In the humid evenings on the Thai island of Phuket, Aleksei* often sits alone on his balcony, and wonders if the past 18 months have been a strange dream. Last year, he was living with his mother and siblings in Moscow, and working in an IT job in one of the city’s skyscrapers. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022 changed everything.
“At that moment I thought: ‘OK what opportunities do I have here in Russia?’ Go to war, which I don’t want of course because Ukrainians are our brothers,” he says. The alternative, to protest, was hopeless. “It is impossible to fight against the government in Russia,” he says.
