(Not in Ukraine – they are actually just down the road from our house, but the sunflower is Ukraine’s national flower and I like the picture)
Well, things are certainly happening here in the Balkans. I mentioned that I am down here to help evacuate and relocate the families of our clients staff. but it’s not just one client, there are many and of course, there are many, many families.
To be clear here, I am not in the Ukraine, I am currently in Bucharest, very safe and in a nice hotel. As I was reminded recently (thanks Jan), I am not as young or as fast as I once was, so the running around is best left to those who can. That fact was made clear by the recently banged up finger (previous post). It’s almost healed now but I don’t have full movement yet. Twenty years ago of course, I would have stupidly shrugged it off, slapped a band aid on it and picked up my suitcase. Hang on, that’s exactly what I did…
The Russians have opened a huge can of worms here by invading the Ukraine and whilst the likely outcome of all this is sadly obvious, it’s not preordained and I suspect that they have been surprised about the level of resistance they are meeting. All men between 18 and 60 (Military Aged Males or MAM’s) have been called up and many of their families have refused to leave their men. I can totally understand that, but like anyone who watches the news, we are seeing shocked and dazed kids with haunted looking mothers. It’s cold here, very cold at night and snowing intermittently throughout and all this is such a tragedy. The Mums have the pinched hyper vigilant look of people who just don’t know what is going to become of them, their kids and the menfolk they leave behind. I have a number of photographs that would show you what its like, but to post them feels obscene.
My company has people in most of the surrounding countries and we have set up safehouses close to the Ukrainian border. Our teams are collecting people from inside the Ukraine and plucking the families away and getting them to the reception teams either side of the border as soon as they can. As I mentioned, some people refuse to leave the country, which is their choice and we’re running an invacuation program for them. Yes, invacuation is a real word and it’s pretty much what it says on the tin – we get them out of immediate danger to a safer part of their country and put them up in temporary accommodation.
The temporary accommodation is usually not what you’d book yourself and we’re using a church in one city.
We, or another agency sets them up and they have basic life support (food, water and beds) and not much else. Obviously, their employers will help in the medium term to long term and they do, but there’s a fair bit of expectation management that needs to be done when evacuating affluent individuals as opposed to real people.
The folks I have just been working with are a case in point. They are a luxury goods company and as you can imagine, there’s a lot of money in luxury goods and a lot of the people in that game are aristocratic, rich or influential, or just think they are. Think of the snotty shop assistants in the movie ‘Pretty Woman’ who are mean to Julia Roberts character. They are used to certain standard of living and level of deference from people they deem to be less than themselves.
The clients had been advised to begin evacuations three weeks ago, when tensions were mounting and the intelligence services noted the mobilization of the Russians. They hadn’t really done anything to prepare, other than talk to us, which actually is a pretty good start. Ivan of course, had no shortage of time to plan for their invasion and he’s an expert proponent of their military doctrine called Maskirovka. This literally means ‘masking’ and what they did is mask their intentions with military exercises near the border, large troop movements coupled with denials from the very top that anything untoward was going on -‘nothing to see here’….
The West was not fooled, but they didn’t mobilise for fear that they’d escalate the situation. It’s a bit like sleight of hand, with the magician distracting your attention with what they are saying and doing with one hand and the opposite hand performs the trick. Of course, when the sun is shining and no one’s shooting at you, no one wants to leave their nice warm apartment and it’s easy to become complacent.
When you evacuate a group, you always try to ‘stage’ people at a central location to make the lift easier but obviously, if you have groups with children, as we did, you try having those with kids get together the day before so as to avoid curfews and fighting on the streets. There was no way that the families (remember, Mums, kids and elderly relations, no MAM’s) could get themselves out on the streets under these conditions so we’d make arrangements to pick them up from their homes. Single females, we’d try to get them to co locate, if the conditions were safe enough and at that stage, moving around was tense, but relatively safe. This lot refused to co locate, probably thinking that the others home was not fancy enough.
We’d arranged for 8 seater mini buses to make the lift, but the word went around that all mini buses and vans were being stopped and searched, for fear that men would be trying to escape their call up. Our service provider substituted cars for the mini buses and one wasn’t up to scratch for one of our princesses. She refused to get in the car (a repurposed taxi), demanded a Mercedes, with more room for her luggage and guess what, she got left behind.
As with any war, there are profiteers and in this one, a lift with security costs at least USD100, 000. Our client has probably spent the best part of a Million dollars getting its people to safety, but they can well afford it.
Another poor lady, who we were expecting bring a small dog with her got in the car with her dog, but also a baby. It wasn’t her baby, but her sister had begged her to take the child out with her as she decided to stay with her husband.
Imagine that goodbye.
We got them out to the Slovakian border.
We had managed to get one of the three groups to a city called Lviv, almost 600 kms to the West of Kyiv where we thought that we had accommodation confirmed for a overnight break in the journey to the border, but with 200, 000 refugees coming in, someone had gazumped us and a fistful of cash beat our promise to pay… Some quick thinking resulted in sharing a hostel room with another group, but as I explained earlier, if you’re expecting anything more than basic life support, you’re out of luck.
One of our Princesses took one look at the room, with 15 beds in it and refused to stay there. She insisted on a “five star hotel” which of course, existed in that city, but they were all booked several times over. She slept in the car.
Of course, there are exceptions to all of my awful generalisations and we got a Mother (Olga*), son and their small dog Sam, out of Odessa in southern Ukraine. Clearly, her husband/partner had been called up and she’d sensibly decided to get to a safe country – in this case, Poland. We knew she was traveling as a small family unit so we were doubly careful to try and make a frightening experience as calm as possible. We were also concerned about the dog, in terms of how big it was, but we needn’t have worried.
*not her real name
Sam was clearly a handbag dog.
Olga and her little family were brought to the Romanian border by our team and handed over to another driver. The girls in our office were so excited after seeing the picture of Sam, that they were waiting in the hotel lobby when they arrived at our hotel. Olga was clearly bewildered at the sight of three very excited foreigners jumping up and down at the sight of them, but she quickly smiled and we even managed to momentarily distract her ten year old from his screen. (a word to the wise, if you are ever evacuated, bring screens and batteries for any and all children).
We settled her into a very nice room and promised to come back in the morning so that we could all play with Sam. We did and had a mini photoshoot with the family before we sent her on her way to Poland with a representative of her company.
Things are changing almost by the hour out here and sadly it’s probably going to get a lot worse before it gets better.
Back soon.