If those hyenas were put to sleep then all the bears, white eagles and trident-wielding lions could hold hands and sing kumbaya together.
Oh that would be amazing...
A friend of mine, that is from Kyrgyzstan (but half Ukrainian and half Jewish), had moved to Kiev some years before the war. Thanks to his Kyrgyz passport, he's been able to continue moving around. Instead of Kiev, he now does most of his meetings in Lvov, where he travels to from Poland, or Romania by car.
His wife is Ukrainian, and my ex was Ukrainian. So... me and him have quite a bit of vested interest in this conflict.
A few days ago we were talking over the phone, and he was asking me: "How do you see this ending?". I gave him my prognosis, and then he shared his own.
He's a big believer in markets, and that markets - in their eternal wisdom - can "price-in" everything. So his thesis, is that Ukraine will at least not lose Kiev, because prices for Class A real estate in Kiev have bottomed out some time ago, and since then have only risen.
I told him that prices for Kiev real estate may be artificially propped up by government imposed capital controls which make it difficult to take USD and EURO out of Ukraine. He told me there is some truth to this, but also - that people broadly expect Kiev to survive the war largely intact, and to resume its place as the heart of Ukrainian economic and cultural life after the war.
I asked him, "What if you are wrong? What if Ukraine collapses and Kiev falls?".
His initial answer, "For me it would probably make life easier" (he imports Ukrainian goods, for which the main market is still the CIS). We laughed. But then he continued to say, "It might make things easier, but at that point I would probably emigrate. To the United States or somewhere in Europe."
The problem is, we can continue to make as much money as we ever made, or maybe even more - but the rest of the world closes to us. Right now, many venture funds and larger institutional investors are simply avoiding any entity which has Russian end beneficiaries (or even transacts with a Russian entity).
So then finally, I shared my PF plan for referenda, which involved the lifting of sanctions. I told him, "They lift all the sanctions from us, but we have to stop the war - in return we get to keep C, D, L, Z, and K." Of course, he called me a Russian imperialist, and told me he will never shake my hand, but then he said this would largely work to everyone's benefit. "You f*ck off from them, and they get to join the EU and NATO and build a normal life for themselves away from you. In twenty years, everyone would be happy."
Just a little snippet from the lives of Russians and Ukrainians.
