“My Grandmother’s Crime against History”: Where Family Ancestry and Putin’s War Meet
“Between 2004 and 2018, I covered Russia’s war and the aftermath in Chechnya. On the way to and from Grozny, my childhood friends often called me a killjoy at their parties in Moscow, when I shared the stories from the field and said that the Russian war machine was using Chechnya as a training ground to then expand beyond the borders. I wish I had been wrong. But when I heard the first reports of the Bucha massacre in 2022, it vividly reminded me of my nightmares based on testimonies collected in Chechnya. But now my uncle Samuil and other family members were part of these nightmares. […]”
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