billions more for national budgets if hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians will have to be integrated.

One thing is clear: this marathon can only be won with EU-wide solidarity towards the most affected member states—Germany, Czechia, Poland, Hungary, and Romania—as well as transatlantic burden-sharing based on our common values and principles. The $1 billion pledged by President Joe Biden might just be the first in a series of aid packages.

Viktor Marsai is the Research Director of the Budapest-based Migration Research Institute.

Kristof Gyorgy Veres is the Andrassy National Security Fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies as well as Senior Researcher at the Budapest-based Migration Research Institute.

Image: Reuters.