Like others ashamed by the invasion of Ukraine, I have left Russia, my home, says writer Ivan Philippov
? My grandfathers fought in it. The war broke them, but they won: they should be proud of that. I know they were. These achievements were certainly never part of my identity in the same way that they are for the “Putin majority”, my compatriots who build their sense of self on past victories to which they are associated only by an accident of birth.
The day of the invasion – 24 February – is a day that will be forever seared into my memory. The enormity and the irrationality of the war was like a physical blow. In my carefully constructed social bubble, there wasn’t a single person who supported the war. We felt like leaves, scattered by a hurricane. We still feel like this.
It’s not quite the same with our passports. In the line to the border control in Istanbul, I overheard a conversation between a Ukrainian mother and daughter. They were standing right behind me – they were trying to fly back home to Kyiv. They left for a holiday in Turkey before the war and now they were going back to a world in which their grandmother was hiding in a bomb shelter and their father and brother had joined the territorial defence forces.
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