Save Ukraine – The Bear and the Bees

War in the Ukraine. (UKR4)

I recently moved into the Ukraine to help run a safe haven for our refugees. There’s two of us staying in a decent three star hotel connected to a 24/7 casino, but there is still a 9pm curfew here and air raid sirens cut through the cold dry air to remind everyone to get home and off the streets, so the gamblers either stay put overnight or slink away. We are in a safe area in a nice old city and there hasn’t been any actual air raids, but the sirens are a reminder that we are still in a country with a war going on.

Sends a chill down your spine.

I mentioned the casino previously and one thing I noticed about Romania before leaving was that literally every 5th shop front in Bucharest was either a casino, a bank, money changer or a pharmacy. That says something. I’m not sure exactly what, but it’s probable that Romania functions as some sort of laundry for men in leather coats with ulcers. Ukraine is different. Good different.

My colleague, who is a former member of a three letter agency and I, were doing runs to and from the border collecting families (although that traffic has slowed) and if they didn’t want to leave the country, bringing them to safer places. We are now mainly coordinating the receiving and shipping on, of supplies to those still in the besieged cities.

*This is the kind of load that we’re sending into the dodgy areas*

Our adopted town has a number of aid agencies who have moved in and set up field kitchens and tented (free) supermarkets, all for the displaced people and even the locals who can no longer afford necessities because of the war. As you can imagine, the fighting and subsequent disruptions to supply lines has not only indirectly, but has also directly screwed peoples lives up. To illustrate that, we passed a funeral in a small village yesterday that was obviously for a soldier, as the coffin was draped in the Ukrainian flag and his unit colours. His comrades had formed a guard of honour as he was carried into the small church for them all to say goodbye. I couldn’t help thinking of my eldest, who had come through his five plus years in the Army unscathed and how lucky we all were.

When we had arrived in this town, the locals had been very suspicious at first, especially when they had seen us moving boxes of supplies into the hotel rooms. After a day or two, the refugees had arrived and they then understood the reason why we had been moving in cots, baby baths and cases of pampers and the suspicious and slightly hard faced hotel staff soon defrosted and have become very friendly ever since. we have tried to become part of the fabric of the place and we now know the staff on the desk, the launderette ladies and the people who work in the coffee shops. Obviously we stand out as foreigners, but there are so many ‘out of towners’ around that people have stopped staring.

As with all countries in wartime, patriotism is always on display, whether it’s the ladies in their national dress, the graffiti on the walls, the flags flying everywhere or the distinctly martial music being played live in the squares or piped in to the hotels.

*A beautiful painting of a lady in national dress*

We saw a street performance earlier in the week outside the National Theatre that was essentially a patriotic piece from the theatre company dressed as citizen soldiers in uniform and their wives and girlfriends, all in national dress. Some had bundles of rags that were being held like babies, one had a hurried wedding before her new husband was bundled away by his cheering mates and as young men on their way to battle the first time tend to be, they were full of bravado and song. The culmination of the show had the actors holding Russian tunics aloft on pikes. I found it very powerful and by the end, I had tears rolling down my cheeks. I wasn’t alone either.

The Police are now going hotel to hotel, looking for military aged males and registering them for potential call up. That means that some families are continually on the move, not wanting to lose their sons or husbands to the war and once the Police have left after documenting them, they usually disappear as well, in order to move to another city. A press gang came to our hotel last week and they would have stopped us if the (now friendly) lady on the front desk hadn’t shouted “Amerikanets” and they waved us on. Neither of us are American, but it did the trick.

I have held onto this post for a few days for personal and operational security reasons so by the time you read it, it’ll be a little out of date. There is a lot of talk about the ‘peace talks’ and how the invaders have reached a standstill, but the facts are that although the Russians have moved back from the front lines in many areas, most sources believe that they are regrouping and that they intend to attack further in the East of the country. I hope not.

Bringing in the refugees (UKR3)

Very early in the morning, I dashed downstairs for a short notice trip out to the border. The day before I had been feeling a little deskbound until I received the word that seven Seamen were being extracted from Odessa and that they were now on the way to the border with Moldova. The vessel was Russian owned but aside from the three most senior officers onboard, the seven crew members were Filipino and Indian. It was the ‘Odessa 7’ that I had to meet at the border.

I set off from the hotel in a brand-new Mercedes Sprinter nine-seater van. My driver, who I am calling Alexei Sale, because of his stunning resemblance in every way to the UK comedian (google him if you don’t know who he is) and he seemed like a decent guy. Not only did Alexei look like him, but he also sounded like him and had the dead pan delivery of his namesake. I was to test his sense of humour in the hours to follow with my numerous requests for quick comfort breaks – in my defence I’d had a few nervous cups of tea whilst waiting to leave.

Leaving Bucharest, I was quite impressed with the Centro district of the city, which had the usual unbelievably expensive luxury shops, opened for 000.01% of the population and I saw a number of busy restaurants and bars that if I ever had the time, I wouldn’t mind checking out. It’s minus three degrees now and everything is covered in a layer of fine snow. I loved the twinkly lights in the trees evoking a mini Champs Elysees feel and it really did look lovely. The local boy racers were making the most of the icy roads and they’re drifting around the central roundabout at ridiculous speeds with the Police looking admiringly on.

Alexei and I were sniffing each other out like two dogs circling each other to see how we are going to work together and I’m pleased to note that he grins and nods to my first (of many) “Eeeesss Naiiiice” Borat references. He then feels comfortable enough to start blaming Gypsies for all the countries current woes and I know he’s going full on Romanian Gypsy hater on me. Hopefully, there’s no sneaky mankeeni wearing or manly wrestling contests going on at any stage of the trip.

I had taken the opportunity to hurriedly empty the mini bar of snacks before I left and we munched along in a companionable silence for a while. It’s going to be a 24-hour round trip at least and I’m beginning to feel like it might be an interesting trip.

I had brought one of the fantastic Marriott pillows with me and acquired a blanket from housekeeping and so it didn’t take too long for me to sneak down to the back of the van and stretch out. By the time I had woken it was dawn, minus seven degrees and we were hurtling through the countryside towards the border with Moldova. Alexei claimed that I snored (I probably did) throughout my recent eyelid inspection and I tried to make it up to him with a few more Borat gags. He gave me such an Alexei Sayle side eye, that I had to ask him if he knew who he was. He nodded, said ‘the young ones’ and that he’d lived in London for a couple of years.

We arrived at the Romanian/Moldova border in the very early hours and I reached for my outsized Australian passport stuffed with numerous visas and handed it over. Alexei rolled his eyes at the look on the border guards face as he grimly thumbed through each page rotating the various stamps 180 degrees, all whilst making us stand outside in the biting wind. Once through that checkpoint, we were at the Moldova side. I whipped out my skinny and rarely used UK passport and we breezed through formalities with a shouted ‘look out for the gypsies’ warning ringing in our ears.

Moldova is a small agricultural country and I’d like to say that it’s beautiful, but I cannot, but only because we were head down barreling towards the border and everything was a blur. We passed through many quiet farming hamlets with people trudging towards their places of work down the frozen muddy roads. Eventually, we arrived at a field with several parked buses, half a dozen cars and people feverishly erecting tents. We knew that our team across the border were four hours away at least, so we decided to get some shuteye. This time Alexei snored. A lot.

*The reception area was just opening and within an hour there were several hundred people right here*

We awoke to a woman screaming just outside the bus and I could see one middle aged lady flailing her arms and clearly in extremis. I asked Alexei what was going on and he listened for a moment before telling me that she’d lost her husband in the fighting two days before. She had brought her two ‘boys’ 18 and 19 years old with her to the border in the hope that she could get them out. He also told me that she would have known that the authorities would stop them and turn them back to fight, but that she had tried to get them out anyway.

Sure enough, they had taken her boys off to fight and she was understandably beside herself. She had plenty of kind people wanting to help her and the ICRC (Red Cross) people quickly put her into an ambulance and drove off. Before we collected our people, we saw another two similar incidents, with small, confused children standing around whilst their Mums completely lost their minds. Thankfully for all, they were quickly helped and led away.

In the three hours we had been napping, a small, tented city had been erected behind us. It had a proper field hospital, canteen, showers and toilets, as well as rows of very smart looking inflatable tents. The inflatable tents were especially impressive as they are double walled and therefore easier to keep warm, but I still wouldn’t want to have to sleep in them for any length of time.

Alexei had just begun an ‘I was stabbed by Gypsy’ story when my bladder forced me to get out from under my blanket. I’d been hydrating myself in the previous days to make up for my dehydration during the flights to get here and that was severely testing my bladder control. By this time, things were becoming critical and so I excused myself and trotted over to the row of original primitive thunderboxes that had been put there in the early hours. They were predictably horrific, but needs must and the poor buggers arriving needed the new clean facilities more than I did.

We got a call that our people were just approaching the border point some 4km down the road and even though the refugees were being bused from the border, it wasn’t cut and dried that they’d be able to get through in short order, so we talked our way past the Police barricades, we parked up and closed in on the relatively clear crossing point. I say relatively clear, because there was quite a queue on the other side, just not on ours. As ‘cash is king’ during these situations, I had a large amount of money to hand over to a contact who brought the group to us, but they had to turn around and drop the evacuees in order to get back to Odessa before the curfew forced them to sleep in their van by the side of the road in questionable safety. I ended up bringing the cash back to much ribbing from my colleagues but it went down successfully the next day.

Our people walked across the border with their bags and we were able to load them in the van. I’m still trying not to show faces, but this hopefully gives you an idea of our pick up.

They were tired and compliant in the way that people who know they have no control over their destiny are, but after a good meal in a warm restaurant nearby, we hightailed it back to Bucharest.

This was only one of the constant 24 hour runs to and from various border crossing points, but this one was mine, it was 27 hours long and it’s going to stay with me for a while.

The Ukraine evacuations (UKR2)

(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.

*It might not look much but it’s a temporary home for many*

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.

*My basic life support – no mate left behind!* *Note: it has its own survival bag.*

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.

New wounds and travel into Ukraine (UKR1)

I haven’t posted much recently largely because I haven’t had much to say, but ‘times, they are a changing’ With a very concerning war in the Balkans and me feeling like the home guard, I made it known at work that I wasn’t feeling overemployed. That could be a dangerous thing, of course, as it could attract the award of the DCM (Don’t Come Monday), but my employer luckily took it as a show of willingness and promised that there would be something active for me to do in the near future.

Sticking my head up and over the proverbial parapet led to me joining a number of WhatsApp groups and I could see that my colleagues had recently bailed out of the Ukraine, just ahead of the shelling. They had been there to evacuate the local employees of a global client, but the employees had decided that they wanted to stay put. It was very clear however, that there were a whole lot of our clients whose people who did want to get out.

My part in all this started with a wonky door. The dogs (and there have been a number lodging at the house recently) had discovered that there was a ‘sweet spot’ on the back door that when hit with the front paws at a full gallop, would swing open and they would have full access to the cat food bowls and any food item or tasty smelling shoe that we’d been daft enough to leave unattended. Soft toys and kids socks had been savaged and I had dodged the entreaties of Mrs. Jerry to do something about it for long enough.

I examined the door and admired the nice stained-glass panel that somehow had survived the not so tender ministrations of our family and quickly ascertained that the root cause of the door problem was loose screws in the doorframe. I have mentioned before that we live in an old house (by Australian standards) and most of the door hinges had been replaced several times over the years. That meant that there were many screw holes that were no longer usable and the old standby of pushing a matchstick in the hole before screwing the hinge on just wasn’t cutting it anymore. I purchased new hinges and set myself up in the tiled boot room to work on what was shaping up to be a really nice day.

I unscrewed the top screws and the bottom ones just pulled straight out. Sighing, I propped up the door against the wall and finding a clear area of wood in the frame, I marked out the new holes, drilling pilot holes and then fixing the hinge to the door and married up the new holes in the frame. The smallest and naughtiest of the dogs made an end run around my legs and clipping the door, sent it slowly but inexorably falling towards me. Somehow, I sensed it coming towards my head and almost at the same time as it crashed into me, my hand reflexively shot up to protect my skull and the glass sliced a large chunk out of my knuckle. It bled spectacularly but aside from hurting like a bastard; didn’t seem too bad. I roughly dressed the cut, finished the hanging of the door, mopped up the blood and went to check my email.

Like most people over the last two years, I have been working from home and apart from a couple of business trips domestically, work has been fairly pedestrian. One email did catch my eye however and it was from Frank (yes, the Frank of the blue suit story) and Frank was in the Ukraine, preparing to evacuate any of our client’s local staff who needed to get out of dodge in the face of the Russian invasion. Things were turning nasty and he gave me a heads up that I’d probably be getting a short notice movement order to get myself over to Eastern Europe. Sure enough, there was message 30 minutes later telling me to get on the first plane to Poland. For me, in reality that was going to be the following night, but it still didn’t give me a lot of time to sort out all the personal admin I needed to close out before I could get on a flight.

The next morning, my knuckle was throbbing but it had at least stopped bleeding and I launched myself into a list of jobs that needed to be done before I could leave with a clear conscience. Of course, rushing through a list of jobs with #2 son as my trusty assistant isn’t sensible when you’ve got a wounded paw and it wasn’t long before I whacked the finger and burst the freshly healing scab. This time, there was no staunching the bleeding and I got #2 son to drive me to the emergency room.

With only three hours to go before my taxi to the airport left the house, I decided to go to the private hospital in town and miss out on the usual two hours of being left in soak by the nurses at the public hospital to see if I was exhibiting drug seeking behaviour and so I paid my $230 examination fee. After 45 minutes, I was taken into an examination room and my very rough dressing was removed. ‘That’ll need some stitches then’ the nurse said. No shit, I thought. I was ushered back into the waiting room and told that I’d be seen soon. I could count six people ahead of me and given that patience was eluding me that day, I got my money back from the hospital and I had my press-ganged chauffeur take me to the hardware store, where I bought some super glue.

Borne out of the hubris of the middle aged DIY’er, I glued the wound, slapped a plaster on it, kissed the family and hopped into the cab. The flight actually wasn’t bad, although I did end up doing babysitting duty for a very nice Scottish lady sitting next to me whose irascible toddler refused to stay asleep when she had to nap or nip to the loo, which seemed to be rather too often until I noticed she returned with an odour of hastily quaffed white wine each time. I certainly couldn’t blame her, having left my own wife and kids to the kindness of strangers on planes many times over the years. The kind hostess donated a few glasses of red as compensation and eventually, we got to Dubai.

I switched on my phone and lo and behold, there was change of plan… I was to complete my Polish flights, reunite with my luggage, stop at the airport and then go straight to Romania, all without collecting 200 quid.

There was however, the small matter of my now rapidly swelling and throbbing finger. It was looking like an angry plum and it didn’t take long for me to convince the Filipina pharmacist near the departure gate that I probably needed some antibiotics. She agreed and I loaded up on the strongest they would sell me.

I had begun to feel a little bit lousy and after a bit of a hike across Dubai airport, I was getting cranky and was very ready to be in my seat, albeit one at the back of the plane and so it was a nasty surprise when the boarding pass for my carefully chosen aisle seat was torn up. I was about to growl at the ground staff when I saw that a boarding pass of a different colour was being printed out. Somehow, economy was overbooked and due only to my historical frequent flyer status, I was getting an upgrade. Wonders would never cease.

When I landed in Bucharest, there was a mass scramble towards the automated gates that allowed people with the appropriate passports and Covid 19 clearances to get out of the airport quickly. I had thought that I did but oh no, I needed to join a distressingly long queue to obtain a local certificate. They were not impressed with my Rapid Antigen Test result that was processed at the airport in Oz, but thankfully, they accepted my proof of two vaccinations plus the booster icon on my phone.

It was -1 degree and snowing outside of the terminal but an Uber got me away from the airport with a minimum of fuss and into a very nice city centre hotel.

The very decorative (brutalist) city centre

Nodding off as I had dinner with the team that night, I began to wonder what the next few weeks had in store for us. I knew had to coordinate local fixers, drivers with vehicles and potentially tens of dozens of people, all trying to escape the fighting. I’ll let you know how I go!