"You have to change your life."

Yevgeniya told how she was not interested in politics, but gradually realized "something had gone wrong" and left Russia with her husband two months before the war.

My husband and I are an ordinary family. We work: I - in production, he - in trade. We live, we make plans, we realized a few years ago that something went wrong in the country, and for a long time now it has been wrong.

We haven't watched the central channels for a long time. 

In '14, at a meeting with friends I learned about Maidan, they were very surprised that I was not aware of political relations. Yes, I live in my own little world.

I asked my friends in Crimea what they thought about all this, and the answer surprised me: "It's Putin. Further on, more and more contradictions became visible, and how much negativity and hatred was pouring out of the central channels? It hurts to watch our own people absorb it. We realized that we had to change our lives.

To begin with went to Moscow, in the 20th year it became even more apparent how much this tyrannical machine had taken over the people. People were forced by intimidation to vote as needed for the government. I sometimes heard someone's predictions that there would be war, and I could not believe that in our time in the civilized world the developed countries could not agree peacefully.

The decision to leave the country was spontaneous, we left Russia in December of '21. On February 24, CNN showed footage of Russia launching an attack on Ukraine? It's hard to put into words. I experienced a range of feelings: shock, helplessness, despair, pain for innocent people and for the Russian government that they do not know what they are doing, and as if I was involved in this evil only because I have a Russian passport.

Anger and terror! Oh, no! What is this! He's gone mad!

We had to go back to Russia in the middle of '22. It is already a different country, I feel a split society, some are embittered, others are pro-peace, the latter are in the minority. I realized that we have to communicate carefully, as if we were 100 years ago in the civil war, where brother on brother, son on father.

It turns out that there are a lot of evil people around, I had not seen this before, I feel lonely among my relatives.