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The saga of an American journalist’s hasty departure from Russia

She’s out now, having caught a last-minute flight to Istanbul, Turkey — an exit gateway for many people fleeing Russia right now.

Molly Schwartz was there on an exchange program, her visit cut short by Putin’s war against Ukraine.

She says while Ukrainian refugees are “leaving their besieged country, there is another mass exodus underway. Terrified Russians, and foreigners living in Russia, are desperate to get out of a country that’s quickly descending into militarized authoritarianism, with an economy that’s entered into a downward tailspin.” She says “Google searches in Russia for the word ’emigration’ have spiked.”

“The evening of Monday, February 21,” she says, “was the beginning of the end.” That’s when Putin delivered his “chilling speech” that Ukraine was a “fake state”– and shelling began in the Donbas region. “From that moment on,” she says, “a sense of impending doom hung over Moscow that has not let up.” Two days later, she “heard from a journalist friend who had checked Twitter that explosions were going off in cities all over Ukraine.”

It was time to leave. She and her exchange program colleagues had 12 hours to get out. She threw everything she had into a suitcase and headed for the Moscow airport, and a few hours later was in Turkey, figuring out where to go next.

“The signs of what was going to happen were everywhere,” she says. “Person after person I’ve talked to, across countries and time zones, wondered how we didn’t see Putin’s reckless invasion coming.”

Well, partly because he disguised his intentions, calling the military deployments exercises, denying Russia would invade Ukraine, and engaging in diplomacy we now know was a sham. Here at my desk, I wondered right up to the last day whether there would be a war. Putin’s mind, intentionally and by design, is nearly impossible to read.

What people are wondering now is, after militarily outmatched Ukraine falls (which most Western observers think it will), will that be the end or only the beginning of his territorial ambitions, and will he take on NATO by using nuclear weapons and threatening American cities if NATO retaliates? Nobody knows where this man will stop, or if he will. He once said that “without Russia, the planet doesn’t need to exist.”

What’s clear is the fate of eastern Europe, perhaps the world, is in the hands of one man — and the rest of us don’t matter.

Read her story here.

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