The war through the eyes of Meduza readers. Today we are publishing Kirill's letter

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The war through the eyes of Meduza readers. Today we are publishing Kirill's letter

I have become spiteful, almost angry. I used to think Russians simply needed to be taught how to be responsible citizens. To explain to them that politics is not something distant, but a mechanism that will sooner or later affect them too. I thought that if this understanding appeared, all of us would be better off.

I left Russia in 2022. Four years later, I watch from the outside as people only now begin to arrive at conclusions I had been living with since 2014. Only now, in 2026, when reality has become too obvious to ignore, have they begun to raise their heads and say something. And it makes me angry.

For more than ten years I tried to talk about responsibility and the cost of indifference. It was convenient for them not to hear, it was great and fun for them to live as if what was happening did not concern them. As if all of this was somewhere far away, happening to someone else, not to them. And now that the consequences have come for them too, I am ashamed to admit it, but I am gloating. I think: there it is, there is what I was talking about! There is the result of elections, silence, mockery, indifference, and the eternal "it's not all so clear-cut."

I am not proud of this feeling, but I validate it, and it exists. And some part of me wants things to be bad for them now, not abstractly or symbolically, but for real, so that they finally suffer. And I know I am not the only one like this, and for many who emigrated it is simply uncomfortable to admit.

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