Freelander

Visa isuing policies can be either symmetrical or asymmetrical. Whereas the first type is, I assume, a matter of bilateral agreements between two given countries (or blocks), the second type is more likely a result of “the market”, meaning that the most “demanded” or “valued” country sets harder conditions for isuing visas to foreigners from the less demanded ones. We in the west are used to profiting from asymmetrical visa policies: because most emigration streams come to the west from less developed parts of the world, we can afford restricting entrance to foreigners from those regions and enjoy the more laxed visa requirements (often none at all) when we travel there.

Well, I have said “we can afford” but perhaps, to be fair, it would be more precise to say “we must”, because otherwise our countries would be flooded with illegal aliens (or in the best case cheap tourists who do not spend any money here) and risk a deterioration of our own economies and welfare. On the part of those “poorer” countries, however, such caution is not needed because — well, we are richer, spend more money and anyway what kind of westerner is interested in staying illegally in–say–Ethiopia?

For this reason, whenever there is an asymmetrical visa policy between two countries, it is assumed that that which has the lesser restrictions is the poorer and/or weaker, economically and/or politically. This is not always true, but is a common and unavoidable implication.

As an avid traveller, for many years I struggled with the “bizarre” fact that it was so difficult to get a visa to Russia. Being an undeniable reality that there are (or were) many more Russians willing to gatecrash into the west than viceversa, I got even indignant at Russia’s stubborn insistence on a symmetrical visa policy. Why on earth–thought I–they do not just let us in visa-free same as Ukraine, Ethiopia or Georgia does? They would certainly profit from a lot more income from tourism and, gee!, who on earth wants to sneak into Russia? Continue reading →

(Image: pinterest.com)

Yes, I also uttered that watchword once. But before scolding me with swinish fury in your comments, please let me tell you how it happened.

It was my very first trip to Ukraine. I knew nothing about that country except that it was a former SSR, many people spoke Russian and there were beautiful women. Seizing the chance that no visa was required for European citizens, I simply crossed the border from Poland, where I was by then, and landed in Lviv. There I sought accommodation in a youth hostel, packed as they usually are by young people, in this case mostly Ukrainians–plus some other senior travellers like myself–by whom I felt warmly received. Thanks to Couchsurfing (that extremely useful but ill-fated website) I soon got acquainted with a bunch of other equally welcoming Ukrainians eager to meet foreigners (on which to preach their cause, as I later found out). In less than a week, I saw myself in the company of a dozen new enthusiastic acquaintances who were very happy to join me up, engage in conversations and show me around. It didn’t take me long, however, to realize that there was, among these folks–and generally in Lviv–a sort of atmosphere that felt quite familiar to me, since I had previously seen something similar in two other places: Catalonia (a well-known secessionist region in Spain) and Ireland. Continue reading →

The ‘international community’ that subscribes the ‘rules-based’ order. (Image: vk.com)

For the past few months, one expression is being repeated by the leaders, politicians, elites and journalists all over the West: A rules-based international order.

Although the term was coined at the end of the Cold War, it has recently gained enormous momentum after Moscow’s recognition of the Lugansk PR and the Donetsk PR as independent states on February 21st 2022, reaching all corners of the planet and being echoed everywhere, from Juneau to Wellington, throughout the whole US-led Collective West. We can hear the slogan incessantly repeated by the dubiously-legitimate 46th president of the United States of America, ‘Big Mouth’ Joseph Robinette Biden, every time he sees himself in front of a microphone, as well as by that globalist cyborg and White House parrot who is Mrs. Ursula Vonderleyen, president of the European Commission as of today. ‘We must rally around a rules-based international order’, we get ad nauseam coming out of our TV sets’ and electronic devices’ speakers; ‘We are aiming to a rules-based world order’, we read on every media terminal owned by the harbingers of such a concept.

And it certainly sounds good. It could not be otherwise, given these people’s ability Continue reading →

Once more, Mrs. Ursula Vonderleyen has managed to chill her audience with her eloquent words: “We all know that Ukrainians are ready to die for the European perspective. We want them to live with us the European dream.” These two sentences were, in my opinion, the key ones in the speech she, literally wrapped in the colours of the Ukrainian flag, gave at a news conference in Brussels on June 17th. Both sentences I deem worthy of some thoughts.

“We all know that Ukrainians are ready to die for the European perspective”, she pathetically said. Well — to begin with, I find it a bit odd -and somewhat enigmatic too- her picking of the word ‘perspective’. This detail got me a bit baffled. Why ‘perspective’ instead of, let’s say, ‘ideals’ or ‘values’, which would’ve seemed more appropriate and grandiose for the occasion? As I understand, words in political speech are carefully chosen so they transmit very particular meanings and shades; therefore, if Ursula said ‘perspective’, perspective she meant and not something else. But whatever be the hue she wanted to tint her sentence with, it comes to me so subtle and hard to guess that I’m not feeling capable of successfully undertake the task of guessing; so I won’t even try.

In any case, what I think important to focus on is the following: if ‘we all’ Europeans ‘know’ that Ukrainians are ready to die for our perspective, then you can bet we know a lot more than they themselves do. I thought -alongside with so many other people, I’m sure- that Ukrainians were dying to defend -what they consider- their territory from -what they consider- an ilegitimate invasion. Dying, by the way, quite reluctantly and not so ‘readily’ as Vonderleyen fantasizes. I know for a fact that, except for the extreme nationalists, Ukrainian soldiers in general don’t want to fight this fratricidal war (neither do the Russians, by the way). A high proportion of the Ukrainian population has some sort of relatives in Russia, and killing each other isn’t to anyone’s taste.

But to get back on track, Continue reading →

A couple of months after the special military operation in Ukraine begun, one of my most trustworthy Russian contacts (who, by the way, generally dislikes Vladimir Putin) told me the following, shocking story:

“Yesterday I was talking with a doctor who works in a military hospital not far from here, to where some of our soldiers, that had been captured in the Donbass, were recently brought back after being liberated by our troops. It was a group of around thirty young men, aged 23 to 29. You know… they had all been castrated while in captivity; and not by the Ukrainian military -who, like our servicemen, took an oath- but by the militias of the nationalist brigades, whom the Ukrainian government has legalized and now cannot control any longer. These militias behave like terrorists, disguise as civilians -being therefore very difficult to spot among the population- hide behind children and enjoy cruelty.”

Let’s for a moment forget about the second half of this story, since it might, arguably, be somewhat subjective — or at least we don’t know, in principle, how accurately depicts the average behaviour and tactics of the Ukrainian nationalist brigades. But as to the main atrocious point, I deem it an indisputable fact; and the image of those thirty young prisoners, barbarously maimed by their captors, was so disgusting to me that, for some weeks, I tried -unsuccessfully- to expel it from my mind.

Later on, by sheer chance, on the internet I stumbled upon the stark remarks that Grennadiy Druzenko, manager of a war-zone mobile hospital in eastern Ukraine, had made to an interviewer of Ukraine-24 TV channel around the same date when the story I’ve just mentioned took place. In Druzenko’s own words, he had given his doctors “very strict orders to castrate all [captured Russian] men, because they are cockroaches, not people.” And though he, afterwards, tried to take his words back saying that his hospital “saves lives, period”, the connection between my friend’s story and Druzenko’s statement was straightforward, and the inference unavoidable: facts talk by themselves, evidencing that such practice has been carried out and strongly suggesting that the castration of Russian soldiers is, indeed, not wholly unusual among Ukrainian nationalists. This brutality not only constitutes a blatant war crime, but also says volumes about the racial cleansing inherent to their ‘ideology’. Castrated individuals, you see, cannot procreate.

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