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I had poked the bear right in the eye, my fight to renounce my Russian citizenship, written

and read by Sergei Rachenko.

One citizenship. Written and read by Sergey Ratchenko. One morning, in May 2025, I walked briskly down basewater road along the northern edge of London's

Kensington Gardens until I reached the gates of the Russian embassy.

Its formidable outer wall, already topped with razor wire, now had the additional protection

of a crowd control barrier.

But there was no crowd, just a lone man feebly protesting from the other side of the road.

In the early days of the war, the embassy was besieged by angry protesters.

Back then, you couldn't walk down a British street without spotting the blue and yellow of the Ukrainian flag.

That time was long gone.

Feeling uneasy, I was ushered inside by a guard who patted me down and checked the contents of my backpack

before pointing the way inside. I knew this routine from my previous visit. Even the guard, a friendly

Nepali man, who knew about three words of Russian, hadn't changed in years. I used to come here to renew

my Russian passport and, on one noteworthy occasion in March

2000, to vote in the Russian presidential elections. This time, I had an altogether different

purpose. I was here to renounce my Russian citizenship. I was born in 1980 to parents of Ukrainian descent and grew up on the island of Sackolin in

Russia's far east. Anton Chekhov, who visited Sacklin nearly a century earlier, described it as a

...