Soon after his airplane took off from Moscow last fall, a Russian energy official who had just resigned took his phone and typed up the emotions he had kept bottled inside since the invasion of Ukraine.
"I am tired of feeling constant fear for myself, for my loved ones, for the future of my country and of my own,” Arseny Pogosyan wrote on his social media page as he flew into a hurried exile. "I am against this inhumane war.”
The outburst in September did not receive much attention, gathering eight likes and one brief comment. After all, Pogosyan, 30, was among the hundreds of thousands of young Russian men fleeing the mobilization announced days earlier by President Vladimir Putin to replenish his battered military.