…yeah. So. This post is going to be rather different from what I usually write about. I certainly didn’t expect when I started the blog that I’d end up covering stuff like this one day, but the plight of Ukraine is making it hard to concentrate on other things, so I may as well try and channel that anxiety into something productive. 

I won’t pretend to be even remotely qualified to make sense of all the information going around about how the Russian invasion is progressing, so what I can say with reasonable confidence basically amounts to “things are bad, but not as bad as they could be”. Among the more qualified, there seems to be a consensus that whatever the attackers have gained so far, it’s not as much as they expected and has cost them more than they expected. I can’t say I’m terribly optimistic about the eventual outcome of the war – Russia has plenty more resources to throw at Ukraine I’m sure – but it is heartening to see the Ukrainians fight back with such grim determination and the rest of Europe rally to the cause with such enthusiasm. Big protests everywhere, even in Russia where participating in one is a good way to land in jail. 

There were two pro-Ukraine demonstrations here in Oulu during the past weekend, a smaller one with a few dozen participants on Saturday and a bigger one with several hundred on Sunday. I attended both, although I left the Saturday one pretty soon after arriving because I wasn’t really dressed for it and started to freeze my toes off. Even without the physical discomfort, the pleas of the local Ukrainian community weren’t easy to listen to as the speakers struggled to make words come out instead of sobs. As I walked away, I was very much aware of how privileged I was to be able to go to a cosy pub to get my feet warm and enjoy a pint without being in constant fear of news that a family member or friend has been killed. 

It’s not just protests either, but imposing huge economic sanctions on the aggressors and supplying the defenders with weapons and intel. It’s frankly amazing how easy it ultimately was to get the entire European Union behind the package; even if you don’t factor in Russian efforts to sow discord among the member states, normally you’d expect it to take ages to get everyone to agree on something of this magnitude, but somehow we went from “endless internal bickering” to “united against a common enemy” in a matter of days. Even Switzerland has broken with its tradition of neutrality, and my own country decided yesterday to go against an established policy of not exporting weapons to conflict zones. Call me naïve, but I doubt this is something the Kremlin was counting on to happen when the invasion was launched. 

To continue my layman speculation, while I fear that Ukraine may eventually be forced to capitulate, I’m not so sure that this will be more than a Pyrrhic victory for Putin. If the objectives of the “special military operation” are taken, what does that achieve in the long run? Is this supposed to persuade Ukraine to return to the fold of Mother Russia like a prodigal son, as the propaganda suggests? Good luck trying, with a crippled economy, to control a nation of 40+ million people who 1) are evidently full of fighting spirit, and 2) hate your guts for what you’ve done to them.

The list of responses to the invasion goes on and on; one of the more creative ones I’ve heard of is dog walkers in Helsinki picking up their pets’ waste and chucking it onto the grounds of the Russian embassy. Boycotts and condemnations have been announced in various fields of business, sports, culture… Academia, too: I’m pleased to report that my university has joined all other Finnish universities in supporting Ukraine and condemning Russia’s actions. The open letter signed by thousands of Russian scientists and science journalists opposed to the invasion is also very welcome, but even so, I don’t see how I could, under the circumstances, have any involvement in a scientific conference taking place in Russia or Belarus, for example. 

Meanwhile, I do need to do also the part of my job that involves talking about things I actually know about. The second ever implementation of the AI ethics course is about to start in two weeks, and although planning it is not such a huge effort now compared to last year when we were creating everything from scratch, there’s still a fair bit of work to do. The university pedagogy course I’ve been taking has given me a few new ideas to try – I hope I can get them to work the way I’m envisioning. We’ve again managed to recruit a great line-up of visiting experts, too, so on the whole I have a pretty good feeling about this. 

The choir has been operating more or less normally since the beginning of February, although last week we had to change some plans, once again because of COVID. A small group of singers, myself included, even got to do a gig at a private function, which was extremely refreshing. All of the big concerts we had planned for the spring term have been postponed, but instead we’re now rehearsing songs for a concert in May, the overarching theme of which happens to be death. When the choirmaster first told us about this idea, I found it quite amusing because of a rather dark inside joke running among some past and present colleagues of mine; it seems less funny now, but I really love the music, and hopefully by the date of the concert it won’t be quite so topical anymore.