I can feel my heart hardening as the war goes on

Palm Sunday in Perugia. Umbrians were scuttling around with twigs and leaves, but I was in town to celebrate another faith. It was the annual International Journalism Festival, which hasn’t been ‘annual’ for the past two years due to Covid. Happy reunions were applauded with the sound of countless clinking glasses, but the mood was often mournful. In the first panel I was on, the moderator, Natalia Antelava, asked for a moment of silence for the 18 journalists already killed in Ukraine. Among them was Oksana Baulina, a former colleague of Natalia’s at Coda Story news platform, where I am also a contributing editor. Oksana was Russian. She had previously worked with the anti-corruption investigation unit of Alexey Navalny, the opposition politician Putin has locked up in a labour camp. At Coda she made films about the legacy of Stalin’s gulag and how Russia has never come to terms with its history of state-organised mass murder. Oksana was killed in Kyiv. After a Russian missile hit a shopping mall, she, along with other journalists, went to film the wreckage. The Russians waited for a crowd to gather, then hit the mall again.

Watching Russian soldiers kill your colleagues, bomb maternity hospitals, schools and apartment blocks, rape teens and even toddlers in front of their parents, bind and execute innocents, fills an émigré Ukrainian like myself with cold hate. I can feel my heart hardening. But it’s much stronger for those who live in Ukraine permanently. My family was exiled in 1978, when I was nine months old, after my father was arrested by the KGB for handing out copies of banned books – including Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago. I only had time to throw up over the Soviet Union as a pukey baby and then grew up in London.