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Patreon.com slash Popular Front. I am from Crimea I was born in Crimea and for me and my family it started way back then in 2014. I am in my

20s so I was a teenager back then and it was really messy at the time during the so-called Russian spring in Crimea and witnessing it all and everything that came after.

For the record I lived, me and my family lived under the occupation until 2015, so I studied at that time in school, in middle school.

It was a shit show. Everyone was really scared. My parents are teachers so they were not really, you know, present in the conflict, they couldn't do anything, the adults, the society, the

society, you know, the public was really polarized towards the people who had to leave immediately because they could have been or were eventually

prosecuted and the ones that could not do or could not make this decision so fast and we

couldn't because it's our family home and we had like elderly grandparents so we stayed and what Russia did Russia just started immediately politicizing the children, so basically us.

Like we had to sing Russian and them, I mean we didn't sing.

It was funny like political resistance started there because me and some other kids

had a small resistance group.

We were speaking Ukrainian, which was a weird thing at that time to do because you could be prosecuted. In general Crimea, it's not a normal thing

to speak Ukrainian.

Only the tourists that would come from the continent,

so to speak, would do that that so we were doing that and then some

secret police came whatever it was fun. And then later, we decided that it's a better idea to flee because it did not look good and we did and also the silver lining in that year of living under Russian occupation was realizing I am queer and that

it's not something that is very welcomed around that kind of system Russia was trying to push and I just didn't want to hide and so since we moved to Kyiv in 2015 I was out of the

out of the closet and was here and there doing queer activism and it remained so until this day so yeah I don't know it's not a

...