A harrowing first-person account by one of the last Americans journalists to leave Moscow after Russia invaded Ukraine:
I closed the windows, turned off the water and gas. I snapped a few photos of my favorite room in the apartment — my study filled with books and art I’d collected over the decades…. I sat “for the road” — the Russian custom of pausing before a departure, sitting for a minute and saying a prayer. And then I took my last bags and my dog into the hall and closed the door on the life I’d lived for 44 years.
As I stepped outside, I looked back at the entryway. In the night, someone had scrawled black graffiti on the pale yellow wall. “Net voine,” it read: “No war.”
Good, I thought. My apartment house, where I’d lived so many decades of my life, was on the right side of history.
