Blog number 14 – October 18, 2022

Yesterday, I got into a cab at the Riga airport – a Baltic taxi vehicle – and soon we were in conversation. We were speaking Latvian and I detected a Russian accent when he was talking about the weather that week. Not to miss an opportunity, I asked him what the situation is in the city now in terms of war anxiety. He said he didn’t listen to the news, it was just fooling people. He got all the information he needed from blogs on the Internet and YouTube. I asked if the situation affected his work. He replied that, as firemen, the teams don’t discuss politics. One just doesn’t discuss these topics because people have different opinions.

So naturally I asked him his opinion, in Russian. He responded that the war has been very disruptive for no good reason. He wasn’t sure how it would end, but he has relatives in Donetsk who were happy to have the Russians take over. When asked why, specifically, he responded that now there was peace, parts of the city were being rebuilt and that his relatives were happy to see the end of the war – which, for them had been raging since the end of 2014. The markets are full of produce. Under Ukraine rule, there was no help from the state, pensioners couldn’t even receive their pensions – it seemed to them that the system had stopped working completely and they were forced to survive…somehow. These people were happy that they would be part of Russia now.

They were happy as well because the bombing stopped. I asked which bombing and he said the constant bombing from Ukraine side since 2014. In fact, they had been neglected since 1994, when Ukraine formally took over. The taxi driver mentioned that it was like Latgale region (rural and impoverished) in Latvia had been until the city of Daugavpils have been renovated. But the villages are still neglected.

He said that other friends in Mariupole have reported that the city was being rebuilt. The bombing of buildings, which might have been started by Russians, was continued and one could say “completed” by Ukrainians destroying structures they were abandoning. Based on accounts from his friends, most of the infrastructure had been destroyed by the Ukrainian Army. When I mentioned hospitals being targeted by Russian rockets, he responded that Russian artillery only targeted military targets and they hit targets precisely. I didn’t mention the footage from BBC and CNN which showed the maternity hospital being hit. Instead, I just mentioned that it may have been precise at the beginning, but soon it stopped being so, on account of artillery pieces wearing out. The barrels were made to withstand 1500 firings with accuracy, but now had fired on average 5000 times without having been replaced. He was silent.

I mentioned that one famous individual said: “The first casualty of war…is the truth.” He did not disagree, he smiled. He said that refugees coming here to Latvia have been told to give accounts that are consistent with Ukraine’s message. To make sure they did so, the Ukrainian immigration office told them they had relatives in Ukraine – “don’t forget that.” So they cannot say anything positive about the Russians or their occupation. I did not tell him that was not my experience. The family from Izium I met in September said that under Russian occupation, men had disappeared, or more precisely were continuing to disappear (The matriarch had actually said, quietly, in a resigned voice, that upon refusing to collaborate with Russian forces—refusing to spying on their behalf or to ‘catch partisans’-- these plain Joe’s were disappearing, for example, on their way home from the bar or from get-togethers with friends).

The driver also complained that many of the Ukrainians here in Latvia were driving around in Mercedes and other luxury vehicles – they were not poor.

Understanding that I wasn’t going to either convince him or get the unvarnished truth, I decided to ask instead about his own situation in Latvia. He replied he wasn’t happy that he had to work three jobs to live satisfactorily--as a fireman, as a taxi driver and I didn’t ask him about third but it was not a great situation I had to agree. However, when he brought up examples of persons earning a good salary, which is what he ended up earning, this was in the vicinity of €4000-5000 per month. That is good for Latvia, where living costs are 2/3’s of what they are in France or Germany. Not just in Latvia, but in all of Europe, with the exception of the large cities. I mentioned that the director of the emergency medical = service for East Anglia[1], which is a significant part of England, who had responsibility for some hundred and 50 ambulance teams, earned a paltry €38,000 a year in 2015. One can only imagine how much less the ambulance drivers were earning.

I am not sure that people understand now, even 18 years after being accepted into the EU, that large salaries are limited to a few industries for a few towns in Europe for the general public. For example, as a medium-sized building contractor in a hot building market, one can do spectacularly well in all the Western Hemisphere…and in resort towns of East Asia as well.

But back to the taxi driver; he had just earned €34 for a 20 minute drive, tip included. He would have another ride teed up immediately upon departure, so it wouldn’t surprise me if he had generated a gross of €80 in one hour. Though he mentioned a friend that got a job and moved to Moscow, where he was living happily, he didn’t say he would be following him…but it wasn’t for the things that might motivate a Westerner – and by golly there are thousands of foreign-born people of Latvian descent who had returned from North America or Western Europe to the country because since 1994 it had offered freedom of expression, an opportunity to start a business on a shoestring, cheap lodging (although now it was as expensive as Spain or Greece), and such intangibles as good security, rule of law and a sense of fair play. The current president would know that better than others… He is a Latvian-American who founded a successful ice making business in the country.

Instead, the taxi driver communicated that he was doing okay here – just well enough to not be tempted to pull up stakes and take off to Russia (at the moment, with conscription in full progress, this would be absurd, but we were speaking in general) – yet his obsession with money is typical for many, many of the post-Soviet Russians I had met – or the “New Russians” as Hedrick Smith called them – in fact, the entire Mafia dominance of the economy in the 90s is based on this obsession. To kill competitors seemed an obvious strategic action for them. In this sense, there is an insurmountable chasm between contemporary Russia and Western liberal democracies--which place primary value on human life and – at least through the 1990s – an emphasis on equality of opportunity for most citizens. The plutocratic movement in the United States has dealt a body blow to the latter, but still, the Briton George Savile’s admonition about plutocrats still holds, by-and-large: “They who are of the opinion that money will do everything, may very well be suspected to do everything for money.” Bold and simple. Voltaire may have purloined that from him when writing: “Don’t think money does everything or you are going to end up doing everything for money.” And it is certainly probable that Benjamin Franklin borrowed that phrase for poor Richard’s almanac, when he wrote: “He that is of the opinion money will do every thing, may well be suspected of doing every thing for money.” Three brilliant minds who reflected the most enlightened segment of their respective countries’ leadership all agreed on that subject.

And this thought is one, which I haven’t heard mentioned yet by others when analyzing Putin’s strategy. But, frankly- speaking this element of his governing philosophy is going to be Putin’s Achilles’ heel, because Putin earnestly believes that money does everything, as such, he is assuming that the ace in his deck is that he can furnish Germany and all of Western Europe (but Germany’s key) with cheap energy. He assumes, that Germany as well will do everything for money so the savings Germany achieves by buying Russian Gas will drive Germany into abandoning Ukraine – that is the only logical path for that country. Germany, however, values its liberal democratic order to the point that people will make sacrifices, which will cost them – definitely in the short term – significant discomfort and for some companies even bankruptcy. Putin, instead of understanding, let alone empathizing with the sentiment, believes this to be an act of irrational self-harm… Something a late-stage schizophrenic would do. And one does not negotiate with crazy people… one bombs them. At this point, I would give the possibility of nuclear Armageddon about a 10% chance of being the final outcome in this situation. Germany and the UK hold the key to NATO.

Despite our differing opinions, the taxi driver expressed satisfaction with being able to discuss the topic openly, if not for the mere satisfaction of making the 20 minute ride “pass quickly” and he cheerily brought my suitcases to the gate. Sometimes, one has to be satisfied with small concessions.

[1] An incredibly extroverted and charismatic man, who mentored dozens of ambulance teams in Sierra Leone to work safely during the 2014-15 Ebola outbreak