An the morning of March 3, Sweta was woken up by a call from her mother. “You have to buy tickets right away before it’s too late,” she said. Two days later Sweta and her boyfriend left Russia, probably for a long time, maybe forever. Ever since the beginning of the war in Ukraine, they had lived as if in an internal state of emergency. “We saw news about what’s really happening in Ukraine and we saw Russian propaganda,” says Sweta. They went to protests against the war. For years, she says, they have mostly been present when there were demonstrations in Moscow against Vladimir Putin’s rule. But this time something was different: “We felt like we were trapped, we were together and we couldn’t speak. It’s an unbelievable tragedy.” As she talks about her feelings in the first days of the war, Sweta struggles for words, tries to hold back tears and apologizes when she doesn’t quite succeed.
The war wasn’t even a week old when Sweta and her boyfriend started talking about leaving Russia. They thought about what had to be done first and how much time it would take them. But then everything went much faster than they thought. The decision as to whether and when came almost automatically after that morning call from the mother. In the first days of March, rumors circulated in Moscow that the declaration of a state of emergency and general mobilization were imminent. In this case, men of military age would no longer be allowed to leave the country. The young couple wanted to forestall that. The siege ring they had sensed seemed to close.