On the "Sapsan" from the bustling spring capital, away from the lively Patriarch Ponds, the Moscow theaters—where there's not a seat to be found in the stalls, and the prices are sky-high!—from the jam-packed shopping centers and eternal traffic jams, you find yourself in the sunny, cool St. Petersburg. You stroll along the embankments, squinting in the fresh breeze, perhaps embark on a small tour of the now world-famous St. Petersburg gastropubs or the carefree local drinking establishments. It seems like Petersburg is far away, but it's right there—just over seven hundred kilometers. Only four hours by high-speed train, and you're in a completely different vibe.

But if the "Sapsans" headed south from the Kievsky station instead of north from the Leningradsky, Muscovites would reach Kharkiv in the same four hours. Straight into the inferno. Into a city where two thousand buildings have been destroyed by Russian bombings and shelling. High-rises, schools, hospitals. A city from which a third of the residents have left, while the rest cling stubbornly to the fragments of their old lives, risking death every day under the shards of Russian missiles and shells. A city besieged by a ruthless enemy, who has shown what it's capable of in Bucha and Irpin.

A ruthless enemy? Who is this enemy? Surely not the people strolling by the Patriarch Ponds, buying all sorts of things in Moscow's shopping malls, and stuck in traffic, dreaming of getting home faster to their waiting families? These people are just people; they can't wish death upon others living in the same panel buildings, speaking the same language, often with the same names. Right? They can't. They aren't committing any crimes, and they're not shooting at anyone. So what are they doing?

They're pretending nothing is happening. They try not to discuss what's happening just four hours away on the hellish "Sapsan." Fortunately, the cannonade of Kharkiv isn't audible from Moscow, and as for Mariupol, it's a devil of a journey from the Russian capital, and no one cares where it is!

If you type "Distance from Moscow to Ma..." into Yandex, the Maldives pop up first. Here's a hint: it takes fifteen hours to drive from Moscow to Mariupol. Fifteen hours behind the wheel from the crowded Moscow theaters to the theater marked "Children," bombed by Russian Aerospace Forces. To that very maternity hospital. To "Azovstal," which resists like the Brest Fortress.

Resists whom? Let's not talk about that, let's not talk about the war, let's not even use the word "war," because not everything is so clear-cut. Let's dance, let's go to a restaurant, to the theater, or just to the cinema in a mall, let's pretend life goes on as usual, that everything is normal. Sure, there's some special operation, somewhere there are some Azov Nazis, well, to hell with them, it's over there, not here with us. And by the way, it's not easy for us either: sometimes the enemies disable Apple Pay, sometimes they pull McDonald's, thinking they'll wear us down. But to spite them, we'll still go out and have fun, scaring a hedgehog with a bare bottom! Moscow and Petersburg look normal, life there is almost the same as before.

A bubble. Inside the bubble: a plate of salad or soup, a theater stage, a cinema screen, the road to work, the road home. And what boils with blood and pus outside this bubble, what the rest of the world is made of now, seems not to exist. But it does exist. Yes, it hasn't burst through the placenta yet, hasn't flooded each of our lives with blood and pus, but the pressure from outside is growing stronger, and inside the bubble, it's rising too.

The murders and destruction, carried out under false, ever-changing pretexts in the name of Russia, still become known to people in the bubble. The stench of corpses seeps in, the placenta can't filter everything. And what's even scarier: the stench becomes part of normality, the murder of peaceful people with the same names and surnames as you becomes part of the norm. Biblical prohibitions are lifted, and the most important pre-biblical taboos are canceled, with justifications found for cannibalism. And don't believe that the new normality will resemble the old one. The poison has already penetrated both body and soul; it just doesn't act instantaneously.

We refuse to think that the train from Moscow to hell takes four hours, and we have no intention of going to hell, but the high-speed railway there has already been laid, and now hell is rushing towards us on it.