“Sir, sir, wake up,” the concierge yelled, banging on my hotel door. “His colleagues asked me to tell him that it looks like we are under bomb attack.”
I never thought that those would be words that I would ever hear in Kiev.
Like many people, he had heard the US warnings in recent months that a Russian invasion was imminent, but could not imagine that it would actually happen.
I came to Ukraine as a journalist in 2014 to cover the “Maidan” protests, when then President Viktor Yanukovych was deposed after his decision to move away from Europe and closer to Russia.
I covered events in Crimea when Russia illegally annexed the Ukrainian peninsula and was in eastern Ukraine when Russian-backed separatists proclaimed their “people’s republics.”
Since the first day of the conflict in eastern Ukraine, Russia has denied its presence there.
But I remember very clearly September 2014, when Russian tanks took over a small Ukrainian town just across the Russian border.
I saw these tanks with my own eyes, but when I went on air to describe the situation for a Moscow radio station, they told me: “This can’t be happening. You must be wrong.”
I also witnessed Russian troops from the Buddhist Far East region of Buryatia support rebel fighters during the bloody battle for the strategic town of Debaltseve in the Donetsk region in February 2015.
I remembered all of these things, as well as the poisoning of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, the egregious fraud in the last Russian election, and the changes to the Constitution introduced to allow Vladimir Putin to stay in power until 2036.
However, he still couldn’t believe that the Russian president would launch a full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
“Everything changed”
It wasn’t until I saw the hotel concierge standing by my bed, telling me the war had started, that I believed him.
And from that moment, everything changed.
In the hotel lobby, I paid my bill, but the receptionist’s hands were shaking so badly that she couldn’t sign the receipt.
And then my phone started ringing.
A friend in Kiev asked me if I knew of any taxi drivers in Odessa who could help get his girlfriend to safety in neighboring Moldova.
Within an hour we found someone, at twice the usual rate.
Leave? Or stand still?
Another friend called from Lvov, where she had gone for a job interview. Should she try to catch the train back to Kiev? , she asked me.
We decided that the railway lines and stations would probably be a target for the invading forces, so it was better to stay put.
The next call was from a Ukrainian veteran of the fighting in Donetsk in 2014, a man he had interviewed a few days earlier.
He was desperate to get his ex-wife and son out of Kharkiv, a city just half an hour’s drive from the Russian border.
He said the only train tickets available were for the next day, but since there was already fighting on the outskirts of the city, could they risk waiting until then?
Fighter planes and aerial sirens
I left the hotel to walk to a friend’s house where I could stay for work.
The walk was only two blocks long, but it was the emptiest street she’d ever seen and the most eerily quiet she’d come across.
No people, no cars. He had never seen it like this before: this part of Kiev is normally full of young people and tourists.
The clouds were so low that they not only hid the sun, but also the warplanes constantly flying overhead. Were they Ukrainians or Russians?
Should I run to the basement and hide, or stay in my room on the top floor and be the first to break the news if something big starts to happen?
Air-raid sirens broke the silence several times.
I recorded it on my phone, but it took me 20 minutes to upload the file to Twitter because the mobile internet signal was interrupted.
As I walked down a street in the Ukrainian capital with my Russian passport in my pocket, I thought of the day Adolf Hitler attacked the USSR in 1941.
I don’t know if there were Germans living in Kiev at that time. But if there were, I imagine they must have felt like me, as a Russian in Kiev at this time.
On a day when Russian warplanes systematically bombed one Ukrainian city after another, not one of my many Ukrainian friends said a bad word to me.
Although they had every right to do so.
But all this has left me with a huge moral dilemma: When my reporting trip is over and when the horror of the war subsides, how will I be able to return home, to Russia, to my country, which has done this to Ukraine today?
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BBC-NEWS-SRC: https://www.bbc.com/mundo/noticias-internacional-60529269, IMPORTING DATE: 2022-02-26 12:00:06
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