Insights, analysis and must reads from CNN's Fareed Zakaria and the Global Public Square team, compiled by Global Briefing editor Chris Good Seeing this newsletter as a forward? Subscribe here. March 30, 2022 |
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Can Europe Handle This Refugee Influx? |
More than 4 million people have fled Ukraine since Russian bombs started landing on Feb. 24, according to the UN, with some 2.3 million having flocked to neighboring Poland alone. Given Europe's refugee struggles since 2015, many wonder how the continent will handle this new influx.
So far, doors and arms remain open, while charges of hypocrisy linger.
Poland's "initial response to the calamity of their neighbors was as heartwarming as it was shocking," Mateusz Mazzini writes for Foreign Policy. "Volunteers flooded the border, offering safe passage to any city in the country, while money, food, and medical supplies poured in the opposite direction. People mobilized to welcome refugees under their roofs and did not ask for any compensation."
That's shocking because just last year, Poland rebuffed Middle Eastern refugees at its border with Belarus. (Belarusian authorities were accused of recruiting and bringing asylum-seekers to Poland's EU-frontier border and encouraging them to cross, a charge Belarus's government denied. As Poland refused entry, many were left stranded in freezing temperatures.) And as Mazzini notes, Poland's right-wing politicians have spent years casting aspersions on refugees—and the idea of taking them in—as millions fled to Europe from war and economic privation in the Middle East, Africa, and Afghanistan.
Explanations for the sudden goodwill have varied—from the skin color of Ukrainians, to cultural similarities, to the nearness of Ukraine's war and a shared history with Russian control. Regardless, Poland has risen to the challenge, but it's not clear how long the welcome mat can stay unfurled, Karolina Jeznach and Steffen Lüdke write for Der Spiegel.
Since 2015, Europe has struggled to update its refugee system to improve upon the holding camps, border-force scandals, and heart-rending sea tragedies of the last seven years. At Foreign Affairs, Alexander Betts writes that now would be a good time to do so, hoping for a repeat of reform initiatives that followed the "generally positive experience" of hosting Balkan refugees in the 1990s. |
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Non-Alignment Is Alive And Well |
As commentators view the Ukraine conflict through a Cold War lens, David Adler writes for The Guardian that developing countries have revived their own Cold War posture of declining to choose sides between large, feuding powers.
Aside from the Western alliance and its friends in Asia, Adler writes, "very few nations have chosen to take part in the economic warfare set against the Putin government. On the contrary, many of the world's largest nations—including China, India, Brazil, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Indonesia and even Nato ally Turkey—have refused to join in." |
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After Western countries imposed an unprecedented suite of sanctions, economists predicted gloom for Russia's economy. But the rouble has since bounced back, climbing toward its pre-war exchange rates with the dollar and euro, and The Economist writes that although Russia is likely to enter a recession this year, so far its economy is faring better than some expected.
"According to an estimate using internet-search data produced by the OECD, a rich-country think-tank, Russia's GDP in the week to March 26th was about 5% higher than the year before," the magazine writes. "Other 'real-time' data gathered by The Economist, such as electricity consumption and railway loadings of goods, are holding up. A spending tracker produced by Sberbank, Russia's largest lender, is slightly up year on year."
Russia's economic future will depend on three factors, the magazine writes: whether domestic consumers get worried, how Russian producers cope with import blockages, and international buyers' willingness to purchase Russian oil and gas. On the last point, the magazine writes elsewhere that China and India could take advantage of an effective discount imposed by countries and companies turning away Russian supplies. |
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A Flu-Like Future for Covid-19? |
As Shanghai makes global headlines with a massive lockdown, the broader future of Covid-19 is still being debated. At The New York Times, viral-evolution experts Sarah Cobey, Jesse Bloom, Tyler Starr, and Nathaniel Lash predict Covid-19's future variants will be more resistant to immunity, rather than more transmissible among the unvaccinated or unexposed.
"In this sense, the future (of Covid-19) may look something like the seasonal flu, where new variants cause waves of cases each year," they write.
Low vaccination rates in Africa continue to raise fears about new variants emerging, as Africa CDC Director John Nkengasong warns in the same paper, while genomic-surveillance data could be shared better to catch them faster as they do, Smriti Mallapaty writes for Nature. |
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