Moscow Through My Eyes
I spent three weeks “on the other side of the front”. Here’s what I saw
My last trip to Moscow in June revealed an important but quite obvious fact: things were better before the war. This applies not only to the pain of civilian casualties and the shattered lives of millions of people, but also to quite prosaic things that, under normal circumstances, we take for granted. A flight from London to Moscow today can take up to 24 hours with a change of planes (before the war it was four hours). I had to travel because of my personal circumstances, otherwise I would probably never decide to come back to the country of permanent mobilization and ongoing war. When I took my second plane from Turkey, I had to realize all the possible consequences of that.
- Hello, This is your captain speaking,
came a pleasant young female voice over the speakers. The passengers next to me looked around in confusion. Yes, we had an all-female crew, including the pilots. Two beautiful, positive young girls were in charge of our lives. The male pilots of Pobeda Airlines (“Pobeda” means “Victory” in Russian) had apparently already been “partially mobilized” and sent to the war in Ukraine. So the motherland met us already in the cabin of the airplane in Antalya. The plane was an old Boeing 737–800 and I seriously don’t know when it…