Hey there, dear reader. This is not a story of a rebel. It is the story of someone forced into that role by circumstance. I was not raised to be strong, vengeful or bloodthirsty. I was born a girl and raised to be a lady but became a warrior instead. A tired trope, perhaps, but not far from the truth.

I was born in Crimea in the early 2000s. It was peaceful then: the Black Sea, figs straight from the tree, culture everywhere, the warmth of the southern sun.

Fourteen years later, I watched armed men in green take power in the capital, just a few blocks from the school I attended each day. In the spring of 2014, BTR armoured personnel carriers rolled into the main square. 

Everything was shifting. The occupation of the peninsula by Russia, alongside my early realisations about gender and sexuality, marked turning points in my life.

I was young. I was queer. I was trapped by the tyranny and repressive machinery of Russian state fascism.

Forced to hide desires for freedom, for love in its many forms, for self-expression and political activism, life narrowed under occupation. A year passed watching people thrown into jail for their beliefs, their voices and their political affiliations. Escape came almost by accident, through a mix of privilege and blind luck. An internally displaced person, or IDP, became the state-sanctioned, politically correct term for “refugee”, a label that felt like both a scar and a source of blame.

Life continued in Kyiv, but never settled. Berlin came later. Seven years passed, bringing adulthood, anarchism, hope and a belief in the praxis of a better world. The start of the full-scale invasion was sobering and decisive. No longer a teenager, but an able-bodied adult, it became possible to live that truth and act on those beliefs. More importantly, an option appeared to pay the Russians back: for a stolen youth, a forbidden home, the millions forced to flee, and centuries of oppression and genocide.

The decision was made, and there has been no looking back. 

Experiences vary. Armies are cruel, and wars even more so. The dead appear before sleep, and they look back. Daily misogyny is routine, and transphobia less frequent but present. None of it matters.

This is a fight for what I believe in, and I fight it. There is a certain grim fulfilment in the dream of an anti-authoritarian fighter: to see enemies perish, and in doing so bring a better world closer. Everything else is either poetry, or a speck of dust in the grinder of revolution.