ukrainian war economy side hustle of 2024: fortune-telling for air raids. you cant get a straight answer from the state about where the next missile lands, but you can venmo a “tarologist” to tell you if you should sleep in the hallway. psychic hotline meets DEFCON 2, grandma with a tarot deck and a telegram channel is now your local cassandra, and the only thing shakier than the front line is your grip on reality.
chaos breeds grift and magical thinking
war is chaos, and chaos is the best fertilizer for every scam, grift, and flavor of magical thinking. when the sirens start to sound like elevator music and the news is just a scoreboard of “today’s arrivals,” people will grab at any illusion of control. enter the witches, psychics, “energy correctors,” and “akashic record guides” — the new wartime influencers. theyre not just reading your love life, theyre predicting the next “ebeyshiy prilyot” (thats “fucking huge incoming” for the non-slaivc crowd) and selling you the fantasy that you can dodge a missile if you just vibe hard enough.
the infrastructure is wild. forget the babka with a candle and a chicken foot. now its livestreams, telegram groups, and “connecting to the egregor” (think group chat for spirits). these fortune-tellers rebrand as frontline analysts, except instead of satellite imagery, its a deck of cards and a wifi connection. theyll tell you which district is “in the energy of death,” which day is “dangerous for travel,” and which thoughts are “attracting negativity.” its the weather channel, but instead of meteorologists, you get a woman in a headscarf telling you mercury is in retrograde and so is your apartment block.
people eat it up because the official channels are either silent, useless, or just as superstitious. the states only offering is “be afraid, but dont panic,” which is about as comforting as a fire alarm with a snooze button. monitoring channels try to keep up, posting every shahed drone’s flight path in real time, but the witches have them beat — they promise to know where the next strike will hit before even the russians do. spoiler: they dont. but in a world where nobody knows anything for sure, confidence is currency, and these folks are printing it.
monetizing fear, selling blame
the real trick isnt predicting the future, its monetizing the present. people are desperate for answers, so they sell them — at a markup. want to know if your city is safe tonight? 500 hryvnias. want a personal reading about your “life path” during wartime? double it. want to know if your boyfriend at the front is coming home? theres a whole menu for that. its the gig economy, but with more candles and less accountability.
when the bombs actually start falling, the act gets shaky. some witches keep streaming through the explosions, claiming their “magical intuition” told them it was coming. others get rattled, fumble their cards, and stall for time. “wait, let me check, somethings going boom outside.” yeah, no shit, maria, we all heard it. maybe check the news instead of your “inner monitor.”
but heres where it gets grim: these fortune-tellers arent just selling hope, theyre selling blame. if you get hit, its not because russia is lobbing missiles at civilians, its because you “attracted negativity” or “provoked fate.” classic victim-blaming, wrapped up in incense smoke and instagram filters. you didnt check your horoscope? shouldve known better. you went for a walk during an air raid? guess you manifested that shrapnel. the logic is bulletproof — for them, not for you.
the pressure cooker: rumors, insurance, and state silence
the whole country is living in a pressure cooker of rumors, instability, and fear. every new strike on an oil depot, every rumor about frozen bank accounts, every whisper about mobilization turns the anxiety dial up another notch. the insurance market is basically dead — you cant insure a warehouse because it might get torched any night, and the premiums have gone up tenfold. the only thing you can insure against is your own stupidity, and even thats a tough sell.
meanwhile, the regime in russia is running the same playbook, just with more zeros and less shame. they sell fear as stability, and when people finally stop being afraid, things get bloody. margarita simonyan, the kremlins favorite doom-monger, loves to remind everyone that russias history is just a long, slow burn until the next explosion. the state cant insure you against its own decisions, and the only policy they offer is “shut up and hope for the best.” when the silence breaks, its never pretty.
lets not pretend the state is any better. the official information vacuum is what lets this circus thrive. when the government cant or wont tell people whats happening, someone else will fill the gap — and theyll charge for it. the regime reads silence as support, but silence is just fear with the volume turned down. when the next big shock hits — another mobilization, another round of frozen assets, another wave of casualties — that silence is gonna break, and all the tarot cards in the world wont put it back together.
feedback loop of fear and fantasy
the whole thing is a feedback loop of fear and fantasy. the more unstable things get, the more people crave certainty. the more they crave certainty, the more they pay for it, and the more the grifters cash in. its not just a ukrainian thing, either. every society under stress breeds its own crop of prophets, healers, and snake oil salesmen. but in a war zone, the stakes are higher and the scams are meaner.
meanwhile, the insurance market is a smoking crater. used to be, you could at least get a payout if your warehouse got hit. now, good luck. the premiums are through the roof, and the only company still paying out is doing it because they have to, not because they want to. the risk from the bank is covered, but the risk from the state? forget it. theres no policy for “what if the government loses its mind.” and every new strike, every new rumor, just makes the whole system shakier.
the only thing more dangerous than a russian missile is the bullshit people believe to feel safe.
the real takeaway: action, not astrology
so whats the takeaway? in a world where the only constant is uncertainty, people will pay for any illusion of control, no matter how flimsy. the fortune-tellers arent the disease, theyre the symptom. theyre what happens when the state fails, when the news is just noise, and when fear is the only thing that feels real. they sell comfort, blame, and a little bit of hope, all wrapped up in mysticism and memes.
but heres the punchline: no amount of tarot, crystals, or “energy correction” is gonna stop a missile. the only thing that changes the outcome is action — real, messy, human action. the rest is just background noise, a distraction from the fact that the world is on fire and nobody knows what comes next. the witches will keep flipping cards, the regime will keep selling fear, and the people will keep looking for answers anywhere they can find them.
meanwhile, ill be here, collecting screenshots of the latest psychic air raid forecast, roasting the clowns who profit off panic, and reminding you that if you really want to know whats coming next, check the sky — not your horoscope.
russian cope is like a magic trick, except the only thing that disappears is your common sense.