Spring of despair

Today I understand well what my relatives experienced, learning about the Hitlerites, which rolled up to the country and their retreat: despair and hopelessness.

Today I understand well the emotions with which the compatriots of the invaders lived - joy or just indifference: ours came, won the living space, they will not do anything bad for people.

Grandma often told me about evacuation. Then I was small and could not understand what kind of tragedy it was - to be far from home and relatives, with a child in their arms, among strangers. Now, when I talk to my Crimean friends or just read the letters of people unfamiliar to me on social networks, I understand what it feels like - and I still know that this can happen to me and my loved ones at any time if the aggressor goes on.

These people are not shown on Russian television, but from this they do not cease to exist. The most ordinary people, of different nationalities, different political views and ideas about the future. The Russians who did not want to live in Putin's Russia and considered themselves the Crimeans, who received a unique chance after the Maidan to build a normal life not far from a degrading neighbor. Ukrainians, who all these years were not so simple in one of the few regions of the country where there were almost no Ukrainian schools where the newspaper in Ukrainian had to be sought in a kiosk, and it was possible to hear his native language from a tourist from Lviv or Poltava. The Crimean Tatars, who returned to their native land after decades of exile and often pushed on the wall of misunderstanding and alienation and the deaf murmur of those who settled in the houses they left.

All these people were already difficult in Crimea. Russian - because almost all the years of Ukrainian independence and Crimean autonomy were ruled by bandits like the current speaker Konstantinov and Prime Minister Aksenov. Ukrainians and Crimean Tatars - because these bandits were chauvinists. Only after the Ukrainian people - and the national flag of the Crimean Tatars, and the panels of Simferopol, Sevastopol, Feodosia, Kerch, Yalta - managed to get rid of the trouble in which we all lived, fluttered on the Maidan. But they came - and, as usual in the days of occupation, the bandits and chauvinists turned into policemen reporting to their neighbors and spitting guests from the country, which was common yesterday and at the expense of which all this fraternity of the invaders and policemen lived, lives and intends to continue to exist.

So it has come, despair. Someone just lives in the void, realizing that there will be no Crimea-but there will be a territory thrown to the feet of Vladimir Putin, like many other pieces of land, caught by the Kremlin and turned into false states. Someone is chasing small cozy hotels-what tourists in a ruined country? Someone is leaving - there are more and more refugees in Ukraine now, and after the occupation is completely possible, there will be even more of them - thousands of people who are deprived of shelter and dreams only because Vladimir Putin wanted to feel like the emperors, and his subjects approaching the country of historical abyss wanted to become saviors and winners - well, at least so, so much trampled.

Of course, there will be fewer such people than kissing tanks' carriages - so, in fact, it always happens during occupation. Of course, the next people's bastard of the Russian Federation will be able to amuse himself with the illusion that his country is protecting and protecting someone there. But the tears of people who leave their home and the powerless disappointment that are experienced in fear are not an illusion. This is the real life that is Crimea.