Hungary, Tiszabecs: A woman fleeing war and Russian attack from Ukraine with a little girl crosses the border into Hungary in the Hungarian municipality of Tiszabecs. The border between Hungary and Ukraine is about 140 kilometers long. (Marton Monus/picture alliance via Getty Images)
I’m in Frankfurt, on my way to a Romanian town in the northern part of the country. From there I will make my way north to the Ukrainian border, and attempt to cross at the Sighetu border post.
It is evening as I make my way through Frankfurt airport to gate for flight LH1472 to Cluj-Napoca. The luxury shops that populate any first-world airport promise to make me better-looking and more desirable for a few hundred Euros. Neatly coiffed and tailored Germans stream past me.
As one breaks away from the general population of the airport to the departure gate for Cluj-Napoca in northern Romania, the people change, as if one has already left the comfort of Western Europe. Faces are set harder. Clothes are built for function. It feels like one is leaving the West for the East.
The voice over the loudspeaker reminds me for the 500th time that I need to be wearing a mask at all times to protect me against the possibility of dying from Covid.
In the Ukraine, where I am going, it seems that there are (can it be possible?) greater dangers than the pandemic.
The TV screens above the departure gate show news channels without sound. Each one is discussing the Russian invasion of the Ukraine with the aid of maps, charts and footage showing fighting / columns of refugees / apartment buildings bombed into Stalingrad.
People in the airport (even here where the war is far away) talk only about events in Kharkiv, Kherson and Kyiv. Apparently the Russians are only invading towns starting with the letter K or almost all town names in the Ukraine start with that letter; it’s unclear which is the case.
The TV coverage is relentless. Hell unleashed. They show the mechanical horsemen of the apocalypse clanking slowly through the steppe towards Kyiv in a column 40 miles long. 40 miles long. It would take half an hour to overtake it while driving at considerable speed.
Cities smashed by a child. Toys scattered. Rage let loose.
The gods here are harsh gods. Gods of steel and cold. Or no gods at all.
The TV screens around me in the airport are full of Ukrainians describing what they’ve experienced in the last week. I’m struck by how strong they are. They seem to be people reared on, and strengthened, by stories of their ancestors’ suffering. Millions killed by Cossacks and Mongols, or during the Russian civil war. Starved by Stalin. Victims of WWII.
It seems like time travel to the darkest corners of Europe’s past. Kinds of madness that we had thought lay in the past, not the present.
Is it more shocking because it has happened on the edge of Europe? Have we become too accustomed to war being something that happens in Africa, Asia or South America? Forgetting that Europe is in the centre stage of warfare. The place where it was industrialised and perfected, often in Belgium, France and Eastern Europe.
A woman on a German news channel talks about she was separated from her child as they fled the Russian advance. She cries endlessly. The cameraman cuts to a shot of the crowded border between Ukraine and Romania (or is it Slovakia?) as the Russians advance. The ancient and bloody ghosts of nationalism that have torn Europe apart, summoned once again.
How did this happen? Are those who question the mental stability of the Russian president correct when they claim he has spent a prolonged lockdown isolated from fear of Covid, sitting alone at nights reading books about Russian history and fantasising about past glories? Certainly, it’s possible he has become obsessed with the fact that the Russian state or people are descended from the “Rus”, a group of traders / Viking warriors who formed a state around Kyiv, and now sees this area as the fatherland of Russia. It is also possible that seeing a place like this fall under the spell of the West and flirt with Nato was upsetting to normal Russians. And how much more so to a man who may see himself as Peter the Great 2.0?
It is hard to know what is true, and what is media speculation. The only thing that’s certain is the images on the TV screens around me.
The villages outside Cluj-Napoca are scattered between huge expanses of Transylvanian forest.
Each contains at least two churches, each ornate and onion-domed, surrounded by fields and more forest. Images born to adorn a tin of biscuits, probably heavy in marzipan or almonds.
The airport is less beautiful. On the tarmac, the first thing you notice here is the cold. Eastern European cold is not like normal cold. Firstly it’s colder. Secondly, the cold here is a political force all on its own. Napoleon and Hitler discovered this. And even now the cold dictates the politics shaping the region. Europe can’t afford not to buy fuel from Putin. Putin can’t afford not to sell it to them. Revenue from the pipelines between the two is a considerable percentage of Ukrainian GDP.
The airport is empty, which is a surprise to me given that it is one of the few airports this close to the Ukraine border. A taxi takes me into town. If one wants to talk, a taxi driver is always a good option. This one is no exception.
“The problem,” he tells me, “is that Russians think that the Ukraine is a province of Russia, and the Ukrainians think that Ukraine is its own country. Imagine if New York wanted to join the EU or Texas wanted to be part of Mexico. That’s how Putin sees it. Or course most Russians don’t care at all, they just want to make some money to support their families, and get through the pandemic. Putin is crazy though.”
After negotiating a rate to take me to the Ukrainian border tomorrow, he drops me in the old town of Cluj-Napoca. I find a small coffee shop. Incomprehensible menu. Chipped formica. What I think is an actual samovar. A table of thick-set men smoking. A radio playing music that makes no sense to me, seeming sad and frivolous at the same time. Everyone seems to be eating a stew with unusually shaped pastries on the side. But it also has Wi-Fi — the oxygen of our age — enabling me to send this back to Johannesburg. The coffee here is more bitter than I am accustomed to.