Hi Des:

Thanks for your response.

I might not have expressed myself as well as I wanted to in my post #5 above.

What I was trying to say is that whenever a country is engaged in hostilities, either internal or external, all interactions with government or quasi-government officials everywhere in the country become more tense, unpredictable, and fraught with peril than they normally are.

I cited my own entry into the USA back in 2001 as an example. In that case, I entered the country as a tourist, a citizen from a neutral 3rd country, via a land border crossing that typically sees over 100,000 vehicles a day transit between Canada and the USA, and it took hours to do so, compared to the normal "minutes". The conflict that the USA was involved in at the time was taking place halfway around the globe, but the effects on all travelers going in and out of the USA were very pronounced.

I suspect the same problem would exist today at any border crossings into either of the countries that are parties to the current Russia - Ukraine conflict (or Gaza-Israel conflict, or Libyan internal conflict, etc.).

I did not mean to express an opinion of any kind about the propriety of America's conflict in 2001, nor do I have an opinion of any kind about the propriety of the current Russia - Ukraine conflict, or any of the many dozens of conflicts that have taken place worldwide in the past 40 years. That's a holdover from my time working with ICRC, during which all of us had to take a position of strict neutrality at all times.

We could not afford to hold personal opinions - we just looked at these conflicts as "Team A vs. Team B". They were all the same anyway - one party to the conflict wanted to control land or people held by the other party. The motivations of the parties involved may have varied from conflict to conflict, but the objective was always the same.

That's a reasonable analysis, but usually there are small but significant shifts in "which way the wind is blowing" immediately after the end of active hostilities, even though all the policies, sanctions, rules, etc. that were in place during the hostilities are still there. I've seen this many times following either the end of hostilities or a mutually acknowledged pause in hostilities.

My guess is that this change happens because 99% of the people on both sides of the conflict are grateful and relieved that things have settled down (if only temporarily), and they long to get back to normal life and long to get back to welcoming visitors to their country.

Michael