Two months after the Berlin Wall fell, another powerful symbol opened its doors in the middle of Moscow: a gleaming new McDonald’s. 

It was the first American fast-food restaurant to enter the Soviet Union, reflecting the new political openness of the era. For Vlad Vexler, who as a 9-year-old waited in a two-hour line to enter the restaurant near Moscow’s Pushkin Square on its opening day in January 1990, it was a gateway to the utopia he imagined the West to be. 

“We thought that life there was magical, and there were no problems,” Vexler said. 

So, it was all the more poignant for Vexler when McDonald’s announced it would temporarily close that store and nearly 850 others in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. McDonald’s Russian website on Monday read, “Due to operational, technical and logistical difficulties, McDonald’s will temporarily suspend service at its network enterprises from March 14.” 

“That McDonald’s is a sign of optimism that in the end didn’t materialize,” said Vexler, a political philosopher and author who now lives in London. “Now that Russia is entering the period of contraction, isolation and impoverishment, you look back at these openings and think about what might have been.” 

McDonald’s said in a statement that “at this juncture, it’s impossible to predict when we might be able to reopen our restaurants in Russia.” But it is continuing to pay its 62,500 Russian employees. The company said this week that it expects the closures to cost around $50 million per month. 

Outside a McDonald’s in Moscow last week, student Lev Shalpo bemoaned the closure. 

“It’s wrong because it was the only affordable place for me where I could eat,” he said. 

Just as McDonald’s paved the way for other brands to enter the Soviet market, its exit led to a cascade of similar announcements from other U.S. brands. Starbucks closed its 130 outlets in Russia. Yum Brands closed its 70 company-owned KFC restaurants and was negotiating the closure of 50 Pizza Huts that are owned by franchisees. 

McDonald’s entry into the Soviet Union began with a chance meeting. In 1976, McDonald’s loaned some buses to organizers of the 1980 Moscow Olympics who were touring Olympic venues in Montreal, Canada. George Cohon, then the head of McDonald’s in Canada, took the visitors to McDonald’s as part of the tour. That same night, the group began discussing ways to open a McDonald’s in the Soviet Union. 

Fourteen years later, after Soviet laws loosened and McDonald’s built relationships with local farmers, the first McDonald’s opened in downtown Moscow. It was a sensation. 

On its opening day, the restaurant’s 27 cash registers rang up 30,000 meals. Vexler and his grandmother waited in a line with thousands of others to enter the 700-seat store, entertained by traditional Russian musicians and costumed characters like Mickey Mouse. 

“The feeling was, ‘Let’s go and see how Westerners do things better. Let’s go and see what a healthy society has to offer,'” Vexler said. 

Vexler saved money for weeks to buy his first McDonald’s meal: a cheeseburger, fries and a Coca-Cola. The food had a “plasticky goodness” he had never experienced before, he said. 

Eileen Kane visited the original McDonald’s often in 1991 and 1992 when she was an exchange student at Moscow State University. She found it a striking contrast from the rest of the country, which was suffering frequent food shortages as the Soviet Union collapsed. 

“McDonald’s was bright and colorful, and they never ran out of anything. It was like a party atmosphere,” said Kane, who is now a history professor at Connecticut College in New London, Connecticut. 

McDonald’s entry into the Soviet Union was so groundbreaking it gave rise to a political theory. The Golden Arches Theory holds that two countries that both have McDonald’s in them won’t go to war, because the presence of a McDonald’s is an indicator of the countries’ level of inter-dependence and their alignment with U.S. laws, said Bernd Kaussler, a political science professor at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia. 

That theory held until 2014, when Russia annexed Crimea, Kaussler said. 

Kaussler said the number of countries now withdrawing from Russia, and the speed with which they acted, is unprecedented. He thinks some, including McDonald’s, might calculate that it’s unwise to reopen, which would leave Russia more isolated and the world less secure. 

“As the Russian economy is becoming less interdependent with the U.S. and Europe, we basically have fewer domestic economic factors that could mitigate current aggressive policies,” Kaussler said. 

Vexler said the admiration for the West that caused Russians to embrace McDonald’s three decades ago has also shifted. Russians now tend to be more anti-Western, he said. 

Anastasia Chubina visited a McDonald’s in Moscow last week because her child wanted one last meal there. But she was indifferent about its closure, suggesting Russians will get healthier if they stop eating fast food. 

“I think we lived without it before and will live further,” she said. 

Entrepreneur Yekaterina Kochergina said the closure could be a good opportunity for Russian fast-food brands to enter the market. 

“It is sad, but it’s not a big deal. We’ll survive without McDonald’s,” she said. 

 
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An anti-war protester interrupted the main news program on Russian state TV Channel One on Monday, holding up a sign behind the studio presenter with slogans denouncing the war in Ukraine.

The sign, in English and Russian, read: “NO WAR. Stop the war. Don’t believe propaganda. They are lying to you here.” Another phrase, which looked like “Russians against war,” was partly obscured.

The extraordinary protest took place on day 19 of the war that began when Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24 in what it calls a special military operation.

“Stop the war. No to war,” the woman protester could be heard shouting, as the news anchor continued to read from her teleprompter.

The protester could be seen and heard for several seconds before the channel switched to a different report to remove her from the screen.

“Wow, that girl is cool,” Kira Yarmysh, spokesperson for jailed opposition leader Alexey Navalny, wrote on Twitter.

She posted a video of the incident, which quickly racked up nearly 180,000 views.

State TV is the main source of news for many millions of Russians and closely follows the Kremlin line that Russia was forced to act in Ukraine to demilitarize and “denazify” the country, and to defend Russian speakers there against “genocide.” Ukraine and most of the world have condemned that as a false pretext for an invasion of a democratic country.

The woman was named by OVD-Info, an independent protest-monitoring group, and by the head of the Agora human rights group, as Marina Ovsyannikova, an employee of the channel.

Pavel Chikov, head of Agora, said she had been arrested and taken to a Moscow police station.

Tass said she may face charges under a law against discrediting the armed forces, citing a law enforcement source.

On March 4, Russia’s parliament passed a law making public actions aimed at “discrediting” Russia’s army illegal and banning the spread of fake news, or the “public dissemination of deliberately false information about the use of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation.” The offense carries a jail term of up to 15 years.
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The chairperson of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe said Monday that Russia’s targeting of Ukrainian civilians, as well as schools and hospitals, is “state terrorism.”

“The invading force started to target the civilian population and infrastructure in an attempt to break the spirit of the Ukrainian people,” Zbigniew Rau said. “This is deplorable and shameful and amounts to state terrorism. Schools, hospitals and kindergartens are being deliberately targeted with internationally banned weapons.”

The United Nations has said it has credible reports that Russian forces are using cluster munitions in populated areas.

Rau, who is Poland’s foreign minister, addressed the U.N. Security Council Monday in his capacity as the chairperson-in-office of the OSCE for 2022.

Russia is an OSCE member, and Rau said Moscow has accused him of bias in response to the conflict.

“I have only one response to this kind of allegation: The impartiality ends where blatant violations of international humanitarian law start,” he said.

Rau urged Russia and Belarus, which is hosting Russian troops on its territory and has been accused of allowing missiles to be fired from its soil, to stop this “cruel endeavor.” He said it serves neither their government nor their people’s interests and will only further isolate both countries internationally.

“The door to diplomacy is still open, and I call on Russia to engage in a meaningful and substantial dialogue to seek a peaceful solution to the current crisis,” Rau said.

Rau said he expects Moscow to honor its international obligations and commitments, adding that any sustainable political solution “must fully respect sovereignty, territorial integrity and independence of Ukraine within its internationally recognized borders.”

Russia’s envoy dismissed the OSCE chairperson’s offer for diplomacy, saying he had picked a side in the conflict and was, therefore, not an honest broker.

“The point of the work of the chairperson in office is precisely to solve disagreements between participating states and to bring positions closer; it is in no way to take biased steps which further inflame confrontation, and especially not to head up an anti-Russian campaign in the OSCE,” Russian Ambassador Vassily Nebenzia told the council.

Situation worsening on the ground

U.N. political chief Rosemary DiCarlo told the meeting that the situation worsened over the weekend, with Russian forces launching deadly strikes in the west of the country.

“Ukrainian cities are under unrelenting shelling and bombardment, with many civilians killed daily,” she said.

The U.N. human rights office put its verified toll since the start of the conflict at 636 civilians killed and 1,125 injured as of midnight Sunday but acknowledges that it is likely much higher. Meanwhile, nearly 2 million people have become displaced inside the country and 2.8 million have fled to neighboring countries.

“We must not allow any questioning of the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine within its internationally recognized borders,” DiCarlo added.

Her boss, U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, addressed reporters outside of the Security Council chamber. He announced $40 million from the U.N. central emergency response fund for meeting urgent needs in Ukraine, where food, water and medicine are growing scarce.

“This war goes far beyond Ukraine,” he warned of the humanitarian implications.

Guterres said it is threatening food security for millions in the developing world, as Russia and Ukraine are responsible for nearly one-third of the planet’s wheat trade and more than half the world’s supply of sunflower oil for cooking.

“Now their breadbasket is being bombed,” Guterres said.

It is especially concerning for the United Nations, as Ukraine supplies the World Food Program with more than half of its wheat supply. With 41 million people on the brink of famine in 43 countries, a poor or nonexistent harvest from Ukraine will make it much harder to feed them.

The Kyiv government has made repeated appeals for the West to close the skies over Ukraine with a no-fly zone. Asked about this, Guterres said a number of countries have analyzed that possibility, but that it could risk escalating the conflict into a global one.

“It is based on that analysis, that I think we need to be prudent, even if I understand the dramatic appeal of the Ukrainian government,” he said.

The U.N. chief repeated his calls for the war to stop and dialogue to begin.

“We need peace. Peace for the people of Ukraine. Peace for the world,” he said. “We need peace now.”

Meanwhile, the sponsors of a draft Security Council resolution on the humanitarian situation in Ukraine, which has been in negotiation for two weeks, said they will not seek a vote in the council but will take it to the wider membership in the General Assembly.

“Obviously, it would have been difficult in the Security Council, no need to explain to you why,” France’s envoy Nicolas de Riviere said in response to a reporter’s question.

Russia holds a veto in the 15-nation council.

“We think it’s time to take action to move to the General Assembly and have the whole membership supporting an initiative on humanitarian access, on cessation of hostilities, on respect of international humanitarian law, on respect of the Geneva Conventions,” Ambassador de Riviere said. “So we are very optimistic we can do that. The sooner the better. The situation on the ground deteriorates by the hour.”
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Marina, a 34-year-old mother of a seven-year-old boy, waves a hand in what she thinks is the direction of Ukraine. “I have to stay near Ukraine, and my husband, that is where my heart is,” she says. “America, Britain, Spain, Italy, what would I do there without him,” she says, after I ask her whether she will leave Poland to settle somewhere else, if Russia’s war on her country drags on.

It took Marina more than a day to reach the Polish border on the train from just west of Kyiv. She says it was stultifying and claustrophobic in the packed train mainly full of women and children; the windows were shut tight and during the night hours and the lights were off to ensure the train wasn’t targeted. The babies wailed; younger children complained on the journey to safety.  

Because of the ban on men of fighting age leaving Ukraine, Marina, like hundreds of other Ukrainian women, had to leave her partner behind, and it clearly pains her. “I did it for my son,” she says. “We were scared for him. There was terrible shelling. I was very frightened,” she says. She tells me this as she cleans my hotel room. She was the head of procurement for a Ukrainian company and with remarkable speed got this cleaning job. “Needs must,” she shrugs.

Many businesses in Warsaw and other Polish towns are going out of their way to employ Ukrainians, if just for temporary work. Ukraine’s neighbors have flung open their doors and hearts to fleeing Ukrainians, offering aid, free transport and accommodation as a wave of dispossessed humanity arrives hour after hour at border crossings and at train and bus stations in-country.

They are met by yellow or orange-vested volunteers as well as government workers. In Warsaw firefighters are taking a lead. They dole out hot meals, bottled water and blankets and help move them on to reception centers or distribute them among charitable Polish families to shelter. Mobile telephone operators T-Mobile and Orange offer free SIM cards that allow the refugees to contact relatives back home at no cost.

Warsaw’s central railway station is packed on the chilly evening I visit. Two trains have arrived from the border and disgorge a mass of disheveled, tired people, and blinking children, to join the already jam-packed main entrance hall, where families clutch bowls of soup and bottled water proffered by the volunteers.  

On the trains, there was no food but “people would get bottled water into the train at station stops,” 25-year-old Yulia says. She has arrived with her eight-year-old sister and mother. They took a day to get by train to Lviv from Kyiv, where their neighborhood was under intense bombardments, and then they had a 13-hour bus ride from the border to Warsaw. “We had no plan when we traveled,” she said. “But on a Facebook forum I found someone in Warsaw offering a room even before we got here,” she added proudly. She had a job with DHL and they are carrying on paying her. “Not just a little but all my wages. Isn’t that unbelievable,” she says.

Most refugees aren’t as lucky or as organized. At the central station, they try to make sense of their surroundings; try to get the bearings on a future that’s unknown and unknowable; they struggle to take in the immediate options outlined by the volunteers, and their eyes dart to the commotion around them. Others take a blanket and gather belongings — a battered suitcase, plastic bags — and find some space to rest. One older woman sits slumped, sleeping on a stair. In a corner a play area has been set up and the toddlers and younger children become absorbed with a doll or a car or a balloon.

Outside the station others crowd into a marquee set up by a group of charitable groups. “We served 30,000 meals today,” a volunteer tells me. Other refugees file up for buses laid on by Warsaw’s firefighters to ferry them to reception centers. A skyscraper looms over the dystopian scene, with the LG brand lit up, flashing the marketing tag, “The Future Is Here.”

Stores and buses in Warsaw have taken to displaying the yellow-and-blue Ukrainian flag. The welcome stands in stark contrast to how Poland, along with neighbors Hungary, Slovakia and Romania, responded during the 2015-2016 refugee crisis. All resisted taking in asylum-seekers from the Middle East or burden-sharing with other more hard-pressed European Union countries.  

Empathy, and history

There are historical reasons for the different treatment, Poles say, pointing to Ukraine’s proximity and the cultural and linguistic ties linking the two countries. But there’s also an underlying sense of what could be described as preemptive empathy. When asked, Polish volunteers of all ages say they are helping because of a compelling moral duty, but many also mention anxieties about the war spilling over. Some even worry they could suffer a similar plight to the hordes of Ukrainians they are trying to assist.  

An historical anxiety feeds Polish alarm. Eastern European borders were decided on the battlefields of Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, the Baltic States and western Russia the past century. Historian Timothy Snyder has dubbed the region the bloodlands, noting in his book of the same name: “In the middle of Europe, in the middle of the twentieth century, the Nazi and Soviet regimes murdered some fourteen million people.” He adds: “Mass violence of a sort never before seen in history was visited upon this region,” he notes. With that history lodged in the background, Poland is undergoing a genetic shudder.  

But as the numbers of Ukrainian evacuees climb remorselessly, some worry Poland’s welcome mat for Ukrainians may start to become threadbare.

In a sense it already is — not because of any hardening of hearts, although some fear that might happen if the numbers of refugees climb as high as some predict. Financial resources are short. On Saturday the Polish government approved an $1.82 billion fund to help cover the costs of the mass Ukrainian influx. Polish families will get $274 a month for the next two months for housing Ukrainians; and every refugee will get $70 a month.  

But Polish politicians acknowledge this isn’t enough and volunteers are already complaining much more has to be done for the dazed and disoriented refugees turning up in Poland. Much of the burden is being carried by volunteers.

“I have had so far 20 Ukrainians overnighting with me since Russia invaded,” says Mia, a human resources manager. “Last night I had a woman who cried a lot, but I could see she was trying to control her emotions so as not to upset her two children. Another one a few days ago also had children but could not stop weeping. She kept showing me photographs, saying, ‘these are my dogs and cats, this was my house two weeks ago and this is my house now.’ It was destroyed,” she added.   

Joanna Niewczas, a volunteer coordinator at the Torwar conference hall in central Warsaw, which has been transformed into a refugee center, catalogued last week in an open letter serious deficiencies in the aid effort. She warned the crowded and unhygienic facilities posed a “huge risk of an epidemic due to the lack of sanitary requirements.” She complained: “Volunteers are responsible for organizing several thousand meals a day by calling restaurants and asking for donations; we are not able to provide meals to refugees because of the number of them. We have not been given funds.”

The UN says about 2.5 million Ukrainians have fled their country so far. About 1.7 million have gone to Poland alone – the largest influx of refugees the country has seen since World War II. More than 214,160 have crossed into Hungary, 165,199 into Slovakia and around 90,000 into Romania. More than 300,00 have entered tiny Moldova, one of Europe’s poorest countries, since February 24 and on Saturday its foreign minister, Nicu Popescu, said the country was facing a “humanitarian catastrophe” and had reached breaking point with its health and social services overwhelmed.

And Poland, wealthier and larger, is also struggling. Rafal Trzaskowski, Warsaw’s mayor, has warned the city’s ability to absorb refugees was “at an end,” and that unless an international relocation system was established it would be overwhelmed soon, too.
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BERLIN — Germany will purchase F-35 fighter jets built by U.S. firm Lockheed Martin LMT.N to replace its aging Tornado aircraft, according to two government sources, with one of the sources saying Berlin aims to buy up to 35 of the stealth jets. 

A German defense source told Reuters in early February that Germany was leaning toward purchasing the F-35 but a final decision had not been taken.  

The Tornado is the only German jet capable of carrying U.S. nuclear bombs, stored in Germany, in case of a conflict. 

But the air force has been flying the jet since the 1980s, and Berlin is planning to phase it out between 2025 and 2030. 

The F-35 buy will be a blow for Boeing BA.N, whose F-18 was favored by former German defense minister Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer to replace the Tornado. 

The decision could also upset France. Paris has watched Germany’s deliberations over the F-18 or more advanced F-35, concerned a deal could undermine the development of a joint Franco-German fighter jet that is supposed to be ready in the 2040s. 

Chancellor Olaf Scholz two weeks ago backed the ongoing joint program with Paris. 

At the time, Scholz also announced that the Eurofighter jet, built by Franco-German Airbus AIR.PA, would be developed further to be capable of electronic warfare, a role the Tornado also fulfills. 
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