[hengheng]

On a tangent, how much do you notice the political tensions in your everyday life? I read some accounts by people from Odessa who said they didn't bother much and saw as their first priority that nobody died no matter on what side. Are you still far enough away from the Crimea to ignore everything if you chose to do so?

Also I'm wondering if people will give you strange looks exporting a 4-engine military aircraft out of Ukraine these days. That'd certainly be fun to try.

[Evgeniuz]

We're almost bordering Crimea, but Crimea is an autonomy, so what happens there is more or less confined. You can ignore politics here if you choose to do so, but unfortunately you can't ignore economic repercussions of it. Exchange rates are skyrocketing, prices on import products (majority of them) rise accordingly, banks put limits on access to debit cards and extreme limits on credit cards. In our biggest bank you literally can't spend more than $20 per day from credit card (and this, combined with higher prices, put strain to people with low income).

As for tensions, our city is pretty much evenly split up pro-russian/anti-russian. Majority of people I know is anti-russian, but this is probably demographics bias, because older people (who lived half of their life in USSR) are mostly pro-russian. But you won't see many fights here over this. In everyday life when someone mentions they are from one camp and someone from another, we usually just laugh it off and change theme. Some extremists do escalate the conflict, but they're not good people anyway, no matter what side they're taking.

I've witnessed one episode recently when playing at trivia competition with my team. It's split up to pro-russian/anti-russian, just like our city, but we just joke casually about each other and that's it. One of the pro-russian members is a world-class athlete. She took part in world championship on behalf of Ukraine and came to this trivia competition in national athletics team's suit. One of the anti-russian people from other team was shouting to her that she does not deserve to wear this suit, because she's pro-russian and hence anti-ukrainian. But that's just nonsense, because she earned the right to wear this suit more than anyone else in that room. Fortunately, this was one of just few exceptions. So what you read about people in Odessa is true for people in Nikolayev - majority here value respect for each other more than political beliefs.

[e3pi]

"... Exchange rates are skyrocketing, prices on import products (majority of them) rise accordingly, banks put limits on access to debit cards and extreme limits on credit cards. In our biggest bank you literally can't spend more than $20 per day from credit card (and this, combined with higher prices, put strain to people with low income)."

Evgenuiz;

Are you, or have you news, if bitcoin, or other e-currency, is being used, becoming popular as an alternative to your "...you literally can't spend more than $20 per day from credit card", etc?