Sometimes all there is left to do, is leave...

‘Do you remember how we trembled under the table, when the Soviet tanks rushed past our window in 1968?’ My cousin who was living in Russia messaged me.

‘Grandma was packing food in a bag for us to flee, but it was too late.’ But here was no reply from her. I knew it wasn't safe for her to correspond with me. I dialed her number, but then changed my mind. She'd always been paranoid that Putin’s men were listening and that they'd punish her Russian husband.

“Never come back,” Natalka whispered to me when we flew out to live in the West.

I looked at her message, thinking of the two of us growing up fatherless in a small village of the then Czechoslovakia. Two daughters of hated dissidents, enemies of the state who'd fought the Russian occupation and failed. All we dreamt about was leaving. But she fell in love with the Russian Sergei, and stayed.

‘I've just left Moscow. It felt oddly similar there in 1991 when people protested before quickly hiding. But there were no tanks on the streets this time.’

I sighed with relief. ‘Natalka, it's so good to hear from you! Putin’s tanks are occupied in the Ukraine right now but his secret police are still there to keep you in line. Is it safe to chat?’

I got a short message back. ‘We packed what we could and left in the middle of the night. Right now we're on a train to Istanbul and we're not the only ones.’

‘What about Sergei? What if Turkey closes their border? How will he get back to Russia?’

‘My husband's leaving Russia for the first time. He says he has no plans to return.’ Natalka typed, sending a photo of her two teenage sons grinning and signalling the peace sign. They were dressed in western t-shirts with the logo: ‘I like rap.’

I understood what Natalka wanted to say. When we studied in Volgograd in 1987, boys of her sons' age were rounded up by the army and sent to Moscow to be quickly trained to fight in Afghanistan. They knew nothing about where they were going. If lucky, they returned, broken in body or mind, never to recover again.

‘What's happening in the Ukraine is a tragedy. And what's happening in Russia is also a catastrophe,’ I typed, scrolling through news podcasts to see heroic Ukrainians standing up to Russian tanks with confused and scared young boys in Russian uniforms calling for the crowd to disperse, only to be blown apart by hand made bombs.

Online news told of international support for Ukrainian civilians as young bodies lay scattered around, glassy eyes looking to the heavens. They'd never been told that they were going to wage war on their neighbour. Many of them had family in the Ukraine.

’Just read Alexi Navalny’s instagram post, of Russians not becoming a nation of frightened silent people. Sergei was in a Moscow bank yesterday where bankers continued to discuss financial plans like nothing had happened.’

‘Natalka, what about the mothers of those boys in Volgograd, crying their eyes out when they received their dead sons from a war that they never even knew was happening?’

‘Sergei said if our Ludmila from St Petersburg, the last survivor of World War 11's 827-day siege on the city can protest against the invasion of Ukraine, bankers can too.’

‘Natalka, Putin’s two year old brother died in that siege. Now Putin's starving the people of Mariupol as the Nazis once did to him. And Ludmila, who's nearly 100 years old and a war hero from the second World War, is in jail for life. She'll be lucky to survive another year.

‘Sergei said that he's more scared for Kyiv ending up like Grozny - left in ruins with 20,000 civilians dead after the Russian invasion of Chechnya.’

I sighed and wished Natalka and her Russian family a safe journey towards freedom. I knew wherever they went, being a Russian was not something that they'd be proud of sharing.

Natalka had read my thoughts, I realised as I saw her last response: ‘Sergei said, imagine if all of us Russians left Russia. The largest land mass on earth would be left empty for our insane Tsar to wage his aggressive war all by himself. He'd go mad in the end like Ivan Grozny. Absolutely alone and mad.’

Following the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia when I was three years old, W.H.Auden published this poem: ‘August 1968’.

If nothing else it reminds us that very little has changed in Russia’s attitude towards its neighbour:

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‘The ogre does what ogre can,

deeds quite impossible for man.

But one prize is beyond his reach.

The ogre cannot master speech.

Across a subjugated plain,

among its desperate and slain,

the ogre strolls with hands on hips,

while drivel gushes from his lips.