I didn’t want to write this for a long time. I feel disgusted, afraid, ashamed.

I can’t write about everything I know because I have to protect the people who’ve saved my life.

On February 24, 2022, my country attacked Ukraine.

On February 24, I went to Ukraine on assignment from Novaya Gazeta, where I had been working for the previous seventeen years.

I crossed the Polish-Ukrainian border on the night of February 25.

Over the course of four weeks, thanks to the incredible support of countless Ukrainians, I was able to file four stories—from the border, Odesa, Mykolaiv, and Kherson. Kherson was under occupation. Getting in and out meant crossing the frontlines twice. In Kherson, Russian soldiers were kidnapping and torturing people. I was able to find people who had survived being tortured. By collating their stories, working in the field, I was able to find where the kidnapped people were being held—a former temporary detention center located at 3 Teploenergetiki Street. I learned the names of forty-four kidnapped people and the circumstances under which they were taken. I published my article and handed over what I had uncovered to the Ukrainian Prosecutor General’s office.

The next place that I was going to was Mariupol.

Mariupol was still resisting. There was active combat. On many days, there were no humanitarian corridors. The only occasionally passable road lay through Zaporizhzhia. It often came under fire, and, as you approached Mariupol, the Russian checkpoints began. Nevertheless, people traveled this road every day in order to try to rescue their loved ones from the city as it was being destroyed. Volunteers organized them into columns. I decided to travel with them.

On March 28, I entered Zaporizhzhia.  Waiting at the checkpoint, (the Teroborona were examining my passport and press credentials), I started getting messages from friends. “Assholes.” “Hang in there.” “Let me know if I can help.” That’s how I found out that Novaya Gazeta had shut down. Novaya had received its second warning that year from the state censorship agency, Roskomnadzor, which meant it could now lose its license. I’d been anticipating this, I’d been waiting for it from the moment of the incursion, but I couldn’t know how painful it would be.

I decided I’d go to Mariupol anyway. Publish my piece wherever I could.

On March 29, I was meeting with volunteers and the people heading to Mariupol to rescue their relatives. I found someone willing to take me in their car despite my Russian passport.

We arranged to leave on the 31st.

I spent March 30, the eve of our trip, in a hotel. I was trying to gather my strength. A colleague from Novaya called me. She asked me if I was going to Mariupol. I was puzzled: only two people from the paper knew I was going to Mariupol—the editor-in-chief, Dmitry Muratov, and my editor Olga Bobrova. I said, Yes, I am going tomorrow. She said, “My sources have gotten in touch with me. They know that you’re going to Mariupol. They say that the Kadyrovites have orders to find you.”

The Kadyrovites, a Chechen subdivision of Rosgvardia, were actively engaged in the fighting around Mariupol—they manned the checkpoints. I knew that. My colleague said, “They’re not planning to hold you. They are going to kill you. That’s been approved.”

It was like running into a wall. I went deaf, everything went white. I said, “I don’t believe you.” She said, “That’s what I told them, too, that I didn’t believe them. Then they played me a recording of you talking to someone about Mariupol, planning your trip. I recognized your voice.”

She hung up, I sat down on the bed. I didn’t think anything, I just sat.

Forty minutes later, my source from Ukrainian military reconnaissance called me. He said, “We have information that an assassination of a female journalist from Novaya Gazeta is being organized in Ukraine. And all-points bulletin on you has been sent out to every Russian checkpoint.”

An hour later, Muratov called me. He said, “You can’t go to Mariupol anymore. You have to leave Ukraine this minute.”

But I couldn’t make myself go.

The following morning, I woke up to messages from an editor at Novaya. The Russian Prosecutor General’s Office and Roskomnadzor had sent them letters demanding they take my reporting from Ukraine down from their website, or else the site would be blocked. Novaya complied. Somehow, this was what crushed me. I started crying and couldn’t stop. Then rage came in place of the tears, and it filled my entire being.

I tried to find another way into Mariupol, looking to bypass the Russian checkpoints. This path did not exist—there was active combat everywhere. The only road was through Zaporizhzhia, and they were waiting for me on that road.

I was incapable of accepting my powerlessness. Rational arguments didn’t work on me. The only thing that stopped me from moving forward was thinking what would happen to the person who agreed to take me in their car. If I got killed, they wouldn’t be spared, either.

On the night of April 1, I left Ukraine.

I left in a very bad state. I had lice, mumps, and PTSD. My friends took me in, they passed me from hand to hand. My girlfriend Yana came from Russia, she took care of me, made sure I was eating and sleeping. I was planning on getting better, finishing the book I was writing, and going back to Russia. All of my work, my entire life, my mother and sister—they are all there. The worse the news from home got, the more I felt like I belonged there and nowhere else.

I thought about how they were going to kill me. But the more I thought about it, the calmer I got. I feel stupid and embarrassed remembering what was going through my head. I didn’t know who had issued the orders, I referred to the killers as “them.” I thought that they’d probably made an emotional decision. The war wasn’t working out the way they wanted at all, everything was going haywire