Vlad Troitskyi: “I decided last night to leave…”

Since the beginning of the war, the Ukrainian director Vlad Troitskyi sends messages to “Liberation”. With his family, the artist decided to leave the suburbs of Kyiv (Kiev) where he lived until then.

Director Vlad Troitskyi is suing for Release his diary which he sends to us as soon as he can. The tacit rule is the same: there is no rewriting, and one does not modify one’s text, at most one allows oneself to explain a reference or allusion which would escape the French reader. A big thank you to Alexis Berelowitch who reads his messages received in Russian.

Thursday, March 3, 11:03 p.m.

Today, I sent my wife, my daughter and Solomiya (from the DakhDaughters group) to the west with her son and her husband. They are now approaching Ivano-Frankovsk…Thirteen hour drive…My wife is a wonderful woman…Last night when it was decided that they would leave tonight, I suddenly realized that this might be the last time I saw them… I wanted to cry in front of this barbaric injustice… In the name of what? Why do they have to leave everything and flee into the unknown… My daughter is going to have to live with strangers, they are our friends, of course, but they are not her mom and dad… I don’t know when she will be able to go to school. school with us… Or just go for a walk… Go to a cafe or to the cinema… Meet her friends… Putin’s world stole my daughter’s childhood and millions of Ukrainian children… There are more than one million refugees coming from Ukraine today… Mainly women, children and old people… For what? What great purpose is worth the suffering of these people?

No answer…

Today, Russia has practically closed its borders to its citizens…Tomorrow, apparently, will be declared martial law and mobilization in Russia…Shoigu, the Russian Minister of Defense, says he wants to send an army of several million in Ukraine… To kill us all?

Friday, March 4, 10:46 p.m.

I decided last night to leave…I realized that I would be much more useful to my country if with the DakhaBrakha and the DakhDaughters we started to present anti-Putin anti-war shows in Europe and America…

I called Lucie Berelowitsch and she is ready to welcome us and settle us in her city… And we are starting to put together tour programs and prepare appropriate content… A goal is emerging… This is what we can do !

I didn’t sleep much last night. The feeling that this is most likely the last time you will sleep in your own bed, in your own home… That from today you are a wanderer… That you are stepping into the unknown, leaving the world that you built for thirty years and which was destroyed in the name of the mad idea of ​​the Reich of the Russian World… In the morning, I tried again to persuade my mother, my little old lady… She was crying and saying that she would not bear off the road and didn’t want to be a burden to us… And again, the question arose: who will answer for her tears… What has she done wrong to Putin? Should she be killed for not loving him? Yesterday more than 100 peaceful civilians were killed by bombs and missiles in the city of Kharkiv alone…

Sunday, March 6, 5:56 p.m.

We are on the third day of the trip… from Kyiv (Kiev) to the border… At this moment, we are in line at the checkpoint. Almost a kilometer…I don’t know how long it will last…We are in three cars…We have seven children, from 10 months to 16 years old…More than a million refugees already…Mostly women and children … Old people mostly refuse to leave… It’s monstrous… 40 million people, 40 million Ukrainians… whom Putin’s world wants to kill… The world of a mad, bloodthirsty Russia… And the military Russians are beginning to take a liking to killing defenseless people… Killing peaceful inhabitants… They won’t have to answer for it… You don’t have to answer for your actions especially when you launch missiles, when you shoot at heavy artillery and when you bomb from your planes… It’s crazy… Even according to Putin’s insane concept of one nation.

We crossed almost all of Ukraine… In Ivano-Frankovsk, we were welcomed by the local theatre… It was very warm… In Beregovo, a Hungarian theater opened its doors to us… Solidarity and love, against wickedness and ferocity… Will we be able to hold on? I believe in it, even if it is sometimes very hard and doubts assail me… Can David defeat Goliath?… In this war, the European spectators who watch the fight while giving us their sympathy are afraid to give us David’s slingshot (that is to say the planes)… How complicated… Our three old women stayed at home. They told us that they would not step outside their native land… And we are not running away. We are going to constitute our own front, the art-front.