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.

Unvaxxed Nation Wipe Out

The number of new COVID cases in Finland, as in many places, are rising as we enter the pandemic’s 4^th wave. Despite that, it feels like things are going well.

Or maybe it just feels that way personally for me, since I’m now fully vaccinated, and soon (two weeks after the second dose) can travel again outside Finland, at least to certain counties. Estonia is one place we might visit before summer is over.

Looking on the bright side, there have been only two COVID deaths in Finland in the past two weeks, only five for the entire month of July. Hospitalizations are still lower than at the beginning of the 2^nd wave. People are going to restaurants, theaters. In some sense, things seem to be getting better.

Especially compared to the US, the land of my birth, where it seems the whole country has gone bonkers, even if it has a decent full-vaccination rate of almost 50%. That is admittedly higher than Finland’s 31%. (One explanation for Finland’s lower rate is that, facing a shortage in the supply of vaccine, Finland spaced out the two doses 3 months apart, compared to 3 weeks in the States. There is a lag here in the everyone getting the second dose.)

I think Finland will catch up with the US soon. While doing a better job at vaccination at the outset, progress in US is now stalling. It’s clear why – right-wing politics. Of the 30 states that have administered vaccinations below the national rate (below 50%) all but four of voted for Donald Trump. All of the remaining 20 that have done better, vaccinating over half their populations, were Biden states. Nothing could be plainer. For many, failure to get vaccinated is a political act.

And there are consequences. Three states now account for 40% of all new COVID cases: Florida (48% vaccination rate), Texas (43%), Missouri (41%). Those states make up only 17% of the US population, so they are obviously are punching above their weight when it comes to helping the spread of the delta variant.

The consequences are also deadly. Unvaccinated Americans now account for some 97% of COVID deaths. That shows the vaccines are working. Vaccinated folks are much, much less likely to die from COVID. Given that fact, it’s baffling why anyone without genuine medical reasons would refuse a free, safe way to lower their risk of infection. Baffling, but these folks are, of course, powerless against the right-wing media machine that has been fueling vaccine skepticism. 

A host on Newsmax recently floated the idea that vaccines in general go against nature by preventing “a certain amount of people” from being wiped out, like that was a bad thing. It’s true, of course, that vaccines do that, but that’s the point of vaccines. We want them to stop nature from wiping people out.

Considering that the Americans being wiped out are predominately the unvaccinated -- you could say, predominately Trump-supporting conservatives -- you would think hosts on Newsmax and other right-wing outlets would want their prime target audience protected. Apparently, you would be wrong.

Self-destructive antivaccination fervor is nothing new.
Cartoon from the 1930s. 

 

Meanwhile, in the Real World

Last week we saw the six-month anniversary of Joe Biden's inauguration as president. Leading up to that event in January, I saw some MAGA folks on Facebook predicting that Biden would not "last six months". They were very confident. They had no doubt about this. They didn’t specify, however, why they thought Biden would not make it this far in his presidency (I asked one – they chose not to explain).

So, I was left to speculate. I think there were 3 possible scenarios those folks on FB were implying:

1) The Plausible. Biden was so old and feeble that the pressure of being president would kill him. In other words, these MAGA folks had bought into the “Geriatric Joe” narrative peddled by Trump and his supporters. Strangely, Biden has not dropped dead.

2) The Sinister. By this point, Biden would have been killed by some righteous Trump-lover unable to abide the abomination of Biden illegitimately occupying the White House. Maybe some of those MAGA fortunetellers secretly (or not secretly) half-hoped this would happen.

3) The Even More Sinister, Plus Insane. Biden would be “bumped” off by forces aligned with Kamala Harris as part of a Democratic ploy to install the extremely radical Harris in the White House by first winning the election with a more-acceptable candidate (Biden). You have to be deep in the Qanon rabbit hole to believe this, but many Trump supporters are really that deep in that hole.

Needlessly to say, none of these Trump-cult fever dreams have played out. Maybe MAGA folks have conveniently forgotten that they ever predicted Biden would NOT be president by this time. Or maybe they have just moved on to now pinning all their hopes of the expected “reinstatement” of Trump on August 13th. That’s only a couple of weeks from now.

Luckily, we won’t have to wait a whole six months to see those high MAGA hopes dashed on the rocks of reality, you know, here in the real world.

Helsinki Tainted

When it was announced that Joe Biden would be meeting with Vladimir Putin during Biden's June trip to Europe, there was some speculation that the meeting would take place in Helsinki. Hearing this, my wife and I looked at each other and after a moment said, “No way. That won't happen.”

Since 2018, Helsinki has been forever tainted as a meeting place between American and Russian leaders. No American president in their right mind would want any reminder of that disastrous meeting here three years ago to cloud their own. That’s Trump’s legacy. He ruined Helsinki for US-Russian summits. It’s like the disgrace associated with Munich after Neville Chamberlain’s trip there in 1938. At least, Trump didn’t promise Sudetenland to Putin. Or did he?

A week ago Trump issued this ridiculous "statement", doubling down on his taking Putin’s side over the US government’s. He’s even proud of it. So refreshing to think that it's Biden meeting with Putin in Geneva today, and not that embarrassing game show host who shamelessly kow-towed to the Russian leader just a few miles from where I live.