I have a globe in my apartment that is the globe my MoM bought when I was in elementary school. She bought it before the fall of the Berlin Wall and before the Cold War ended. Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia exit. There are two fairly small Germanies: East and West and in contrast, I can just barely cover the whole of the USSR with my hand.

When the globe came into our home, I spun it round and round and would put my finger down to see which foreign country it would land on. I didn’t dream of traveling to these places. Nope. These places seemed very far away from me. Remote, strange, unknowable.
Last night, I couldn’t stop looking at my globe.
<a title="My childhood globe by karolinka.sofia, on Flickr" href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/29050866@N06/12524397233/"><img alt="My childhood globe" src="http://farm6.staticflickr.com/5487/12524397233_5a7aa6051d.jpg" width="100%" /></a>
I’ve been wrapped up in the drama and conflict that is unfolding in starts and fits between Russia and the Ukraine over Crimea.

I was in Bulgaria in 2009 when Russia cut the natural gas to Europe due to a dispute with the Ukraine over unpaid natural gas debt. No one really thought that Russia would do it. The assumption was that the threat was posturing. Then Russia did it. It was the middle of January and they turned off the gas. Things got cold in Sofia without natural gas. I was glued to the news then too.

In Eastern Europe, Russia lurks, omnipresent. In the States, no one it seems thinks twice about Russia until events like these.<!--more-->

I visited the Ukraine in the summer of 2009. I crossed the Polish-Ukrainian boarder on foot on my way to Lviv. I took a train, to a mini-bus which dropped me off at the edge of the EU. I walked the no-man’s land between Poland and the Ukraine. On the Polish side I excited the EU with a quick stamp. On the Ukrainian side, I filled out some paperwork that I just barely understood thanks to my limited Bulgarian and after a little back and forth over half of a form and the fact that I hadn’t filled it out correctly (or at all), I was given an entrance stamp to the Ukraine. I picked up another mini-bus and was dropped off in Lviv.

I spent three days in Lviv and I loved every minute of it. Fewer people spoke English than in other Eastern European cities that I’d visited and in contrast, Ukrainians also seemed more accommodating of foreigners. Largely my experience was that people was interacting with would smile and make do. They would write out a price for me so I knew how much to pay. They would confirm slowly: kafe? They would smile.

I left Lviv on an overnight train to Budapest. This is something everyone should do once. The train is old and grimy but it still has a little old-world charm. At the Ukrainian-Hungarian border, border guards climb on the train. It’s the middle of the night. They swing open your cabin door and turn on the lights saying: Passporti! and then they take your passport to check and stamp. In the meantime, the train moves forward and stops, moves forward and stops, moves forward and stops. This happens over and over again.

When it comes to checking passports, the guards can take their time, and do because while they are checking passports, all of the wheels on the train are being changed out. The track sizes are different between the Ukraine and the rest of Europe. Allegedly, Stalin purposefully had the gauge of tracks in Russia made a different size than the rest of Europe to prevent an easy invasion from the West. A quick google search did little to confirm this but I like the idea of this claim regarding Stalin and his trains even if it is just popular myth.

Given the state of affairs in Crimea, wouldn’t it be something if it really were that easy to prevent an invasion?