Audiatur et altera pars

Walking down to the bike shop with Anna’s bike as it had a flat tire and needed some general repairs after the long winter, I finally had a chance to call my friend Gabriel in Warsaw and catch up on the latest from Poland and discuss the situation at the Ukrainian border. As my dad pointed out earlier today, there are always so many stories to every story, including how Kyiv, as an “asymmetric sanction” of sorts, has been blocking the water supplies to the occupied Crimean Peninsula with devastating effects for the local agriculture. While the 2014 war was clearly in breach of the Budapest Memorandum, one also has to understand the historic symbolism of Crimea to Russia and why possible Ukrainian NATO membership was simply a bridge too far. On the other hand, it is important to not stop there but also ask the deeper question of why we ended up with this antagonistic logic in the first place rather than with a future in which Russia would have been invited to join the EU?

Once downtown, I sat down at Espresso House for a flat white and some scones, answering a steady stream of amazing and supportive e-mails after yesterday’s online lecture. Hopefully, once the pandemic is under control, I will be able to travel to India again as I now have a number of kind invitations.