Archives: Newsletters

A year after the trio of Georgia, Ukraine and Moldova applied for EU membership, Georgia was hoping to be granted candidate status by the end of 2023. But then the ruling Georgian Dream party proposed a law on “foreign agents”. The draft proposal triggered fierce protests, with critics claiming it was “dictated by Moscow”, and some comparing the citizens’ reaction to the Euromaidan in Ukraine in 2014.

Although the government has never openly rejected the country’s European aspirations, it has displayed anti-Western rhetoric since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022. It has refused to join Western sanctions against Russia or to provide military assistance to Ukraine. Tbilisi justifies this on the grounds of neutrality, in order to prevent another Russian invasion of Georgia. Moreover, the government has accused the opposition, “some Western powers,” and the Ukrainian authorities of acting as “war parties” that are “trying to drag Georgia into the war and open a second front against Russia.”

After the government was forced to backtrack on passing the bill, its rhetoric has only become harsher, suggesting the retreat might only be tactical.

As the country awaits a decision on candidate status, the government continues to blame the “war party” for its potential failure. Meanwhile, civil society and the media are eager to debunk the pro-Russian narratives. A second disappointment could lead to greater unrest and damage Georgian Dream’s chances in the 2024 parliamentary election.

A majority of Georgians believe that economic development and the country’s security depend on Euro-Atlantic integration and that turning towards Russia is not an option. People have proven that they are ready to defend Georgia’s European future, as shown by the iconic image of a woman waving the EU flag against a water cannon on 7 March in Tbilisi.

“Incredible Georgian people who understand that friends need to be supported! There are, indeed, times when citizens are not the government, but better than the government.”
Volodymyr Zelenskyy

Since 2005, Ukraine and Georgia had considered each other the closest allies in the region. But that changed once Russia launched a full-scale invasion on Ukraine’s soil. On 26 February 2022, Ukrainian president Zelenskyy began a statement war between Ukrainian and Georgian officials, which continues today.

While Georgians poured onto the streets of their cities to protest against Russia’s attack on Ukraine, the Georgian government refused to impose sanctions against the Kremlin.

Over the following year, top Ukrainian officials accused Tbilisi of being too indecisive, duplicitous or even pro-Russian, while Georgian ministers and MPs replied that the Ukrainian side was “provocative” and “arrogant”.

In the last week, history repeated itself: Zelenskyy supported the recent pro-EU Georgian protesters and wished them “democratic success”, while Georgian prime minister Irakli Gabriashvili said that Ukrainian officials “should take care of their own country”.

Last summer, Georgia hoped to be accepted as an EU candidate country along with Ukraine and Moldova, but fell short. Estonia’s outgoing two-term foreign minister Urmas Reinsalu explains why that happened, why Georgians might be disappointed again and why a historically supportive Estonia is now disillusioned with Georgia’s progress towards EU accession.

Why are some countries in the EU not supporting Georgia’s candidacy?

Leaving more technocratic aspects aside, the main problem is the functioning of the rule of law and democracy in Georgia. We do not see any determined efforts by the Georgian government. The people of Georgia are very much in favour of integration with the West. Therefore, the government supports it rhetorically, but its practical approach is one of regression.

Great hopes were placed in Georgia’s accession process in 2008. How has it changed from an Estonian perspective?

Estonia’s instinctive sympathy for Georgia was the cornerstone of our relations after the country fell victim to Russia’s invasion in 2008. We have supported them despite various political developments since that time.

However, the events of the last few years have disturbed us. We have repeatedly expressed our disappointment at the suppression of the opposition. Estonia cannot remain silent on this.

Symbolic of this is the deterioration of the former President Mikheil Saakashvili’s health in prison. I have personally campaigned for him to be given the opportunity to receive medical treatment abroad. We have also offered medical assistance on our own behalf. These requests have not been met with a positive response.

One of these disappointments could be the Georgian reaction to the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine?

Considering that Georgia itself is a victim of [a Russian] invasion, the attitude of the government in Tbilisi has been far too lenient. Politically, it is still a like-minded country, but we have not seen a firm attitude towards the hundreds of thousands of Russians being allowed to pour into Georgia. The same goes for Georgia’s approach towards sanctions against Russia.

How many years does it take to repeal a law that forces NGOs to register as foreign agents? In Hungary: four years and a court ruling.

In 2017, the Hungarian Parliament passed a bill that obliged organisations receiving at least 7.2 million HUF (18,500 EUR) annually from abroad to register with the courts or face a fine.

Civil society protests went unheard, but not by the European Union. Following a ruling by the European Court of Justice and pressure from the European Commission, the law was revoked in 2021. No NGO has ever been fined. But Georgia, which followed in Hungary’s footsteps with a similarly controversial bill, lacks the EU’s legal umbrella. The Hungarian case proves the rule of law can be upheld in the EU, even if one country does not like the decision.

In the run-up to Montenegro’s presidential elections on 19 March, the mantra of EU membership is once again a major campaign promise in the country. All candidates are pledging to speed up reforms, so that the country can become an EU member before 2028. Despite these bold promises, EU membership may remain unattainable for this small country on the Adriatic Sea with 620,000 citizens – as it is for others in the Balkan region where EU promises have fallen short.

Montenegro launched its EU negotiation process in June 2012, but so far only three of the 33 negotiating chapters have been closed. The process has already taken longer than for the other former Yugoslav republic Croatia, which completed negotiations in six years, and was the last country to join the EU in 2013.

While the country struggles with political interference in state institutions, the European Commission repeatedly warns in its annual progress reports that parties are failing to reach consensus on important issues of national interest.

The most recent example was that the parliament finally appointed new constitutional court judges after six months of strong pressure from the EU. These appointments require a two-thirds majority of parliament, and MPs could not agree on the judges for months, so that the court had no decision-making quorum. But there is still no agreement on who should be the new Attorney General or the head of the Supreme Court.

Under the Constitution, the president has no power to propose laws or appoint officials. However, this weak position could be turned into a strength: Whoever comes first in the elections should promote dialogue between the ruling parties and the opposition in order to speed up the reforms needed for accession.

With more than 80 percent of the population in favour of becoming an EU member, it is now high time to accelerate the reform process necessary for accession – so that the 2028 deadline doesn’t become an empty electoral slogan again.

Tamara, 34, has a delicate frame, an elegant face and a bright smile. She is always happy to have her picture taken, loves talking to her six-year-old son about different car brands, and collects vintage Ukrainian clothes and accessories. She still wears a wedding ring, despite recently becoming a widow, like thousands of other Ukrainian women after a year of full-scale war.

Her husband Oleksiy Yanin was a world champion in Thai boxing ― and a soldier with the Azov regiment since 2014. Azov defended the frontline in some of the most intense moments of the war so far, and last April its soldiers were surrounded by the Russian Army in Mariupol. Oleksiy died there.

Tamara had a hard time coping with his death. She didn’t even kiss him goodbye at the train station on the morning of 24 February, when she last saw him. “Everything I do now is for you, about you, in the name of your memory,” she writes in messages to Oleksiy, which he will never read. Her gratitude and pride have become stronger than pain. Caring for others is what gives her strength now.

A month after Oleksiy’s death, she began to take care of the families of other dead Azov soldiers. Tamara met them in chat rooms where relatives were discussing how to identify bodies and bury their remains. Many of these women used to live in the now-occupied territories, so they lost not only their husbands or sons, but also their home, belongings and their livelihoods. Tamara began collecting clothes, food, medicine, hygiene products and books for women and children displaced by war, and helps them find jobs and a place to stay. In a room she uses as a location for goods and aid, the walls are covered with widows’ phone numbers.

“I just love all of them, unconditionally. I understand them like no one else. And this is how I thank their husbands,” says Tamara. She has stepped out of her role as a traditional wife and a mother of a son on maternity leave, and has become a “collective mother”, supporting women united by grief and loss.

30 out of the 101 seats in the Estonian parliament will be occupied by female candidates after last week’s general election. This matches the average political representation of women in the EU.

Even though the sitting Prime Minister Kaja Kallas earned a record-breaking 31,800 votes, just 13 out of the 37 seats won by her Reform party will be taken by women.

Still, 30 female deputies is the highest number of women ever to be elected to the parliament in Tallinn. Progress to gender equality follows a slow and winding road, even though, this time, there appeared to be more public calls to the electorate to cast their votes in favour of a female candidate.

“We are strong, we are proud, we are feminist, radical and angry”. In recent weeks, this classic hymn of feminist protest has echoed through demonstrations against the Government’s pension reform. Women are at the forefront of dissent to the policy, which plans to raise the legal retirement age from 62 to 64 and to increase the number of active years required to obtain a full pension.

Women will be the biggest losers. In France, as elsewhere, women’s careers are often interrupted. They are the ones who take breaks from work to bear and raise children. They also tend to be the ones who work part-time to care for sick or ageing family members. Plus they are often shut out of leadership roles or positions of responsibility, which are largely entrusted to men.

The consequences of this sexist career structure are economic: women in France earn on average 15.8% less than men. It is even worse once they reach retirement age: women’s pensions are 28% lower on average than those of men.

The pension reform risks reinforcing these inequalities by asking women to work longer. Even the Minister Delegate for Parliamentary Relations, Franck Riester, has acknowledged that “women are somewhat penalised by the postponement of the legal retirement age”.

Other factors also play a role, such as the non-recognition of the arduous nature of certain jobs, mostly carried out by women, which deprives them of obtaining early retirement.

In the protests, women’s collectives are hijacking songs and choreographing militant dances to make these inequalities more visible. This year, the traditional Women’s Day demonstration on 8 March has a socially conscious slogan: the abandonment of this anti-feminist pension reform.

“I have always wondered what a trigger this little word ‘feminist’ is. What we are striving for with these guidelines is something that should actually be self-evident in the 21st century.

Women make up half of the society in any country. A feminist foreign policy is therefore not a fighting term, it is derived from our constitution. And it’s certainly not trivial. It is a hard security issue.”

Germany’s Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock presented the guidelines for her envisioned “feminist foreign policy” last week. Political opponents have derided her for the creation of what they felt was another meaningless buzzword, with one of them calling it the “emotional gratification of domestic politics”.

Yet, Baerbock’s goals are simple: to create a foreign policy in which the human aspect prevails. That means bringing women to the forefront: “When women are safer,” she said, “Everyone is safer.”

I became a ‘feminist’ because of rage. When a child, I only cried publicly when I perceived something was unjust. Like knowing it was much easier to be a boy than a girl. Boys were allowed to do more things. Later, I put names to those feelings and concepts: feminism.

In adulthood, I tried to navigate all the contradictions, from being raised in a sexist world (I still prefer the Spanish word: machismo) to overcompensating with thoughts such as ‘I’m not a victim’ and ‘I’m succeeding because of my personal effort’ and so on. But it’s not only personal effort, but the effort of so many women before us.

Spain is one of the most progressive countries in terms of law: the Government has just proposed a law making parity in electoral lists mandatory. It has one of the longest paternity leaves in Europe (non-transferable), and so on. Not bad for a country that some in Europe still perceive as Catholic-conservative, is it?

Maybe the laws were introduced too early and society wasn’t prepared, some say. There is still ‘machismo’ in Spain. In everyday life, in the streets where women face harassment, in the wives still beaten by their husbands, the social pressures and expectations on women, we still suffer.

I would be happy for the day when a woman can be as mediocre as a man and still access the same opportunities. Some men say to women like me in Spain, who ask for more equal rights: ‘Spain is one of the most ‘feminist’ countries, why don’t you go to Iran to protest? There they have problems, not here’.

But I am radically convinced that you don’t have to wait for a society to ‘be prepared’ to start making changes, especially when they’re about justice and equality. Spanish society will surely catch up with the mindset that has drawn up these new laws.

I know there are countries where the conditions of women are worse than in Spain. But now is the time to speak about our rights and duties, and where room for improvement is needed, supported by the laws and beyond them.

In October, we wrote of a possible new far-right prime minister emerging on the continent. Martin Helme’s Estonian National Conservative (EKRE) party was breaking records in public support “with no ceiling in sight”, ahead of elections on 5 March this year. Now it appears he has smacked his head on the roof.

Before the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022, EKRE was the leading party in the polls, and the struggling prime minister Kaja Kallas of the centre-right liberal Reform Party was scrambling to hold onto her position.

The 24th of February also happens to be Estonia’s Independence Day. This made the start of the invasion especially dramatic. This country, too, had been occupied by Russia. The prime minister’s numerous Putin-bashing appearances in international media over the past year have boosted her domestic political standing.

But the more energy prices soared, the better Helme’s party performed against Kallas’s liberals. In their adverts, EKRE proclaimed: “We will save Estonia!” Their campaign bet on crippling energy prices that never happened, because of the milder-than-usual winter.

Martin Helme has tried blaming high energy prices on Kaja Kallas and Ursula von der Leyen. On 24 February this year, a grinning Kallas celebrated Estonia’s 105th Independence Day with von der Leyen herself, and NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg in Tallinn. Kallas knows that these “globalists” standing beside her irritate Helme and EKRE, but bolsters her own support.

Helme had been betting on an energy weapon that has been firing blanks. At times, the market prices were even lower than the government rate, which were designed for customers who prefer stable costs.

The chances of a far-right Estonian prime minister are not dead in the water. But as we enter the last week of the campaign, it is Helme’s pro-European arch-nemesis who is all smiles.

In Germany six months ago, the buzzword “hot autumn” was everywhere. This was not due to seasonally high temperatures, but reflected a growing fear at the time: Germany’s soaring energy prices would lead to mass-scale social unrest.

As it turned out, skyrocketing inflation did not trigger riots in the streets. The German government was helped by a mild winter, but also took pre-emptive measures to reduce potential public disorder. But you would be mistaken in thinking energy issues didn’t capture the attention of the German people.

In January, thousands of protestors swarmed into the village of Lützerath to prevent the extension of a coal mine. This time, the German government abandoned its soft mitigation strategy and opted for repression.

On Twitter, climate activist Luisa Neubauer made a simple plea to her leaders: to be able to protest without being criminalised. But when it comes to respecting such civil liberties, Germany measures different demonstrations on different scales.

This weekend, Russia has announced that it will cut all oil and gas supplies to Poland. The Polish government claims this will not harm the economy because it is already importing oil from other countries. If this is the case, why has Poland been importing raw materials from Russia for months, worth hundreds of millions of dollars, allowing Russia to finance the war in Ukraine?

Russia first cut off Poland completely from gas in the second quarter of last year, and then did the same a few days ago with oil.

Before this happened, Poland was the largest importer of Russian oil in the European Union. Hypocrisy ensued: while the government loudly criticised other EU countries, especially Germany, for importing raw materials from Russia, it quietly did the same.

When Germany stopped all oil supplies from Russia from the 1 January 2023, the government in Warsaw continued to allow the black gold to flow from Moscow.
Why this discrepancy?

Perhaps the issue is about the huge profits which the state-controlled company Orlen has made thanks to cheap oil from Russia. Last year this amounted to 21.5 billion zlotys, or 5.2 billion euros.

This money goes into the state budget and towards the political projects of those in power. Thanks to this cash, Orlen has purchased several regional newspapers. Local media is often a propaganda vehicle for those in power and a vital tool in the upcoming parliamentary elections this year.

For those in power, staying in power is the overriding value. Poland could have diversified its energy resources much faster, and not had to rely so much on its old rival in the east. It is good that Poland is no longer importing Russian oil and gas, but this did not happen because of a decision by Warsaw. Ultimately, this was Moscow’s choice.

In 2022, electricity production in France decreased by 15% compared to 2021, to its lowest level in 30 years. To compensate, the country imported electricity for the first time since 1980.

This unprecedented situation, in the context of an energy crisis, is due to a drop in nuclear power generation. France’s reactors are ageing and half were shut down at the same time last winter for maintenance.

Yet the nuclear lobby is still strong: Europe’s attempt to move away from energy dependence on Russia has bolstered its case.

I enjoy my night light, though it’s located outside my apartment. Lamps on my street in Kyiv have a warm orange hue. It reflects on my walls, adding cosiness to the place where I stay.

Last year, I barely saw it. For several months after Russia’s full-scale invasion started, Ukraine switched to the dim mode. Lights could help the enemy detect or reach its targets, so the whole nation kept them switched off.

Once the occupiers were repelled from Kyiv, this low mode ended. But after 10 October, Russia massively attacked the Ukrainian energy infrastructure, and darkness came back.

I remember last November as a month when my colleagues were hastily searching for cafés with a diesel generator, so they could finish writing their articles. Our chat, once a place for sharing memes and planning barbecues, resembled a hackathon: we were talking about how to access the Internet without electricity, what we need to use car batteries at home, and where to find LED lights with a USB connection.

The hardest thing was knowing it would get worse: Ukraine didn’t have enough means of air defence at that time.

Now, for several weeks, there have been almost no blackouts in Ukraine. Thanks to the allies, army and electricians, our skies are far better protected, and the energy system is partially restored. It’s the Russian side which is exhausted now, having spent the bulk of their missiles.

After the windows in the opposite house became bright, street lighting also came back. My flat is cosier again. And my friends are wondering: could we ever imagine, back in November, that the light would return so fast?

It’s definitely not over yet. But Ukraine once again became an illustration of the inspirational phrase about the need to keep fighting even when the prospects are dark. Things can get brighter afterwards.

In Ukrainian cities, many things can happen at the same time at 9am on a Sunday morning. Services in churches begin. Loudspeakers announce a nationwide minute of silence for those killed in the war. A message drops into an online chat room: “Russian missiles may soon be fired from the Black Sea area.”

On the morning of 19 February, church bells ring over the Kyiv hills. I’m standing a few steps away from the ancient Tithe Church. It was destroyed in 1240 when the Mongol ruler Batu Khan stormed Kyiv. At that time, people hid in the church, hoping the consecrated stone walls would protect them.

Ukraine is a secular country where the church is separate from the state. But the role of religion, and Christianity in particular, should not be underestimated. According to surveys, 44% of Ukrainians trust the church. After a year of full-scale war, however, this trust has diminished ― we now have more faith in our army than in God.

The sound of the bells carries far in the cold air. Different people gather for prayer: elderly women, a couple with a small child, and a fair-haired woman on a bicycle. An idyllic picture, if one did not know that this tiny temple, which Ukrainian journalists call a ‘kiosk’ due to its size and poor location, will soon have to be demolished. This is due to a court order. This church is part of a monastery belonging to the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate (UOCMP), which remains loyal to Moscow and is, in fact, under the Russian Orthodox Church. At the head of this temple is Bishop Gideon, who was stripped of his Ukrainian citizenship in December because he had a Russian passport. Dual citizenship is illegal in Ukraine.

The nuns, dressed in black, argue about who left the green cloth under the bench. In a few minutes, the oldest nun will use it to wipe the icons. Priests will say prayers for unity and for those in captivity. In Russian. It feels like God is being lied to, shamelessly.

In August, the head of the UOCMP, Metropolitan Onufriy, received captured Russian soldiers and even blessed them. He doesn’t pay the same attention to the Ukrainian military, though. Ukraine accused one UOCMP priest of collaborating with and supporting Russia, and extradited him in the direction of Moscow. This made at least 101 Ukrainians happy, as they returned home as part of this prisoner exchange.

“Perhaps we are atheists, but we are atheists of the Kyiv Patriarchate,” some friends of mine have joked. Though they aren’t really religious, this reveals their political attitude. In 2019, pro-Ukrainian Orthodox priests founded the independent Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU). This was recognised by the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople, the Istanbul-based ‘higher authority’ of the Eastern Orthodox Church. Ukraine’s move was not unprecedented. In some ways, it righted a historical wrong. In 1686, the Kyiv Seat was temporarily given to the Russian church. Now this ‘temporary’ state of affairs has come to an end. Since then, the question of religious choice no longer arose for many truly devout people. However, it became impossible for worshippers to justify attending a pro-Moscow church on the grounds that it was “more legitimate” than its Ukrainian counterpart.

Only a few minutes’ walk from the “kiosk” is OCU’s St. Michael’s Golden-Domed Monastery. I still have time to go there. I listen to the priest’s Sunday sermon, standing among dozens of people. In front of me is a young man in the uniform of the Ukrainian army. On the walls hang portraits of those who died in the war, starting with the executions of the Heavenly Hundred during the Revolution of Dignity in 2014.

Sometimes the choice of where to pray not only depends on God.

For 2022, the city of Mariupol’s planned budget growth was 18%. Before the full-scale war, the port city was one of the richest Ukrainian cities: taxes paid by local industry helped create a prosperous local economy.

This money was allocated to build a new park and a transport depot, and to support festivals dedicated to classical music, literature and modern art.

Thanks to its thriving artistic scene, Mariupol received the status of the Ukrainian cultural capital in 2021. Delicious seafood from the Sea of Azov and speciality dishes prepared by the 20,000s of ethnic Greeks also made Mariupol a destination for foodies.

The full-scale war has altered Ukraine’s power structure, delivering a deadly blow to the country’s wealthy and politically-connected elite.

“Today this group [the oligarchs] doesn’t influence politics, the economy or the media anymore,” Ukraine’s National Security and Defence Council Secretary Oleksiy Danilov said in a recent interview.

In late 2021, President Volodymyr Zelensky made the colloquial term ‘oligarch’ official by signing an anti-oligarch law, which stated that this moniker refers to a wealthy person with a net worth of over $80 million, who owns or influences both media and politics. Many thought that decreasing the oligarch’s powers would need years. It took only days.

Soon after Russia began bombarding Ukraine on 24 February 2022, the TV stations, some of which are owned by oligarchs, were forcibly merged into a continuous government-run news telethon, which is still airing today. The same day, the National Security and Defence Council imposed martial law, with the president becoming the country’s sole power holder.

Now, many oligarchs are losing their wealth and assets due to Russian attacks and the government’s consolidation of power.

Two major oligarchs, Ihor Kolomoiskyi and Kostyantyn Zhevago, who are facing legal troubles in Ukraine and abroad, were stripped of some of their assets by the authorities last November. This included energy companies Ukrnafta, Ukrtatnafta, and vehicle manufacturer AutoKraz. Prior to that, Kolomoiskyi’s Kremenchuk oil refinery was destroyed by Russian missiles in May. Two months later, the president stripped Kolomoiskyi of his Ukrainian citizenship.

Oligarch Rinat Akhmetov lost most of his pre-war fortune of $7.6 billion after Russia sacked and pillaged his native Donbas, where most of his assets are located. This includes steel mills in Mariupol, which boasted an annual production of 8.6 million tonnes, 90% of his holding company’s steel yield.

In June, Akhmetov closed his media company, the biggest in the country.

According to Forbes Ukraine, the 20 wealthiest people in Ukraine lost $20 billion in 2022. However, it’s too early to draw conclusions on what this means in the long-term, says Oleksandr Lemenov, co-founder of the NGO StateWatch. “The war has only hit the financial interests of certain oligarchs, nothing more,” says Lemenov. “The oligarchy will be ‘killed’ by stable democracy, a strong middle class, and stable political institutions.”

Shards of glass set in gold ― pictures of these lapel pins went viral in mid-February, when a Ukrainian delegation presented these unique accessories at the conference ‘Ukraine out of Blackout’ in Paris. The glass comes from the windows of The Khanenko Museum, Kyiv, which were blown out by a blast when the Russians shelled the city centre with missiles last October.

The pins made by the museum became artworks themselves, and a symbol of the suffering Ukraine had to endure to capture the world’s attention.

One of these pins was presented to Audrey Azoulay, Director-General of UNESCO. Faced with Russia’s attempt to erase Ukrainian heritage and culture, it is vital for the world to act preventatively to preserve Ukraine’s most precious assets. If the country overall is protected ― its culture is also protected.

The walls of the Khanenko Museum, usually home to the largest collection of world art in Ukraine, are now empty. Unlike hundreds of heavily looted and bombed institutions in other Ukrainian regions, the museum has evacuated its artworks to safe locations.

In Zaporizhzhia, where I was born and raised, there was a so-called “Lenin Reserve”. Lenin Avenue ended at Lenin Square, where the Lenin monument stood, pointing to the river port and the hydropower station, both named after Lenin. There was logic to this: it was during the early USSR when Zaporizhzhia received a modern makeover, and at that time, a lot of things were named after Lenin.

With the start of Ukraine’s decommunisation in 2015, signs with Lenin gradually disappeared. The last one was at the “Lenin” art gallery near the “Lenin Reserve”. It mocked Lenin’s presence in the city, and ceased to exist in 2020 when its founder died. Now there is almost nothing left of Lenin in Zaporizhzhia.

A few weeks ago, a monument to General Nikolai Vatutin, a Russian-born Red Army commander who liberated the city from the Nazis, was demolished in Kyiv. A year ago, many people were against its removal. Now there are almost no opponents.

Even in Odesa, which was considered Russia-friendly, a monument to 18th century Emperor Catherine the Great was recently demolished. Just a year ago, no one would have imagined this.

The Russian invasion has radically changed attitudes towards everything Russian in Ukraine. Monuments to Russian personalities are disappearing, streets are being renamed, often to their historical names, showing how the Russian Empire and the USSR have entrenched Russian culture in Ukraine.

Now Ukrainians, most of whom were bilingual, are giving up the Russian language, music, literature, and cinema. Putin’s desire to rewrite Ukrainian history and portray Ukraine as a part of Russia has had the opposite effect. And that cannot be stopped, even if the war ends tomorrow.

Now I live in Kyiv, not far from “Minska” metro station, named after the Belorussian capital. Soon it will also be renamed ― probably after Warsaw. This station is on the road to Belarus, from where Russian tanks rolled towards Kyiv in February. And it was this invading force who smashed everything that was still Russian in Ukraine.

The tragedy in Turkey has shocked its neighbours and the rest of the world. In Greek cities like Athens and Thessaloniki, volunteers collected food, clothes for adults and babies, first aid kits, painkillers and other medicine, blankets, sleeping bags and cash to send to the affected zones. By last Thursday, Greece has sent 90 tonnes of aid to Turkey.

The deadly earthquake of 6 February cost the lives of more than 37,000 people. This reminded me of the deadly earthquake of 1999 in both countries. In Turkey, 17,000 people died in that incident, and 143 in Athens. Greek and Turkish rescue teams worked together. Then as now, the Greek and Turkish foreign ministers met and spoke warmly, giving hope for a change in the relations between the two countries.

In the same spirit, people on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram are posting photos of Greek and Turkish rescue teams joining forces, or Greeks retrieving survivors from the ruins.

Greek media detailing the tragedy includes headlines such as “Wave of solidarity for the people in Turkey”, “Humanitarian aid collection points for the earthquake victims in Turkey-Syria”and “The thanks of the Turks on social media for the help of Greece.”

The solidarity between the two countries has become breaking news in the west. The foreign press speaks about a new era between these two old “enemies”. They often forget or do not know the history of these countries. Beyond the wars, the differences, the nationalism and its instrumentalisation for political gain, are the people.

The diplomatic history between Greece and Turkey is complex and controversial. For a reader trying to grapple with the intricacies, it develops like a spiral that drags you down and crash-lands you. Beyond and above politics are people; they always are, regardless of whether many forget this.

The EU had deployed 1,652 emergency responders to Turkey through its Civil Protection Mechanism by the time we went to press. They are part of the 36 EU medical and technical teams currently in the area providing emergency support.

The number of EU rescue personnel responding to this disaster is unprecedented. As a comparison, a similar contingent of 250 specialists was recently sent to Chile to combat the dangerous wildfires, affecting around 300,000 ha of forests and claiming 24 lives.

The current teams are only first responders, more material and financial aid will be provided to the disaster struck area in the forthcoming weeks.

Looking for good examples of cross-border cooperation between EU countries? Poland has shown how this should not be done.

Odra is Poland’s second-largest river, and runs along a section of the Polish-German border. Part of its basin is also on the German side. A shared river means common problems and challenges: protection of the environment, defence against floods, the maintenance of bridges, and the development of tourism.

Besides major floods (the biggest in Poland took place in 1997), nothing happened around the Odra of interest to journalists in the national media, until the dry summer of 2022. Photos of thousands of dead fish flowing down the Odra went viral through Europe. A major river in Poland haddied.

Finally, the poisoned wave reached Germany. If the Polish had informed the Germans of the coming environmental disaster, they would have had time to prepare. They would have cut off the rivers and canals flowing into the Odra, and mobilised their emergency services.

Nobody from Poland called their neighbours or even sent an email. Instead, allegations by national-conservative activists appeared, arguing that the Germans had poisoned the Odra, and were trying to shift the blame on the Poles.

These accusations sounded surreal; it would mean the poison would have had to flow upstream, because the first dead fish were spotted 200 km from the German border, deep into Polish territory, and closer to the source.

The poisoning of the Odra may be repeated this summer. The river is still salted, the water level will most likely drop due to hot weather and climate change. Poland will face legislative elections and the anti-German narrative is important to the national-conservative ruling PiS party.

Will that again be the reason, why nobody from Warsaw will message Berlin?

Based in Gaziantep,Turkey, Hakim Khaldi is the head of studies for the Middle East zone in the French NGO Médecins Sans Frontières, which is responding to humanitarian needs in northern Syria after the earthquake killed more than 37,000 people in the region, including more than 3500 in Syria.

What are the current needs in Syria?
On the medical side, there are needs at all levels. The majority of people living in the Idlib area are displaced, even multiple-displaced. When the earthquake happened on Monday (6 February), a lot of people flocked to the hospitals. Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) has one of the few burn hospitals in the opposition areas. We had to donate equipment, vehicles and medical teams to the affected areas. Border hospitals do not have the capacity to treat Syrians, many of whom are seriously injured, and most [nearby] Turkish hospitals have been destroyed or damaged. The current situation takes us back five years. There are even fewer hard buildings available and even more people living in tents.

Syria is a country at war and many States do not recognise the legitimacy of Bashar al-Assad’s regime. How does this complicate the delivery of humanitarian aid?
There are two main complexities. The first is that Syria is a country at war. The second is that Western countries cannot send bilateral aid because of US sanctions. In Turkey, on the other hand, aid has been sent by several states, including France, Qatar and Saudi Arabia. However, they cannot land a humanitarian plane in Damascus or Aleppo. They are therefore dependent on border countries to deliver aid.

Is this also complex because the region of Idlib, the last enclave of the Syrian opposition, is beyond the control of the regime?
The regime does not provide any aid there. In northern Syria, the population is dependent on the international border crossing Bab al-Hawa, on the Syrian-Turkish border. The absence of bilateral aid has major consequences for MSF: our emergency stock is empty. We have to ask for emergency orders, but it takes time, since Turkey is itself affected by the earthquake. Since 2014, a UN resolution has renewed the Bab al-Hawa corridor every six months, which complicates the continuity of the healthcare system.

Austerity is over in Germany! Two hundred billion Euro for reining in wild inflation and energy prices, another hundred billion for gearing up the military, and … 2.7 billion for humanitarian aid in 2023?

What seems like a drizzle compared to other recent money showers is actually the world’s second-largest budget for global crisis and disaster relief, trailing only behind the United States. But while putting money on the table can be important, Germany glosses over one simple fact: that quantity doesn’t always equal quality.

Relief en masse

Germany’s budget for international humanitarian aid makes even the European Commission pale in comparison. But what the country needs is the organisational structure to put its money where somebody else’s mouth is. Instead, much of it is shoved into large organisations. “Help has to become a lot more localised,” criticised Ralf Südhoff, who heads the Centre for Humanitarian Action, a Berlin-based think tank.

Ironically, this centralised trend is almost reversed within Germany itself. While the federal government is tasked with protecting its people in times of crisis, each of Germany’s sixteen states has its own relief services for natural disasters, 90 percent of which is run by trained volunteers. What they lack is funding and coordination, both between states and within the federal hierarchy.

History lessons

When in July 2021, the Ahr valley in Germany’s southwest suffered a devastating flood, push came to shove: more than 130 people died, because local authorities misinterpreted warning signs and issued evacuation orders too late. The area is prone to flooding, but history, too, was disregarded. Human lives could’ve been saved, had the state taken the existential threat of natural disasters seriously.

Unfortunately, little has improved since. Warning sirens remain underfunded, joint protocols have hardly been established, and climate change issues still aren’t front and centre.

When Karl Marx wrote his Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, he claimed that great historic events tend to repeat themselves: first as tragedy, then as farce. Tragedy has already happened in Germany. The farce is to believe we’ll heed the siren’s call next time.

Last summer, I had a discussion with Ukrainian journalists on the German Baltic Sea – the same coast where the North Stream 2 pipeline reaches the mainland in the village of Lubmin.

It wasn’t long before they, many of whom risked their lives on the Maidan eight years earlier in the revolution against a bent Moscow puppet regime, asked me: “There is so much corruption in Germany. Why does the public tolerate it?”

Germany – a corrupt country? The accusation would probably shock many Germans.

But this perception is not unusual. I can’t remember how often I’ve been confronted with this criticism in Hungary when conversing with investigative journalists.

The questionable involvement of the German car industry in Hungary’s corrupt economy and the perception that some German publishers have not covered themselves with glory when protecting their former media assets from takeover by Viktor Orbán’s clique are part of this tone. As is the view that Angela Merkel neglected Hungarian democracy in favour of German economic interests.

Sure, in Germany you don’t have to bribe the doctor to get an appointment. But while Germans cast a critical eye on corruption in other countries, they rarely turn their gaze on themselves with the same vigour.

How else can it be explained that Minister President Manuela Schwesig of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, who set up a cover-up foundation to realise North Stream 2 in tandem with Gazprom, is still in office today? Or that Putin’s friend and lobbyist, ex-chancellor Gerhard Schröder is not expelled from the SPD?

Hopefully we will soon realise that the strategic corruption “Made in Germany” can cause far more damage than everyday corruption in the “wild East” or “lazy South”.

Then maybe I could tell Ukrainian colleagues about big anti-corruption protests in Germany – instead of demonstrations in Lubmin to stop sanctions against Russia.

Ranked 14th best by Transparency International in terms of perceived level of public sector corruption, Estonia is less dodgy than the UK, France or Japan. This may seem bewildering to Estonians themselves.

Take Kohtla-Järve, the fifth-largest city. At the end of last year, nine of the 25 members of the city council and the governing coalition were declared suspects in a bribery and influence peddling case.

This was followed by the council’s attempt to put together a “rainbow coalition of the uncorrupt”. In the end, only nine of the “uncorrupt” 16 council members voted in favour of it, leaving the city with a minority government. How do Kohtla-Järve’s citizens perceive corruption? Probably as something right before their eyes.

“Corruption kills” – hundreds of thousands took to the streets of Romania for weeks during the cold winter of 2015-2016, echoing this slogan. The #colectivrevolution was sparked by the tragedy at the Colectiv night-club in the capital Bucharest, where 64 people died in a fire in November 2015.

When the protestors realised the disaster was caused by irregularities overlooked by authorities, they turned against corruption with rage. As the expected results from years of a so-called war against corruption failed to materialise, the government of Victor Ponta resigned.

Since then, Romania is often cited as a positive example of anti-graft measures, which is both true and false. The judicial reform has transformed Romania step by step. Anti-corruption institutions have been set up. Over the last decade, corruption perception in the country has shown an upward trend. Following the protests, Romania’s corruption ranking has clearly improved.

Unfortunately, this is not necessarily because of the country’s outstanding performance, but because of increased levels of corruption in neighbouring countries. Tellingly, at the end of 2022, Austria vetoed Romania’s Schengen accession due to the level of corruption.

Most corruption cases still concern public procurement procedures in Romania, and there are still serious problems with Romania’s border controls, but vetoing Schengen is counterproductive.

Corruption cuts across borders. It is our common European problem. Whether we like it or not: we are bound together. Romanian society has a unique commitment to corruption-free politics and this needs European support.

The veto, on the other hand, is hurting the people, not the criminals. While several central European countries show a growing indifference to corruption, it would be wrong to punish a society that does not think that way and still resists.

“Imagine cancelling your tax residence from the country where your head is on the coins”, the tweet says.

In Spain, corruption has reached the highest level: the monarchy. After decades of a policy of eyes wide shut to the shady business of Juan Carlos I (our first King after the Franco dictatorship), the scandal grew so big that he was forced to abdicate to save the institution.

So now, as “emeritus King” Juan Carlos lives in “exile” in the United Arab Emirates, where he had previously used his status as the Spanish monarch to make business.

Juan Carlos has even changed his tax residency to the UAE to avoid investigation by the Spanish Treasury for tax evasion regarding juicy ‘presents’ from his Arab friends. Surreal, isn’t it? So much that the Spanish can only do one thing: laugh.

Ten years ago, it seemed hopeless. Corruption in Ukraine was so ubiquitous it was hard to name a sector that bribery and sleaze did not infect. Education, customs, medicine ― at every level of society was a corrupt method of getting things done, which was the easier route for many citizens.

Then-president Victor Yanukovych headed the trend, amassing a treasure trove of bribes. The 2013-14 clashes started partly because people were fed up with corruption. New president, Petro Poroshenko, won using the slogan: “Living in a new way”.

At first, everything went according to plan. Comically clumsy, pot-bellied bribe-takers from the transport police were fired, and new staff replaced them. After training, the officers worked according to western standards. Even well-paid managers or lawyers joined the traffic cops.

With transport police it was ― and is ― a success. But high-profile corruption remained: people like oligarch Dmytro Firtash were forced to leave the country, but kept their wealth. Five years ago, society radiated disappointment. New president Volodymyr Zelensky won a landslide with the promise: “As spring comes, we’ll start putting corrupt people in jail.”

Yet again nothing happened. Firstly, the pandemic messed up his plans, then Russia invaded. Ukraine had even bigger challenges ― until the war caused the biggest anti-corruption shift ever.

Without financial help from the West, Ukraine can’t make ends meet ― and our allies have set the rules for access to cash. One of these rules is reliability. That’s why our anti-corruption bodies are finally working at their full capacity.

Last week, in a true crackdown on the Ukrainian corrupt officials, investigators ordered hundreds of searches, and many suspects were detained. Several regional governors lost their posts, as well as customs and tax service management.

In a strange situation where war and hardship push Ukraine towards the rule of law, our only hope is that the effect will be long-lasting.

European countries are facing a wave of attempts to repress dissent, although our collective awareness as a continent is still low.

The debut of Giorgia Meloni’s government was disconcerting. On 31 October, thousands were allowed to gather to celebrate the centenary of Mussolini’s March on Rome, at his birthplace at Predappio. In the same period, the police were beating up students protesting against an event attended by members of Meloni’s party, at La Sapienza University in Rome.

An ill wind was blowing that gave birth to the so-called “rave decree”. After police evacuated a rave in Modena, the far-right government launched a plan to ban gatherings of more than 50 people, if they “occupy places and threaten public order”. The debate escalated and coalition partner Forza Italia succeeded in smoothing the decree.

The problem of limiting dissent not only concerns Italy. In February 2022, Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, an old friend of the Italian right wing, issued a decree restricting the right to strike. Strikes are not formally banned, but the decree had a concrete impact on teachers who were protesting for a better education system and wage increases:

“If I want to strike, I am still obliged to teach at least half my lessons, or even all of them for the final year students,” Bea Berta, a Hungarian teacher, told Domani.

Some who engaged in civil disobedience, like Katalin Törley, a teacher in a Budapest high school, were fired.

As workers’ protests increase, governments are rushing through anti-strike laws. The Conservative government in the UK has pushed a bill to guarantee a minimum service as a means to indirectly restrict strikes.

Facing protests against pension reform, the French government has made similar considerations: Transport minister Clément Beaune wants to guarantee a “minimum service” during strikes. Ironically enough, they call it “the Italian model”.

UK prime minister Rishi Sunak is choosing a Thatcherite approach to tackling mass strikes in Britain. He is even pushing an anti-strike bill to mandate minimum service levels in sectors such as health, education, fire and rescue and transport during strike periods. This bill also allows bosses in the private and public sectors to fire striking workers.

Despite the hard talk, trade unions and their members are giving no indication they will bow to government pressure. However, the Tories’ insistence on repeating their post-2010s austerity policy, when inequality is so deep in this country, will give workers way more reasons to strike.

Trade unions were blasted by the Conservative leader Margaret Thatcher as the “enemy within” at the height of the “Winter of Discontent”, the long series of strikes in 1978 and 1979, which brought down the then-Labour Government. This label has re-entered the debate now, at a time when so many are going on strike.

Trade unions in the UK are central to the country’s social development, as they founded the Labour Party, alongside socialist intellectuals in 1900, and helped bring in the Labour government of Clement Atlee in 1945, which established the National Health Service. Union membership rose to 9.5 million, almost 20 percent of the population, in 1950.

Now, the cost of living crisis, the social impact of over twelve years of Conservative austerity measures, mounting inflation and the need to raise wages and improve working conditions are keys to understanding the massive wave of protest.

On 1 February, teachers, civil servants, university lecturers, security guards, train and bus drivers will walk out in what is expected to be the single largest strike action day in the last 10 years, with half a million people expected to withdraw their labour, proving that UK unions are standing their ground, despite all odds.

“I quit France in 2005: too many trade unions. Too many strikes. Too much complaining. Too much labour protection”
– these words belong to Grégoire Nitot, founder and CEO of Sii, an IT company that operates in Poland.

Nitot wrote them in an email in November to one of his employees, Krystian Kosowski, who wanted to establish a trade union in Sii. For the CEO, Kosowski was “attacking Sii”, and “motivated” his colleagues “to fight against Sii as well”. Eventually, the IT company fired him.

The level of unionisation is low in Poland, barely at 12.9%. But the country has a rich tradition of trade unions. In the 1980s, more than 10 million citizens belonged to the opposition “Solidarność” (Solidarity) movement, which overthrew the communists in 1989. However, the end of communism and the collapse of many state-owned enterprises led to the exclusion of trade unions.

Thus, Poland, where unions are lacking or poorly organised, is again starting from scratch when it comes to defending workers’ rights.

In Kosovo last September, high-school and elementary school teachers spent a total of 132 hours on strike, demanding a pay rise. This was the equivalent of 22 days of classes.

The teachers fought a highly politicised system in a country that is only now building a culture of civic and labour dissent. However, they did not gain a pay boost, and now must work at weekends to make up for the lost days. But they dared to make a stand.

Germans do not see strikes as an option for political advancement. Strikes for political aims are de facto banned. Withdrawing one’s work is considered only a means within a labour struggle, but not for any other goal.

But last year, I learned that a strike once had a major impact on the political landscape in Germany: In March 1920 a giant pro-democratic general strike prevented a right-wing regime from coming to power for 13 years.

I came upon this event in an autobiographical account by my great-grandfather, who was a mayor in a small German municipality during the First World War. Apparently, he was one of the co-founders of the local group of the far-right Deutsche Vaterlandspartei (German Homeland Party).

In March 1920, the Treaty of Versailles obliged Germany to reduce its troops immensely. But some anti-democratic forces in the military refused to dissolve their troops and challenged the newly elected government in an attempted coup. As an anti-democrat, my great-grandfather supported the coup openly. The putsch failed, and he lost his job.

Why did the putsch fail? That’s where we come to the striking part: on the one hand, the putschists had no common plan.

Most significantly, 12 million pro-democratic workers stopped their work for several days, and showed that the infrastructure and means of production was in the hands of the people and the people did not support the coup. Without buses, trains, newspapers, telephones or mail, and in Berlin without water and electricity, the regime couldn’t hold onto power.
In his text, my great-grandfather wanted to convey some doctrines to his descendents which to me seem rather frightening.

But what I learned was something different: although I tend to be suspicious of the collective will of the German people, there was one moment when it performed a powerful, pro-democracy action.

When I was a child, collecting firewood was often intertwined with danger. I grew up in a village near the Oleshky sands ― a natural desert near Kherson. Legend has it that some centuries ago there were meadows there, but the horses and sheep of the invading Crimean Tatars ate up all the grass.

In Soviet times, after the Second World War, pine forests were planted there. Schoolchildren put the seeds in straight rows, so from above these forests looked like combed hair. Still, the heart of the area was mostly treeless ― and the Soviet army decided to take advantage of it.

Thousands of bombs were dropped there, as the military tested their power. Some were equipped with parachutes, so many people from nearby villages now have a chute in their household, which is a handy cloth to clean freshly-picked vegetables before taking them to the market. To collect firewood, the locals went into this forest-desert, sometimes blowing themselves up on unexploded bombs.

In this century, though, the place was a rather safe tourist attraction. Spending a night there, I never saw more stars in the sky.

Last year, the Russians came there. They chopped many trees for the trenches and used the desert as a training ground. The place became dangerous again.

The same happened to many other forests in the occupied areas of Ukraine. The Russian army laid down weapons there, dug trenches or buried victims. During their retreat, they heavily mined everything. If you go into the woods around Izyum, Bucha, or Lyman, you never know if you’ll come back.

By horrible coincidence, infrastructure in these settlements is often destroyed. State and private initiatives for heating don’t cover everyone’s needs, so many locals can only warm their homes by cutting down trees, even if there may be the danger of explosives or fines for illegal logging. “Freezing temperatures scare me more than these [threats],” one logger from Izyum told the media.

Invaders turn many places in Ukraine to deserts, again. Our only hope is that one day life will return there.

Soaring energy prices have turned firewood into a precious commodity in Hungary. To manage this crisis, the government continued its trend of putting a price cap, this time on firewood. Households could buy 10m3 at a subsidised price of 30 to 76 Euro – roughly enough to heat an average family home during winter.

But when prices are cheaper, demand is higher. The state forestry companies ran out of logs for sale, while private sellers tripled their prices. The government came up with a solution: easing regulations to cut down the nation’s forests.

Thousands protested, forcing the ministry to backtrack and prove that even in times of emergency, the environment always comes first.

When one door closes for someone, a window opens for someone else. That’s the case with Spanish wood pellets, which boomed in exports in 2022. This biofuel made from pressed wood is such a hot export product that locals now refer to the pellets as ‘brown gold’.

The increasing use of biomass in Europe, which accounts for up to 60% of all energy produced from renewable sources and the Russian invasion of Ukraine have turned the European energy market upside down, and Spain is seizing its opportunity.

Russia was the main supplier of wood pellets to the ‘old continent’. Now, with the embargo imposed on both Moscow and Minsk, some European importers like Italy and the United Kingdom are struggling to find supplies of this precious substance.

Spain is now filling the gap in the market.

Thanks to EU regulations facilitating exports, Spanish wood pellets sold to Italy increased by 67.1% last year. 11,593 tonnes were also sent to the UK. The Iberian country was already providing wood pellets to London before Brexit, with a peak in 2017.

After the UK left the EU in 2020, Britain started buying Russian pellets and Spanish numbers dropped to less than a third. With the general trend to move away from Russian energy sources, British consumers have switched back to importing the biofuel from Spain, with sales up 15.1% in 2022 compared to 2021.

But the golden egg for Spanish wood pellet sellers is France, since its government decided in 2018 to promote biomass, mainly for heating. The results have been especially noticeable last year, when exports increased by 148.9%. With more and more French households opting for this alternative, it is unlikely that Spanish wood pellets will fall out of favour, even after the war ends.

“You have to burn with everything at the moment, except of course tyres, or things like that. Poland has to be warmed up.”

This is what Jarosław Kaczyński, leader of the ruling Law and Justice Party, said last September, after the EU embargo on Russian coal entered into force. Since then, the price of firewood has doubled in the country, where 28.8% of households heat with wood.

A 34-year-old resident of northern Poland took Kaczyński’s words to heart. When a municipal police patrol knocked on his door to penalise him for burning unauthorised materials, the man claimed that Kaczyński had publicly allowed him to do so, and refused to pay a fine of 500 Zloty (about 105 euros).

The case will end up in court, which will probably pass a guilty verdict: The words of the Law and Justice chairman have no legal value.

Markus von Willert is the editor of waldhilfe.de, an advisory website for private forest owners. He has also worked as a forest & sustainability expert for the Federal Association of German sawmill and timber industry (DeSH).

What are the challenges for forest management in the face of climate change?

The transforming conditions are mainly noticeable in changed rainfall, drought and heat. All this leads to stress and the weakening of the trees, which then allows bugs to invade the trees more easily. An example of this is the European spruce bark beetle, which has attacked huge stands in Germany in recent years. As a result, the forests are collapsing. So far, the focus has only been on softwood. Where they grow in man-made monocultures and at higher altitudes, they are very unstable. We knew that already. But now we are also seeing a weakening of forests where we would never have expected. Even near-natural beech forests are suffering from climate change.

How do we need to transform the forests so that we can continue to harvest wood in the future?

We need to find a way to still gain wood from trees, because we will urgently need them in the next decades, for example in buildings. On the other hand, we need to think about how to make them more resilient: Less vulnerable to stress from drought, heat and bugs. This will not happen quickly, however, because the choices we make for forests today will have to last for up to two hundred years.

What do you recommend?

Risk diversification makes the most sense: it is recommended to mix different tree species and also to include foreign tree species in the mix. However, this often clashes with conservationists, who classically only want native tree species in the forest. But our climate will no longer be “natural” anyway. Mediterranean tree species or those from North America may have a much better potential to cope with the climate in a hundred or two hundred years’ time.

Three things are needed to make an Estonian, according to the old saying. You need to build a house, plant a tree and finish the Tartu cross-country ski marathon.

Most probably, I will never build a house. I have planted a few trees. But for sure I can tick off the marathon box, having multiple times finished the classic 63-kilometre cross-country race, named after the southern Estonian city close to where it takes place.

The excitement starts building every year in late autumn when the days here are sombre, dark and wet. That’s when checking the 10-day weather forecast becomes a bit of an addiction. Is the temperature going to fall below zero? Is there any hint there will be some snow? A few degrees this way or that can make the difference between the ugliest and most depressing time of year and its opposite — a snowy, beautiful winter.

The weather is becoming more unstable. Cold and snowy temperatures change abruptly to a warm and rainy climate, destroying the ski track in a matter of days. This means it becomes more difficult to enjoy winter sports. I take every snowy winter, and every snowy weekend as the last there might be. A few weekends ago, I forced myself to do a 19-kilometre lap, even though I was suffering from a nasty cold. This was because the forecast correctly said that the next weekend there would be no more snow.

I’m a fan of a diminishing sport. The number of people registering themselves at the ski marathon is declining. You can’t be sure if the winter will actually allow you to prepare for the tough effort or if the marathon will even take place.

Cross-country skiing has been part of Estonia’s national identity for decades. It is something that has allowed us to feel “nordic”, which is something the nation also yearns for in terms of quality of life. But soon we’ll need to find a new characteristic to define what makes a “proper Estonian”.

Satire is no different from reality, when it comes to global warming. That was the public reaction after the Spanish version of The Onion published an article with the title: “The upper classes begin to worry about climate change when they see that there is no snow in Baqueira”.

Skiing and other winter sports that need snow are not so popular in Spain, as warm weather is the norm here. Ski resorts such as Baqueira in Catalonia are seen as an expensive holiday destination, and not for all pockets.

But this also shows the stark reality of climate change: for Spain, today’s scarcity of snow will mean tomorrow’s lack of water. The reservoirs in internal basins of Catalonia, for example, are at 31% of their total capacity. According to the Catalan Water Agency (ACA), this figure is “worrying”.

Islands of artificial snow surrounded by green grass – the prevailing image for the recent European heatwave came from the Ski World Cup in Adelboden, Switzerland. The climate crisis means a snow crisis: snow is one of the clearest indicators of climate change.

We are witnessing a business-as-usual adaptation measure to this crisis: artificial snow, shot with cannons, and transported by trucks or helicopters to ski slopes. The point is that we are in a +1.2°C warmer world.

Yet nobody is telling us how mountain communities will adapt to a +2.8°C warmer world where the current global energy policies are driving us. At this point in the history of global warming, artificial snow is costly and disillusional. An average ski slope needs 20k cubic meters of water on average to function.

The only way to save mountain communities and ecosystems is to give up fossil fuels: this is not what is happening. Meanwhile, the UAE has appointed Sultan Al Jaber, CEO of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, as president for COP28, the next round of the UN talks on climate change. A leading figure from an oil superpower will lead negotiations to give up oil, coal and gas.

The outcome of COP27 was the triumph of the energy status quo: no new mitigation commitments were agreed, and it’s hard to be hopeful about the next summit, hosted by a petrostate and chaired by a Big Oil CEO.

Don’t be fooled by the next few weeks of frosty weather: we are losing ground to the climate crisis. Artificial snow will buy us some time, but this is a big crisis which needs a big response: quickly reducing carbon emissions. There’s no other way.

“Was the glacier white? And how was skiing on snow?” This is the question posed by a child from the future, in a tweet by Anne-Sophie Barthet, a member of the French alpine ski team.

This high-level athlete was training on the Tignes glacier, at an altitude of 3,100 meters, when she posted this sad observation on Twitter in 2018, to alert people to the damage by climate change on the mountains.

Five years later, the projected scenario has become a reality. The mild temperatures and lack of snow on French peaks are disrupting the organisation of several competitions and sporting events.

In the Alps, the Tignes station was forced to cancel the “Andros Trophy”, a car race on ice, in January. In the Contamines, along the Swiss border, the telemark World Cup has been postponed until February.

These warm conditions in turn have created a growing movement among professional winter sports athletes. A campaign called “Athletes in Action” has been created to elevate climate change solutions.

Germany is a winter sports nation, as measured by its 434 Winter Olympic medals and its 14 million citizens who take to the slopes every year. So it should come as no surprise that the country’s penchant for skiing and snowboarding has developed into a multi-billion euro industry.

2.3 percent of Germany’s yearly GDP comes from sport and its associated spending. Winter sports rake in one fifth of that share (about 15 billion euros), while only requiring one fiftieth of the country’s athletic infrastructure expenses.

Such robust profit margins incentivised about 400 southern municipalities to invest heavily in impeccable ski slopes. But winter sports tourism needs one essential ingredient: snow – and less of it is falling every year.

Bavaria hosts eight of Germany’s ten biggest ski resorts. Climate change, however, is not on the region’s side, as the average annual temperature in the Bavarian Alps has increased by 1.5 degrees in the last 60 years.

Piling onto that is the need for more energy-intensive snow cannons. One hectare of artificially powdered ski slopes requires up to three million litres of water (or 20,000 bathtubs), and Germany has no less than 93,000 hectares of track to maintain. Even with the cannons at work, half of Bavaria’s ski resorts are at risk of vanishing within the next 20 years.

Despite existential threats and a swelling ecological footprint, winter sports in Germany remain a lucrative business for now. Lucrative enough to host a recent biathlon in the Bavarian town of Ruhpolding, despite no snowfall or sub-zero temperatures. But as the climate and energy crises rage on, the price to pay for a pure white terrain risks becoming unsurmountable.

Looking to rent an apartment in Poland? Be prepared for high costs. Last year, rents rose by nearly 18%. In the five largest cities of Warsaw, Krakow, Wroclaw, Poznan and Gdansk, the increase was even higher, at 30-40%. A two-bedroom apartment of 45 square metres in a major Polish city costs €800 per month, while the average income over the same period is €1,050.

Prices were already rising rapidly before the war in Ukraine, but when more than a million Ukrainian refugees arrived in Poland, the housing market became even more difficult. Inflation, fuelled by the energy crisis, is making matters worse.

The roots go back to the housing shortage of the communist era, but even after the fall of communism, no government has built enough social housing. The effects are still felt today: according to Eurostat, Poland has the lowest number of rooms per person in the European Union (just 1.1). At the same time, Polish families are the most numerous (2.8 people on average per family).

There are no signs that the situation will improve. The recent construction boom helped to alleviate the housing market deficit, but it wasn’t enough. Last year, the Central Bank raised interest rates due to inflation, making credit expensive and difficult to access.

This had a massive knock-on effect: mortgage applications fell by 63% in 2022. Investment is also slowing down: developers are building less and less, affected by the skyrocketing interest rates. Only if inflation falls will there be a rate cut, but the market has already changed. Now the Poles are not only stuck in literal tight rooms, but there isn’t really a way out for the housing market in sight.

Rising interest rates are expected to push up average mortgage payments in Estonia by up to 45% this year, taking hundreds of euros out of families’ pockets each month.

For Estonians, home ownership is sacred as this comparative map of European home ownerships shows. This attitude has been reinforced by years of sub-zero interest rates and booming real estate prices, which have fuelled fears of missing out on the opportunity to buy property at an affordable price.

With inflation at record highs and utility costs skyrocketing, people remember the 2008 financial crisis, when many lost their homes, are coming back.

Like many young-but-not-that-young Europeans in their thirties, my partner and I face a dilemma: should we continue renting or buy a house? Whatever the answer, one thing is clear: in Spain, we are lucky to be able to ask ourselves this question at all.

For most young Spaniards, renting is not a choice. It is the only option available. Gone are the golden days when banks offered a 100% mortgage. Nowadays, financial institutions require at least 20% of the property price as a down payment. This is only possible for almost all young people in Spain if their older relatives can help out.

Culturally, my country strongly favours buying over renting. I don’t have a single friend who would rather rent than own a house. Yet homeownership among the under 35s has almost halved in the last decade.

But the alternative has not been a real solution. Despite the ongoing digital transformation, most young Spaniards still have to move to Madrid or Barcelona to find a job. This has sent rents through the roof, with respective annual increases of 15.4% and 19.9% in 2022 alone.

There lies the Spanish rent trap. Ever-rising rents make it harder to save money, making it difficult to buy a property. This, in turn, means that young people stay in rented accommodation for longer. It’s a vicious circle that my partner and I, two of the lucky few, may be able to break free from, but it will keep younger generations trapped for decades.

“I am so happy that I was able to get hold of a council flat. My monthly income is not enough to rent a two-room apartment on the open market. You have to know the cost of a council flat is about half as much as the rent for an ordinary apartment.

Still, it’s not easy to get one. In the beginning, I had to go to the authorities again and again to comply with the various requirements. In the end, it took several months before I got an apartment. So this requires patience.“

The first council flats in the two-million strong city of Vienna were built a hundred years ago. There are now 220,000 such apartments in the city housing 500,000 residents. Edit Gyimesi, 57, has lived in a council flat for three years.

Building more is not the way to solve the housing crisis. Furthermore, it fuels another crisis: climate change. The building and construction sector accounts for almost 39% of energy and process-related carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. Eight percent alone are caused by cement production. Maybe we simply should build less.

There is not really a shortage of living space in Germany, but we are facing a problem of distribution instead: Elderly people are continuing to live in the houses where they have raised their children, and these children are struggling to find a flat on their own. The amount of single households is rising, and all of them need a kitchen and a bathroom for an individual occupant, which means a lot more square meters.

Since 1960, the average available living space per person has increased by almost one and a half times: from 19 square meters to almost 48 in 2021. In Berlin, 25% more living space has been built since 1989, while the population has grown by only 10%. But even today, poorer people live in overcrowded apartments.

What we need is a change of perspective: we need to look for solutions on how to share the housing space we already have. This could mean swapping apartments between those who need more space and those who don’t, and developing new models of living. If we push these solutions, we could build much less – and reduce climate pollution, which is urgently needed.

Our house is on fire, as Greta Thunberg has put it. We should extinguish the flames burning the house we already have – by building less.