Ukraine Invasion: Part 25

[MagicFox]

Hi all, another thread for supporting and sharing

@Ijsbear · 18/05/2022 13:31
❤️‍🩹"Before the war, my son loved to play, jump, laugh. And there he stopped smiling at all, stopped talking. His eyes fell, I thought he would not survive. Now he is better, but still sometimes he remembers something, comes up to me, hugs and cries. And I cry with him."

Miranda, mother of five-year-old Artur from Mariupol.

Illustration by(I can’t put the name or Mumsnet will ‘ not recognise it’ and stop this from posting.

It is heartbreaking to think all these children will keep remembering and crying, one way or another, all their lives

I have just read replies that if children get the appropriate psychological help they should be able to lead full lives. Let us hope and push for/donate funds for this help to be prioritised.

Most children here have no access to much needed psychological help from what we hear.

I think that there is a reason that the Azol fighters surrendered when they did. They would not have done so without good reason.
I think they would also have been very well aware that the Russians may not have been honest in their negotiations.
I wonder why now?

Outstanding news source is now on Twitter twitter.com/UkraineNowMedia

Welt: European Parliament to propose sanctions against former German Chancellor, Austrian ex-Foreign Minister.

The members of the European Parliament want to call on the 27 EU states to include Germany’s Gerhard Schröder and Austria’s Karin Kneissl on the sanctions list, the German newspaper Welt reported.

Kneissl has been on the supervisory board of the Russian state oil company Rosneft since 2021, and Schroeder is the chairman of the supervisory board within the same organization.

About fucking time.

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❗️ There is a threat of the complete extinction of the Sea of Azov. As a result of the shelling of Azovstal, a technical structure containing tens of thousands of tons of concentrated hydrogen sulfide solution could be damaged, the Mariupol City Council reports.

Hazardous substances can get into the Black and Mediterranean Seas.

I went to a talk by a woman who had been a child in Auschwitz and experienced terrible things obviously. She had later become a psychiatrist working with individuals with all types of trauma. Her view was that no one type of trauma was more significant than any other and certainly no type of trauma was insurmountable with the right help and support. She was truly inspiring, wish I could remember her name!

Worth watching Fergal Keane's documentary on PTSD which is on iplayer atm. He has reported on numerous wars but inparticular the Rwandan Genocide had the biggest impact on him.

It explores how some people experience trauma but others do not - there isn't a direct linear relationship between the severity of your experience and the trauma you get and it stressed that some people seem to be more at risk than others to begin with.

I do think its also worth noting that the idea of not being able to live a 'full life' without formal psychological intervention doesn't reflect the fact this is a very modern and Western idea. Support does not necessarily need to be formal. Community support can be helpful in its own right. Also some of the most successful people out there have managed to turn their trauma into something that has given them a determination to succeed and to value life perhaps more than those who have had a comfortable upbringing.

I find the idea that these kids are somehow now doomed for life because they couldn't get an appointment does them a disservice and could merely be self limiting if it gains too much traction.

We also do know that not everyone response to certain types of psychological support and there is a growing awareness that there is a lack of consistency in quality of support available and a worrying follow up in terms of research into what works (as in this is an area of concern thats been flagged as problematic for the NHS). There is concern that the lack of quality control actually puts some at risk because the support they get is inappropriate and may do harm rather than help.

It should be a variety of different support systems and networks both formal and informal that we should consider in combination rather than having this idea that there is a one stop fix with a specific psychological counselling, to in effect create a net rather than a single stranded rope of support.

as I understand it, trauma emerges when (in a nutshell) you feel a direct personal threat to your life or the lives of the people you love plus perceived (often physical) powerlessness.

I wonder if, in a way, the children in Azovstal will survive not too very badly because they had their mothers and they had a sense of pulling together, of companionship in all the hardship. People at the most fundamental level going need each other.

I suspect the children who see their parents killed or endure horrors themselves will come off worst.

Very small children's expectations of normal may become warped for a while though. I'm so glad that the knowledge exists now how to help them process it and I really, really hope that during reconstruction a lot of emphasis is laid on this.

Yes, I very much disagree with:
’It is heartbreaking to think all these children will keep remembering and crying, one way or another, all their lives’

Many of us have parents who are or were old enough to remember WW2 and experienced things as children similar to what a lot of Ukrainian children are going through. They don’t all remember it as traumatic.

My mum was actually born in a shelter during an air raid. This must have been scary at the time for my granny but I don’t get the impression it blighted her life. My dad was more frightened by the VE Day fireworks than the actual bombs.

I have read that about 90% of people who experience this kind of trauma recover with the right support (meaning networks of friends and family, the chance to move somewhere safe, rather than professional help). Of course when this happens to an entire population that leaves an awful lot of people who will be suffering badly for years to come and I don’t want to trivialise that, but it’s not everyone by any means.

Many children are hugely resilient. Some of my relations went through hell during WWII, as children and young adults - either ending up as refugees or living through a brutal occupation. Some of the girls narrowly avoided being raped. One family opted to run into the unknown; had they sought shelter closer to home with a group of friends and relatives, they would have been amongst those killed in a massacre.

And most of them built good lives for themselves. Some were amazing people who it was a privilege to know. As a PP said, the sense of pulling together through a crisis is really important, and that was very much how the family coped.

I'm not saying trauma is a good child-rearing technique, and certainly it knocks on down the generations, but I think and hope that Ukraine's children will surprise us.

Re: the conversation about children’s resilience to trauma:

I think people are resilient to the extent that they are soon able to forget on the surface, maybe for example hardly remember a parent killed in front of them, but that doesn’t mean a trace of what happened doesn’t always stay with them in various forms. Crying doesn’t have to be literal. On the contrary someone can be quite dissociated and calm.

I think too that it is known that for physiological reasons pregnant women living under high stress at certain points of pregnancy may have babies measurably more likely to be to grow up to be affected mentally when they are older.

I agree that what will help children from war zones is the degree to which they will have other help and love around them not necessarily professional as RTB said. And as someone pointed out maybe those in Azovstal held in a tight community. But it would be good if professional support were available for people who don’t have it otherwise.

All around in our non war hit lives, drug addicts, alcoholics, suicides, the depressed etc tend to be living out things that harmed them at some point.

To get back to war, I think someone from the military on this thread pointed out that veterans sometimes become homeless alcoholics from ptsd.

Wtf, Erdogan has blocked the Finland and Sweden joining NATO

Hang on, saw this reported on the Kyiv Independent but it looks like maybe they're just referring to what he's said previously as I can't find it anywhere else. But here's what they say: twitter.com/kyivindependent/status/1526949921546547200?s=21&t=0Dcck2rgmvb0Y3QNkkCZ7Q

I am not sure if anyone else has posted about this, but I thought I heard on the Radio 4 Six o’clock news that about 1000 of the Azov regiment are still in the steel works. Did anyone else hear that?

We've had fighter jets criss-crossing the sky all day today here in Sweden. Nothing to worry about, it's a week of scheduled military manoevers. But the noise bloody terrifying. I'm jumping out of my skin every time one roars past. It's really making me think about the horror the people of Ukraine are enduring. It scares me despite knowing it's 'games'. I can't begin to imagine the terror if you knew it was for real.

Yes just a confirmation of their already stated position that they have conditions they want met in return for their vote in favour.

US Embassy in Kyiv reopening and US pledging support to S&F in case of aggressive action during the accession process. In essence they now have roughly the same assurances, through bilateral agreements as fall under Art. 5 - which it’s worth noting is not an automatic right to military support but rather to ask for it and it be debated by NATO member states. It’s actually flexible and allows member states to decide for themselves what action they deem to be ‘necessary’. it also does not override national requirements for armed conflict - for example of art. 5 is triggered any US response would still need congressional approval and that isn’t guaranteed.

Many seem to assume that if a NATO member is attacked the rest will all rush to its defence and are required by law to do so - this is not the case.

On sky it looks as though they are phrasing it different and discussions are taking place between Turkey, Finland and Sweden

”Progress on Finland and Sweden's NATO membership bids will only be possible if concrete steps are taken to address Turkey's national security concerns, President Tayyip Erdogan's spokesman told his Nordic counterparts in calls today.
Ibrahim Kalin, who is Mr Erdogan's chief foreign policy adviser, held calls with counterparts from Sweden, Finland, Germany, Britain and the US to discuss the proposed NATO enlargement, according to a readout from Erdogan's office.
"It was underlined that if Turkey's expectations were not met, the progress of the process would not be possible," it said.

Community support will definitely be important for those children, being around other Ukrainians so they don't feel so different and like outsiders in a strange country. Hopefully community groups can form in the different areas they're in now (this is also why I think housing refugees together rather than in private accommodation can be more beneficial, they're around each other and can support each other)

@MagicFox its probably just referring to what he said earlier, pretty sure every country has to go through a process to approve or deny the entry and that'll take time.

Sky are also reporting the following:

Croatian President Zoran Milanovic wants his country to follow Turkey’s example by trying to block Sweden and Finland from joining NATO.

Mr Milanovic is in a bitter verbal dispute with Croatian Prime Minister Andrej Plenkovic over a number of issues, including whether to support the NATO applications Sweden and Finland submitted today.

Before Croatia's parliament ratifies NATO membership for the two Nordic nations, Mr Milanovic wants a change in neighbouring Bosnia's electoral law that would make it easier for Bosnian Croats to get their representatives elected to leadership positions.

there is a growing awareness that there is a lack of consistency in quality of support available and a worrying follow up in terms of research into what works (as in this is an area of concern thats been flagged as problematic for the NHS). There is concern that the lack of quality control actually puts some at risk because the support they get is inappropriate and may do harm rather than help

this is true too, but the lack of quality support is to do with funding, training. Basically there aren't enough professionals who have the right expertise. Out of the many people doing a pscyhology degree, there are very limited opportunities to qualify at the doctorate level as a clinical psychologist, ie the level to undertake trauma work. Which does go back to the capacity point.

But it is true that informal work can do just as well, if adults around the child understand about what is needed to help a child recover then the child can recover very well. A really good connection with an adult who cares for the child, and the child being known and understood and the adult being aware of what would help. Some communities are going to be better than others. However i would say that such communities would not exist much in the UK unfortunately

scrollingleaves - Even if some people are more likely to be traumatised than others, naturally more resilient than others, if they get the right help it doesn't make much difference in the long run. Help should be personalised, there isn't a one size fits all.

Bloody despicable to use the threat against us from Putin for political leverage in internal matters. Bastards, the pair of them.

Thanks everybody for clarifying. Depressing re art. 5 @Igotjelly. It doesn't seem to quite fit with the distinct "an attack on one is an attack on all" rally cry

Thank you for explaining that about trauma recovery, Whenwill. And thank you all for your discussion on that subject.

I listened to Radio 4 six o’clock news again and it definitely reported that the leader of the Pro-Russian Separatists in Mariupol says that about 1000 Commanders and higher ranking officers of the Azov regiment are still inside the Azovstal Steel Works.

I think there has always been a distinct concern within some members that they’d be less likely to get direct military support than others….

Radio 4 Six O’Clock News iPlayer
About 12:15 mins in mentions that 1000 Azov regiment are reportedly still in the steel works.

www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0017ch8

It is horrid politics to do this.

But in good news, we're currently beating you in the ice hockey.