In part 4 of my series in Dubai, I would like to talk about the Russian community in Dubai. So to give you some context as to why this is surprising, after the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, most countries around the world closed their borders to Russians - so all flights between London and Moscow were suspended. Russian tourists stopped coming to the UK and likewise, British tourists are no longer visiting Russia: this is not just because of the lack of direct flights, but most British tourists fear being arbitrarily arrested in Russia and being used as a hostage, a bargaining chip as in the notorious Brittney Grinner case, an American basketball player who was arrested in Moscow on charges of smuggling and sentenced to nine years in prison. Of course, these was only because she was a high profile basketball player and the Russian authorities knew that the American government wouldn't let her rot in a prison cell for that long. She was thus released as part of a prisoner exchange on the 8th December with arms dealer Viktor Bout. Yeah, nobody in the West wants to become the next Grinner, so we're staying the hell away from Russia for now. Technically speaking Russian tourists can still access the European Union but they need a short-stay visa, but most EU countries have stopped issuing this even to Russians willing to travel via third countries. Likewise, Russian tourists can still apply for a visa to visit America but the odds of a successful visa application is very low. That's why Russian tourists have all but disappeared from the West but they are still in Dubai - you see, I do speak Russian and my ears would perk up when I hear Russian. It suffices to say that whenever you're visiting a famous tourist attraction like the Burj Khalifa, hanging out at the malls, chilling at the beach or just simply the Dubai Metro - you will be surrounded by loads of Russians in Dubai.
Technically, the UAE has chosen to remain neutral and not get involved in the war in Ukraine - this is a rather cynical and cowardly stance of course but one that has served the UAE well. The war in Ukraine has pushed up oil and gas prices, thus being a major oil and gas exporter, the UAE has indirectly benefited from the war-induced price hike. Likewise, when the Russian tourists stopped visiting Amsterdam, Madrid and New York, they turned to other countries like the UAE which are still happy to welcome Russian tourists. If you were to look at the departure board at Moscow's Sheremetyevo airport, you will see that there are still international flights to places like Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Istanbul, Delhi. Belgrade, Phuket, Doha, Beijing, Male (Maldives), Bangkok. Colombo, Seychelles and Hurghada (Egypt). There are no more flights to destinations like London, Paris, New York, Tokyo, Singapore or Berlin but there are still plenty of countries happy to welcome Russian tourists. Take Sri Lanka for example, their economy has totally imploded this year after the double whammy of an extremely corrupt, incompetent government who couldn't handle the pandemic. They are desperate for tourists to come and spend some money there, thus they have chosen to turn a blind eye to the war in Ukraine and welcome Russian tourists seeking some sunny weather and beautiful beaches when the temperature in Moscow is -18 degrees. So the dire situation in Sri Lanka gives them an excuse to welcome Russian tourists, but what about the UAE though? This is such a rich country but the two main industries here are oil and gas followed by tourism - both have received a massive boost this year as a direct consequence of the war in Ukraine. In fact, oil prices in 2020 and 2021 fell dramatically because of the pandemic slowing down the world's economy. Tourism also took a major hit for the same reason when countries closed their borders and had lock downs - Dubai took a double hit from both of those factors and thus you could see the locals shrugging their shoulders, "do you know how much we suffered in 2020 and 2021? This is just the recovery we needed! We didn't start the war in Ukraine - this has absolutely nothing to do with us!"
Prior to the war in Ukraine, there was already a sizable Russian community living and working in Dubai. It is quite hard for Russians to get a work permit for somewhere like the UK or USA, they would have to be quite highly skilled but in Dubai, they would gladly give a Russian person who has little work experience a work permit to do a fairly lowly paid job. So if you were from a small town in the Russian countryside, you could either move to a big city like Moscow to get some work experience after you finish your studies or you could go to Dubai - as long as you speak some English and have some skills, it wouldn't be hard to find a job there. In the nice hotel where I stayed for example, many of the staff there were Russian - that made complete sense, given the large number of Russian tourists who frequented that hotel. Hence over the years, this has led to a sizable Russian community building up in the UAE - according to Wikipedia, there are around 100,000 Russian speakers living in the UAE though this includes other Russian speakers from countries like Belarus, Ukraine and Kazakhstan. Add to that an influx of about two million Russian tourists a year and that's a heck of a lot of Russians in the UAE at any one time - there are Russian schools, Russian social clubs, shops selling Russian food and drink, Russian restaurants, even a local Russian radio station. The war has only made this community grow in size as those young Russian people seeking international work experience have even fewer options now, holiday makers are only welcomed in a small number of countries and on top of that, Russian young men who want to avoid being sent to the front line in Ukraine can easily get on a plane from Russia and land in Dubai within a few hours. There was already a sizable number of Russians back in 2006, when I was working in Dubai - that number has increased exponentially since.
My favourite mall in Dubai is the Mall of the Emirates and that's because I used to work there back in 2006. It is also the only mall in the world is a massive indoor ski slope - the famous Ski Dubai. The signs in that mall are in four languages: Arabic, English, Chinese and Russian. So whilst I can imagine there were plenty of Chinese tourists before the pandemic visiting that mall, the Russians were still there in huge numbers. There is clearly a lot of money to be made from these Russian tourists in Dubai. Furthermore, when you go to a restaurant in Dubai, the menu would usually be in English but if they were going to offer me a menu in another language, it wouldn't be Arabic - it would be Russian of course as the restaurant wants to make money from the many Russian tourists there. There were even a few occasions when I passed as a Russian tourist - you see, Dubai is such a touristy place and many of the people who work in the tourism industry are English-speaking migrant workers from places like Pakistan and India. To avoid being harassed by these salesmen trying to sell me stuff, I would often pretend to be a Russian tourist who didn't speak a word of English. That worked sometimes if they realized they couldn't communicate with me, but what happened sometimes was that the Indian or Pakistani guy would signal to his Russian speaking colleague who would then pounce on me and start pitching me in Russian. Of course, not all Russians are European looking - there's a lot of Russia on the Asian continent to the north of China and Mongolia, the Siberian Russians there tend to look far more Chinese like me than their white, European counterparts in Western Russia. After all, I was either with my white husband or my two bosses who were also white, that went on to make me look even more like a Russian-speaking Siberian tourist hanging out with my white Russian friends in Dubai and this last happened to me in Georgia, when some locals thought I was a Russian-speaking Siberian tourist.
How do I feel about the Russians there though - that's a rather complex question. At the hotel where I was staying, I saw a group of young Russian gays outside smoking; they were quite obviously homosexual given the way they were dressed. They were getting ready for a night out in town and were discussing where to go drinking, where to go dancing etc. I did think for a moment, how can you party away in Dubai like that when there's a war raging on in Ukraine, where your fellow Russian young men are being sent to the front line as cannon fodder by Putin to die a very nasty death? Then again, I'm always in this moral dilemma myself given my own complex identity: firstly, I'm British and I have always hated the current Conservative government. Boy, I have written so many blog posts about how I wanted Boris Johnson to fuck off as I really hated him and of course, there are Russian people who hate Putin the same way. Just because I am British doesn't mean I like or support the government, quite the opposite! Another part of my identity is that I was born and raised in Singapore, but I fucking hate the government there so much as well and have never ever supported the PAP. Then ethnically, I'm Chinese (well I am mixed but I'm mostly Chinese) and I can't tell you just how much I fucking hate the Communist government in China and I think they're pure evil. So for the three countries you could associate me with - the UK, Singapore and China - guess what? I really fucking hate the governments in all three countries! The way I cope with this that I make sure I always express my views very clearly on these issues and my friends who know me well know exactly where I stand when it comes to the governments of these countries. After all, anyone who assumes that all citizens by default always love and pledge 100% unconditional loyalty to their leaders is living in cloud cuckoo land and if someone is guilty of making that kind of assumption, then do you really want to waste any time talking to them? No way.
Let me share with you an encounter I had in Dubai with a member of staff in the hotel whom I chatted to a few times, she was a Siberian Russian who looked Chinese and often gets mistaken as Chinese but when she found out that I was Russian speaking, she couldn't quite place where I was given that I had an accent - thus she guessed that I was Chinese-American but had studied Russian at university or had worked in Russia. I couldn't resist saying, "нет войне (nyet voynye)" to her in one conversation, that means 'no to war' and has been the battle cry for those in Russia opposed to the war. She made this face and just said, "да конечно (da koneschno)" which translates to "yes naturally" or "yes that goes without saying." A good example of the use of this phrase was when a reporter asked a Russian gymnast at the 2000 Olympics if she wanted to win the gold medal and her reply was да конечно - followed by every gymnast here wants to win that gold medal too." You get the impression that she thought the reporter was an idiot to have asked such an obvious answer - like couldn't he have come up with a more intelligent question to ask her? Thus when the lady at the hotel said да конечно I felt embarrassed because I had put her on the spot to defend herself, as if I was forcing her to condemn Putin as a villain, a war criminal and a murderer before I would befriend or trust her. Given how much I hate Boris Johnson, the PAP and the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), I can only imagine how irked she must be each time people wonder if she supports Putin or not. The fact is there are many Russian people, living in Russia, who are completely brainwashed by the Russian propaganda machine and they believe the lies that Putin tells them about the war. But this Siberian lady who worked at the hotel doesn't live in Russia - she lives and works in Dubai and so I have good reason to believe that she is not brainwashed like her relatives back in Siberia. So that was the only time I brought up the topic of the war in Dubai with a Russian person; given how awfully awkward that was, I never brought it up again.
So the one lesson I took away from this was that whilst I have very strong feelings about how evil Putin has been in this war, it is important not to imagine that all Russians are evil and support Putin. Putin's most brainwashed supporters are those in deepest, darkest Russia who do not speak another language like English and thus do not consume foreign media. They make no access to try to get information or entertainment apart from what the Russian government offers them and for them; now that tends to be older Russians and less educated Russians - the Russians who do make it to Dubai tend to be younger Russians and they have to be reasonably educated and/or skilled enough to get a job there. On top of that, these Russians living and working in Dubai do tend to speak English - it is a necessity as it's the lingua franca that you have to use in daily life in Dubai. I have had years of working with Russian people in London and that's one aspect of life in London that has nearly disappeared - given our stance on the war in Russia in the West, many Russians who have settled in the UK keep a very low profile, some will anglicize their names and also change their accents to avoid being identified as Russian. Whereas in Dubai, the Russians are there in such big numbers and there's no stigma attached to being Russian there. Rather, what bothered me far more was the willingness of the UAE government to simply continue welcoming all these Russians to their country when the rest of the world has taken a very clear stance on the war in Ukraine by turning away Russian tourists. But of course, in the UAE, a massive 89% of the population is expatriate whilst only 11% are locals who hold UAE citizenship - thus even I met very few UAE locals on this trip, I met far more Russians in Dubai. So that's it from me on this topic - what do you think? Would the presence of all these Russians in Dubai make you feel somewhat uncomfortable given the war in Ukraine? Or am I right to give them the benefit of the doubt that not all Russians support or like Putin? Do leave a comment below, many thanks for reading.
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