The truth is that the exodus has not started in recent weeks, the exodus from the Donbass has long been an invisible exodus, as the documentarian Sara Reginella defines it in her book ‘The phantom war in the heart of Europe‘(Exòrma). But in 2014
old Europe, asleep behind the decrepit old snob face, didn’t seem to care much about the Donbass.
It is so. And now the most visible exodus, in which this man in transit in Pokrovsk station also takes part, how long will it remain so? The third class train. The suitcases, the rolled up duvets, what looks like a crutch. Leaving as an elderly person is certainly more desperate than leaving as a young person. Even if war, or rather, wars knotted in the same long conflict have ‘corroded everything with the same force with which brackish water erodes rocks and digs’, leaving one’s land resembles unconditional surrender.
And it makes no noise.