Day 87

Day 87 of Russia’s unprovoked war against Ukraine. It’s been a busy week for Finland. On Monday the Finnish parliament debated NATO membership for 14 hours. How much debate there was, is itself debatable, since when the vote was held the next day there was overwhelming support for the move, with only 8 parliament members voting against it (out of 200), mostly from the Left Alliance party.

Following the vote, Russia’s foreign minister Sergei Lavrov, declared that Finland and Sweden joining NATO doesn’t really matter to the Kremlin after all. Which begs the question: if a neighboring country joining NATO is no big deal, then what was all that rigamarole about Russia having no choice but to invade Ukraine because a neighboring country even contemplating joining the western alliance could not be tolerated by Russia.

The following day Finland, along with Sweden, formally delivered its application to Jens Stoltenberg, general secretary of NATO and fellow Nordic. The day after that, Finnish president Sauli Niinistö traveled straight from Sweden, where he was making a state visit (prompted by the NATO application), to Washington to meet with Joe Biden. Sauli’s been busy. 

And he did manage to talk by phone to Putin last week, expressing his view of Finland’s situation in a clear and straightforward manner. Putin, in turn, told Niinistö that Finland would be making a mistake by joining NATO. Which seems to fly in the face of what Lavrov said.

The Russians are saying a lot of things. Someone on Russian state TV explained that the USSR never invaded Finland in 1939, but rather merely “moved our borders deeper into Finland”. Defense Minister Shoigu also said last week that Sweden and Finland’s membership in NATO would force Russia to create 12 army “units and division” in the military district bordering Finland.

As of 7:00 this morning, Russia shut off the pipeline supplying natural gas to Finland. Luckily, Finland is not very dependent on gas in general, and the government has just signed a 10-year contract with an American company to lease the ship Exemplar, a “floating storage and regasification vessel” to help Finland import gas from other sources.

A small brewery in Savonlinna, not that far from the border that the USSR "moved" in 1939, is now marketing NATO-inspired beer, called "OTAN", which happens to be the French acronym for NATO and the Finnish word for "I take", commonly used when taking a good, hearty swig of beer. The Olof Brewing is planning to ship some samples to Joe Biden and Jens Stoltenberg. No word whether they will send some to Putin. 

Recently, I happened to notice that our cable TV package now includes, along with CNN, BBC, etc., the Nickelodeon cartoon channel – in Ukrainian. Unexpected. The only explanation I can come up with is that it’s for the benefit of Ukrainian children who are now in Finland as refugees. Though it’s true that, even before the war, Ukrainians has made up a large part of seasonal labor force in Finland. Whether there will be fewer Ukrainian strawberry pickers this summer due to men remaining in Ukraine to fight, I have no idea.  

Day 74

Day 74 of Russia’s unprovoked war in Ukraine. This past week the Finnish army was holding its annual mechanized war exercises (which I guess means using tanks, etc.), named Arrow 22. This year, units from the American, British, Latvian and Estonian armies were taking part. Such a joint exercise with four NATO militaries at this particular moment, of course, doesn't go unnoticed. It's even gotten the attention of the international media, with CNN at least doing a segment on it. The British defence minister was onhand to watch the exercises in person. He pledged that Britain would definitely come to Finland's aid in the case of a Russian attack.

Meanwhile, also this past week, a Russian helicopter encroached 4 kilometers into Finnish airspace, though nowhere near where Arrow 22 was taking place.

Neste, Finland's partly state-owned oil company, will take delivery of its last shipment of Russian crude oil in July, replacing it with North Sea oil. The Helsingin Sanomat has reported that before the war started an average of six tankers a week delivered oil from Russia, supplying two-thirds of Finland's crude oil imports. Now that's been reduced to just one tanker a week.

Finland is proceeding fast with its plans to join NATO. You might say Russia is not happy about this. One concrete threat already made by Russia is that the Saimaa Canal might be closed if Finland follows through joining the western alliance. The canal, half of which runs through Russian territory, gives Finland's massive Lake Saimaa freshwater system access to the Baltic Sea at the former Finnish city of Viipuri. Last summer, we watched a Russian freighter pass through the Mälkiä lock, the first lock on the voyage down the canal from Saimaa.

The canal was built over 165 years ago when Finland was a Grand Duchy of Russia, and has been operated by Finland since 1963. Finland holds a lease on the Russian part of the canal until 2063. A lot of industry in eastern Finland uses the canal for international trade. Towns deep inside Finland, like my wife's hometown of Varkaus, historically a big paper-making center, have benefited from the ship traffic the canal makes possible. It's clearly more important to Finland than to Russia. There was a danger that EU sanctions against Russia would put a stop to use of the canal when it reopened after the usual winter break. But then it was decided that ship traffic between Finland and Russia via the canal does not fall under the sanctions.

The war is having some effect anyway. While the canal officially opened for the 2022 traffic season on 28 March, actual ship traffic had to wait for the ice to melt enough by itself, without human help. Normally, sea-based ice breakers would have cleared the ice-bound sections of the canal with the opening of the season. But the operators of the ice breakers decided not to this year due to the risk of the canal being shut unepectedly, preventing their return back down the canal to the sea. Ironically, the ice breakers could have become stuck in Lake Saimaa in the summer. Now the Russia Duma is warning that Finland's 50-year lease on the canal could be "revised" if it joins NATO, a clear threat to close the canal.

Tomorrow is May 9th, Victory Day in Russia. There were reports that Putin wanted to have the whole military adventure in Ukraine wrapped up by then in order to put on a huge Victory Day celebration. Now, it seems he might use the occasion to officially declare war on Ukraine (not just a special military operation). As if things could get worse. Or maybe they can.

A Modest Proposal

With the leak of the Supreme Court draft decision concerning abortion, it is now clear that Roe v. Wade will soon be overturned and abortion will become illegal in many states. Many people are upset by this. Many people, no doubt, are celebrating. It is a divisive issue. I have some thoughts. And a possible compromise solution. A modest proposal.

The goal of Pro-Choice folks is to prevent unwanted pregnancies. The goal of Pro-Lifers is to prevent abortions. If you think about it, both goals can be achieved (for the most part) by tightly regulating pregnancies.

Why do pregnancies occur? Because of sperm. The woman’s egg also, of course, but without the sperm there is no pregnancy. It takes two to tango.

The easiest way to do this is through vasectomies. All males could be required to have a vasectomy before reproductive age, say at the age of 13. No exceptions. It could even be seen (maybe ironically) as a ritual of manhood. “Now you are old enough to have sex, young man.” without the worry of getting the girl pregnant. The demand for abortions then largely disappears (except in the cases where there are risks to the mother in continuing a pregnancy).

The vasectomy would be reversed only when the man is ready to become a father. Of course, the man could still cause unwanted pregnancies at that point by having unauthorized sex through rape, incest, or adultery.

But this could also be easily controlled (the technology exists) by taking DNA samples of every 13-year-old boy getting a vasectomy – which would be all boys turning 13). It would be part of the ritual. The resulting DNA database of all American men of reproductive age could be compared to the DNA of every baby born to determine exactly who the father is. In the of case rape or incest, they would be castrated. In the case of adultery, they pay child support or be castrated.

There are still some details to brainstorm, of course, but I think this could work! And it would put most abortion doctors out of business, just like the conservatives on the Supreme Court want.

Day 61

Day 61 of Russia’s unprovoked war in Ukraine. The Finnish parliament began debating NATO membership last week. Russia already warned over a month ago that Finland joining the Western alliance would “require retaliatory measures” on its part, with Sergei Belyayev, head of the Russian foreign ministry’s European department, promising “serious military and political consequences”.

More recently, former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev, now deputy chairman of the Russian Security Council, said Russia would be forced to increase its military presence in the Baltic. He went so far as to threaten ending the “nuclear-free” status of the region, which surely means at least deploying nuclear weapons to Kaliningrad. (Whether they have been there all along is another question.)

A week or so ago a video was shared on social media supposedly showing Russia military equipment moving along a highway toward the Finnish border. That turned out to be from some years ago, so in no way evidence of a recent threat.

In fact, a Finnish expert estimates that Russian forces normally based near Finland have been “severely degraded” since the war in Ukraine started. So, maybe Russia is less of a threat now than before.

Military equipment is going the other way, however. Finland has now shipped a third wave of arms and military supplies to Ukraine. Unlike in the first wave, the government has not revealed specially what was included in the more recent shipments.

Meanwhile, Finland is reducing its dependence on Russian energy. Starting yesterday, Finland has started cutting back on the electricity it imports from Russia, which is reportedly about a third of its electricity imports and 10% of its total consumption. Luckily, much of the shortfall from the loss of Russian power can be compensated by Finland’s fifth nuclear reactor when it finally comes fully online soon.

Until a mere two years ago Russia was Finland’s only source of natural gas, via a cross-border pipeline. That one has now been supplemented by an undersea pipeline from Estonia that can supply up to a third of Finland's LNG needs. We are otherwise not as dependant on Russia as are Germany or other countries anyway, since natural gas accounts for only 6% of energy consumptions here. 

In any case, Finland will stop all gas imports from Russia and turn to other sources to replace it, which means importing via tanker ships -- despite currently having no LNG terminals where to offload the ships. As a temporary solution, it has agreed with Estonia to share a floating LNG terminal to be used to supply both countries with non-Russian gas.

Reducing dependence on Russian crude oil (70% of Finnish oil imports) and coal (about half of imports) is also underway. While existing contracts are still being honored, no new ones being signed. The Finnish state railway company is also being pressured to stop transporting Russian coal through Finland for export to other countries well before the EU sanctions deadline of August. 

It seems clear that Finland will likely never return as the good customer it was for Russia's energy business, even after the bloody war in Ukraine finally concludes.

Wolf traps and steppe quagmires

We recently sold my mother-in-law’s apartment in Varkaus, my wife’s hometown in the heart of the Finnish lake district 200 miles from Helsinki. It’s been over a year since my mother-in-law moved to a nursing home, so it was high time we did something with the apartment that we use only occasionally on visits to Varkaus. Selling the apartment, of course, required emptying and cleaning the place, which means discovering the kinds of random personal items and keepsakes accumulated over the years by a long-married couple. One of these little items was a lapel pin, with a distinctive emblem and the obviously German word “Rüsselsheim”. 

I was curious why my in-laws would have such a obscure little thing. The word “Rüsselsheim” said nothing to me, and I found the symbol on the pin a little unsettling. Then my wife informed me that Rüsselsheim, Germany, is a sister city to Varkaus. Obviously, this was a trinket handed out to promote friendly international relations at an excruciatingly local level. Varkaus, after all, is not a big place. 

Rüsselsheim am Main is about three times larger, according to its Wikipedia page, from which I also learned about the symbols on the lapel pin, the Rüsslsheim coat of arms. The zig-zag, Z-shaped symbol is a “Doppelhaken” (double hook), sometimes called a “Wolfsangel” or “wolf’s hook”, due to the gruesome fact that it resembles a metal hook used in Germany in medieval times to trap wolves. It was literally used like a fishhook to snare a wolf unlucky enough to take the bait of raw meat surrounding the Z-shaped metal. 

There must be something intrinsically appealing about the stylized rendering of this instrument of death, maybe something in its simple esthetics, because over time the Doppelhaken became associated with magical powers and strong symbolism -- which maybe not surprisingly led to it being widely adopted by the Nazi Party. For this reason, Doppelhaken symbols are now banned in Germany, except when used – as in the case of the lapel pin we found in Varkaus – as part of a traditional coat of arms. Outside Germany it is sadly still used by some far-right movements, such as the Azov Battalion in Ukraine. 

(Interestingly, the Finnish word for swastika is “hakaristi”, or “hook cross”. Also, Varkaus’ own coat of arms features an actual arm holding a different kind of hook, an anchor.) 

The coat of arms of Varkaus.

Anyway, I say there must be something appealing in the simple esthetics of Z-shapes, because it is remarkable how quickly the letter Z has been adopted in Russia as the symbol of patriotism in less than two weeks following Vladimir Putin’s criminal invasion of Ukraine. And this only because the Russian army painted the Z-symbol conspicuously on many of its tanks. Clearly, the image of Russian tanks marked with Zs inspired somebody to turn that simple symbol into a new patriotic fetish. And this despite many of those Z-marked tanks now seem ingloriously to be bogged down in the mud of the Ukraine steppes, or otherwise destroyed. But the Russian public doesn’t see those images. 

It seems many folks in Russia are now rallying around this new symbol of Russian pride, a letter that does not exist in the Russian alphabet, by displaying it with the same zeal that Trump supporters in America banish their “Make America Great Again” hat or “Let’s Go Brandon” flags. To drive the point home even further, Russians are also combining the Z with the another widely used “virtue signal” of Russian ethnonationalism, the St. George ribbon. I had noticed those orange-and-black-striped ribbons tied on car rear-view mirrors everywhere in St. Petersburg the last time we were there – which, as things are going now, might well be THE very last time we visit St. Petersburg. 

So, now all “right-thinking” Russians – like Germans under the Third Reich – are enthusiastically embracing a symbol that harkens back to medieval times based solely on the fact that the Russian army invading Ukraine painted Zs on their tanks, rocket launchers, and other modern instruments of death. What a strange world we live in.

Russian children presenting their country's newest patriotic fetish.