Extract. “Do you know how to live with this? »

“It also happened that they shot not only the person who spoke to me, but also members of his family. I have on my “journalist account” a 15-year-old boy, killed with his mother, Markha, a village activist, who, like Vakha Kossouïev, gathered information on war crimes committed against the inhabitants of the place. Everything happened the same way: a group of soldiers arrived at Markha’s house, they asked her to confirm her identity, then took her to the yard with her son, and shot them. Do you know how to live with this? Me, I do not know. On what “shelf” of my consciousness can I put the image of the son of Markha, so as not to think of him every day as my most horrible sin? (…) I stayed alive, but wasn’t it at the cost of the lives of others? Didn’t I push them under the submachine guns of the military? Unintentionally, of course, but I played a dirty trick on them… What should I do? Do I have to continue so that their death is not, in the end, useless? And yet, nothing will rid me of a sense of guilt towards those who sacrificed their lives for my work – for my resistance to this type of journalism which is being established, thanks to the “Putin” war. , in Russia. I am talking about ideological journalism, without access to information…”