Alex Hemeryckx said he had been on the phone with his family for three days straight, making sure they were safe and trying to get them out of Ukraine, after Russian President Vladimir Putin gave the order to invade the country.
At first, the owner of Brussel’s Cafe in downtown Chambersburg, Pa., thought “there’s no way anything can happen.” Hemeryckx is originally from Belgium and his wife, Inna, is from Ukraine.
But as reports of bombs exploding came across the news, they began to worry. Inna has 12 family members in Ukraine, with nine of them in the eastern part of the country.
Hemeryckx told The Herald-Mail on Friday that he hasn’t had contact with his wife’s family members since the attack.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in a video address Thursday that 137 “heroes,” including 10 military officers, had been killed and 316 people wounded.
“They said they’re not targeting civilians,” Hemeryckx said. “Yet they did kill 136 yesterday.”
Hemeryckx added that he even considered getting on a plane and extracting his family Thursday.
Eric Schwartz, political science and international relations professor at Hagerstown Community College, told The Herald-Mail that the conflict has the potential to be devastating.
Schwartz lived and worked in Russia off and on over the years stretching back to the 1990s.
“I think that what is happening now … the repercussions could be much greater than what happened on Sept. 11, 2001,” Schwartz said Wednesday. “At one extreme is nuclear war … shy of that there’s cyberwar … the extension of Russian power.”
How did we get here?
Tensions had begun rising between Russia and Ukraine after satellite images showed Russia massing troops and military equipment along its border with Ukraine and the annexed Crimean Peninsula region in November.
After ignoring desperate pleas from U.N. members not to take military action, Putin stated in a televised address on Wednesday night that it was needed to protect civilians in eastern Ukraine, where Ukrainian forces and Russia-backed separatists have been fighting for almost eight years.
The Russian leader warned other countries that any attempt to interfere in Ukraine would “lead to consequences you have never seen in history.”
Putin accused the U.S. and its allies of ignoring Russia’s demands to block Ukraine from ever joining NATO and offer Moscow security guarantees.
Putin said Russia does not intend to occupy Ukraine but plans to “demilitarize” it, a euphemism for destroying its armed forces. He urged Ukrainian servicemen to “immediately put down arms and go home.”
Soon after his address, explosions were heard in the cities of Kyiv, Kharkiv and Odessa.
President Joe Biden announced Thursday that he would add more sanctions to Russia, continuing to put a “squeeze” on Russian access to technology and financial markets, a limit on certain exports, and sanctions against a growing list of “Russian elites” close to Putin.
In addition, Biden is deploying 7,000 U.S. troops to Germany to bolster NATO after the invasion of Ukraine, which is not a member of the defense organization.
“Do you really think that the president of Russia gives two … about sanctions,” Hemeryckx said. “He doesn’t. He’s the most powerful dude in Russia. He has more money than people can even dream of. They’re (sanctions) gonna affect his people, it doesn’t affect him.”
Shocked Russians turned out by the thousands Thursday to decry their country’s invasion of Ukraine as emotional calls for protests grew on social media. Some 1,745 people in 54 Russian cities were detained, at least 957 of them in Moscow.
“Just because Putin … decides to invade Ukraine, it doesn’t mean the country or all Russians are war mongers,” Schwartz said. “There’s a divergence in opinion. There are lots of people who oppose this within Russia.”
“A lot of them (Russians and Ukrainians) might be in the same church … they might be going to the same grocery store,” Schwartz said.
How does this affect the U.S.?
Schwartz said that many people might not really know exactly what the repercussions of Putin’s actions will be.
“If Putin succeeds, it’s huge,” Schwartz said. “If Putin fails, it’s huge. Domestically, how does that play out in the U.S.?”
Americans are bound to see more inflation, meaning higher fuel prices and higher bread prices, for example, he said.
“This moves us toward a less favorable economic outlook with slower activity and higher inflation,” Gregory Daco, chief economist at EY-Parthenon said in a USA TODAY report.
Like other economists, Daco had based his forecast on the most likely scenario of a Russian troop deployment that fell short of military action. That would have led to a modest two-tenths of a percentage point reduction in U.S. growth this year to a still healthy 3.8%.
“We’re looking at the tensions via the prism of an economy that’s recovering from COVID, global supply chains are really stressed, and we have a high inflation environment,” Daco said. “The tensions will further fuel inflation and further stress supply chains.”
‘Not all people in the country are behind it’
Schwartz spent some time as a journalist in St. Petersburg, Russia, before leaving in 1998. He had returned to visit over the years before working in Moscow in 2007. As he made friends throughout the country, he said he witnessed a shift toward nationalism.
“They (his friends) became much more nationalistic, much more defensive,” Schwartz said.
One of Schwartz’s friends who opposed Putin was very upset with the Russian president’s policies, according to Schwartz. They thought the policies were unfair for Russians and saw that Russians were suffering as a result.
“I think that’s an important point, that just because the government conducts a military operation does not mean that all the people in that country are behind it, by any means,” Schwartz said.
Hemeryckx added that Russia and Ukraine are very similar.
“I just hope that nobody else will get injured and peace will be found,” Hemeryckx said.
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