Only children of robbers will have gifts for Christmas: the Argentine apocalypse and its lessons

Today, few people outside Argentina remember those terrible events. It seems impossible: a country with one of the world's largest Ukrainian diasporas (250,000 to 450,000), which for many years was the breadbasket of both Americas and had a huge area of fertile agricultural land, in 2001 fell not even into the third but into the fourth world. It was at the level of Somalia-with total famine, anarchy, and the decline of public services and medicine.

The idea that a big city without electricity, water, and groceries in stores could become a terrible trap in a few days was first thought of by some Ukrainians in the spring of 2013. A heavy snowfall in March not only turned St. Andrew's Descent into a snowboarding trail, but also blocked traffic, turning Kyiv into a city of pedestrians who trudged through snowy debris and bought as much food and toilet paper as they could carry to their homes.