Tidings of War

I left the U.S. for Sweden, but Maybe Nowhere is Safe

“In Case of Crisis or War”

November is the darkest month here. I swear I can feel my serotonin leaching as the sun recedes and the black surges toward the winter solstice, when the sun will set at 2:51. It’s a month of keening depression, candles, and shadows.

It was on November 18 – in the middle of the worst month, a perfect time for bad news – that the Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency mailed out a 32-page pamphlet to every household in the country. The pamphlet’s cover was banana yellow, not something you’d be likely to miss in a pile of bills and newspapers, especially in this land of grays and whites. It was entitled, “In Case of Crisis or War.” Maybe it was a coincidence that the next day, November 19, marked the 1,000th day of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Like most things Swedish, the pamphlet was direct and to the point:

We live in uncertain times. Armed conflicts are currently being waged in our corner of the world. Terrorism, cyber attacks, and disinformation campaigns are being used to undermine and influence us. To resist these threats, we must stand united. If Sweden is attacked, everyone must do their part to defend Sweden’s independence – and our democracy.

I’m American born and bred and that doesn’t go away. As the France-based writer Alexandra Marshall puts it, “I am American in my bones. I am American in my ancestry. I am American in where I put my attention. I am American in my culture and my cooking. Deeply. I follow American politics like a hypervigilant hawk. I can’t quit this bitch.” All that is true, but nonetheless, I made the decision to leave the U.S. in 2019. It was obvious to me that the country was headed for trouble. I was expecting a civil war, a democratic collapse, or both. I didn’t want my kids to grow up there, in peril. When I became a Swedish citizen last year, I was flooded with gratitude. The Swedish word for citizen, medbord, means “inside the castle.” I felt like I'd been taken in from a storm. I’ve had my moments of doubt, but I will never return to the U.S. Still, lately, there’s been a sense of menace in the air.

It was toward the end of November that a DHL cargo plane crashed near the Vilnius International Airport in Lithuania, killing one person on board. The incident remains under investigation, but Russia has been suspected of sneaking explosives onto DHL planes recently, most likely as a prelude to a covert operation. That operation is most likely to blow up a civilian aircraft in mid-air. There was an earlier incident in July, when someone disguised incendiary devices as massagers and sparked fires at two different DHL logistics centers. Now, some of my friends are cancelling their holiday travel plans. They might well be wrong about the whole thing, they say. But then again, they might be right.

The pamphlet decodes air raid signals and spells out how to find your local fallout shelters and staunch heavy bleeding. It recommends getting a paraffin heater and a battery operated radio, and stocking up on food that can be stored at room temperature, like rosehip soup, crispbread and fruit custard. The first time Sweden sent out this pamphlet, in 2018, it was much shorter at 20 pages. Now, “military threat levels are increasing,” the pamphlet says.

Just outside the Stockholm archipelago, in the Baltic Sea, a shadow fleet sails. It’s an expanding armada of hard-to-identify, uninsured and often scrapped vessels, flying flags from disreputable places and often moving with their transponders off. They’re thought to be spying on Sweden, but that’s not their main objective. They’re ghost ships, moving Russian oil exports in defiance of sanctions. Their work fills Russia’s war coffers.

For Europe, the past 30 years have been golden, a holiday from history. Then came February 24, 2022, when Russia invaded Ukraine and shook Europe to its core. Somewhere in my citizenship papers, in tiny writing, it says that until I age out of the obligation at 70, I’ll be called on to do my part if war comes to Sweden. I’m a writer. I’m not much of a lethal threat. “If the Swedes are relying on you, they’ll be speaking Russian in Stockholm by next year,” my friends said, chortling. But I don’t think they will be. The pamphlet says, “If Sweden is attacked, we will never surrender.” My friend Marcus put it differently: “If they come here, we’ll show them what hell looks like,” he said, shrugging. I don’t know any Swedes who are afraid, but I do know some who are preparing, just in case.

An article on the Radio Sweden website

In November, in that terrible month, two fiber-optic cables in the Baltic Sea were severed. One connected Finland and Germany, and the other linked Sweden and Lithuania. These cables are massive and form the backbone of the global internet, carrying 99% of the world’s intercontinental data traffic. The cables are critical national infrastructure. These attacks have raised fears of hybrid warfare, a fusion of conventional and unconventional instruments of power and tools of subversion, blended to achieve synergistic effects. It’s everything, everywhere, all at once. The NATO Review writes:

There are two distinct characteristics of hybrid warfare. First, the line between war and peace time is rendered obscure. This means that it is hard to identify or discern the war threshold. War becomes elusive as it becomes difficult to operationalize it.

Sweden has fought six major wars with Russia. But since the end of the Napoleonic wars in 1809, when Sweden lost to Russia one-third of its territory in the form of Finland, Sweden hasn’t engaged in armed conflict. Swedish neutrality was never 100%, of course. Sweden supplied Nazi Germany with iron ore during World War II, for instance, and joined the EU in 1995. But neutrality protected Sweden from the worst of 200+ years of conflict on a blood-soaked continent. When I got here just five years ago, the idea of Sweden abandoning its policy of neutrality was inconceivable. But that was five years ago. Now, Sweden is a member of NATO.

I write a lot about expat/immigrant life and because of this, Americans looking to leave the U.S. often find their way to me. Since the election, these inquiries have spiked. People are asking about visas, residence permits, school admissions, healthcare, housing and the outlook for employment in various European countries. There’s a new sense of urgency and I understand it. For most of my time here, my thinking has been that if a tiny voice in your head is telling you to leave the U.S., you probably should. But the world has changed and so have I. Things are worse at home, yes, but they are also worse here, and no one anywhere yet knows what we are inside of. A departure from one place necessarily means an arrival in another. I look at the face of my youngest child in the flickering candlelight, here below the Arctic Circle, here in the encroaching dark.