Night is falling in Siberia. She is standing in the snow in front of the entrance to her university and holding up three tulips along with a letter-sized sheet of paper emblazoned with the words: "No to War.” The war in Ukraine has been underway for 30 hours and Russian fighter jets are flying over Kyiv. Two guards approach her. One is quite tall, and he stands in front of her, legs spread far apart. The other, who is a bit older, asks her questions.

"What are you doing here?"

"I study here. My boyfriend was sent to war."

"Commanders are like fathers – they do the thinking for him. He must obey."

"I disagree."

"With what? We are liberating Ukraine from fascists, we’re only one step away from World War III. Zelenskyy says he can build a nuclear bomb at any time."

"Putin has a lot of nuclear weapons"

"Ukrainians are beating up World War II veterans. You, young woman, are killing people by standing there. You break their legs, you pull out their nails, you burn children."

"But I’m only against the war!"

"Switch on your brain – we sent your boyfriend there to keep the peace."

The security guard takes a picture of the woman with his mobile phone. "We’ll report that to your dean tomorrow," he says. "And the police."

She wears her dark hair long, the fake fur of her jacket up to her face. As the guards leave, she shows a photo on her phone of her fiancé – taken outside the barracks last summer.

He’s a soldier in the Russian army. She is a sociology student at university. In the picture, she has placed her hand on his stomach. He smiles shyly into the camera, a young man with a long neck, his head shaved bald, and his nose dotted with freckles. He looks like a teenager who secretly took his father’s uniform from the closet. His shoulders disappear under the military garb. His khaki cap is crooked. You can see a concrete fence with barbed wire in the background.

We have elected not to print the names of the couple in this article for fear of putting them in even more danger than they already are. We also won’t show their faces, even though the student allowed herself to be photographed by DER SPIEGEL and shared private photos. She said she was no longer afraid and that she has nothing to lose. She wants to tell her story and that of her fiancé. She has even provided us with the entire chat history between herself and her boyfriend since the start of the war. She has done so because she wants to show the world that Putin didn’t just invade Ukraine. His longest war is the one he has been waging against the people of his own country.

She’s 25 years old, he’s 24.

They’re part of the Putin generation. They have no memories of any other ruler other than Putin, who moved into the Kremlin 22 years ago.

They had it good for a long time in Putin’s Russia, a country of IKEA curtains, cappuccino, snowboarding and Netflix. For a long time, they didn’t much care that Putin was gradually turning back the clock, that he was leading their country back to a past they are unfamiliar with. Back to a time when Russia was part of the Soviet Union, an empire located behind the Iron Curtain.

His wars have never been theirs. They were in kindergarten when Russian bombs fell on Chechnya. They were in puberty when Putin attacked Georgia. When Putin annexed Crimea, her fiancé went to the shisha bar. When he bombed Aleppo, she was buying cosmetics on the internet.

Now, the man who prides himself on not using a smartphone is forcefully dragging them into his past. The young soldier from Siberia doesn’t want to die for this past. He doesn’t want to kill for it either. And his girlfriend, the college student, is ashamed to be Russian. They would prefer to leave the country.

Chat excerpts, Feb. 5

Him: To be honest, I’m dreading the trip.

Her: Can I at least bring you anything to the train station?

Him: You can, I think. I’m going to go ahead and wish you a Happy Birthday now. I can’t find the words to tell you how much I love you.

Her: How do you feel?

Him: I’m preparing myself mentally. I just don’t know what for. They don’t tell us shit.

He studied computer science and hoped to get his master’s degree. She says he played computer games in the evening, fought the Dragon of the Void in the fantasy realm of "Rivellon," solved the murder of the Wizard of Cyseal and tried to prevent the apocalypse.

In this Siberian city, several time zones away from Moscow, no one was speaking about war – even though Putin had already deployed more than 100,000 Russian soldiers to the Ukrainian border in March 2021.

Russia has more than 400,000 professional soldiers. The military has become stronger and stronger under Putin. Four years ago, he presented missiles that fly 20 times faster than the speed of sound. He has the most modern fighter jets under his command and, in addition to professional soldiers, he also has the power to draft reservists and conscripts. Every man in Russia between the ages of 18 and 27 is required to serve one year of military duty.

The boyfriend was drafted last summer, right after he had completed his bachelor's degree.

In early February, he was deployed to the Ukrainian border.

Chat excerpts, Feb. 6

Him: We’re huddling at the train station.

Her: For how much longer?

Him: Four hours. Are you dressing warmly?

Her: I’m not dressed at all yet. Did you eat the stuff I gave you?

Him: I’m still eating the stuff my parents gave me. I washed myself on a train for the first time. It’s a strange feeling.

She says he used to wear ironed shirts and washed his hair every day. The two have been a couple for three years, and this is the first time they’ve been separated.

They write messages to each other on their mobile phones. They talk by phone when he has time. But he has less and less of it. She uses an iPhone; he has a dumb phone with normal buttons. Smartphones aren’t allowed in the Russian military.

It’s the second day of the war and she’s sitting in a café, though she hasn’t eaten anything in almost 24 hours. She looks for a Band-Aid in her backpack. In the afternoon, she ran until her heels were sore as she fled from police officers. There was a peace demonstration at Lenin Square.

"I only weigh 60 kilograms," she says. "How am I supposed to prevent wars?"

She now tries to open Facebook. But the app freezes. As does Twitter. She opens Dembel Timer.

It’s a Russian app – Dembel stands for demobilization. Dembel Timer calculates how many days are left until his military service is supposed to end. She uploaded a photo of him as the background on her phone. It shows him wearing a dark blue shirt with a wide collar, smiling at the camera. It was from the second New Year’s Eve they spent together. They were at a friend’s house, and he was roasting pork in the oven.

Dembel Timer says that he has already served 234 days and that he has 130 to go. Progress: 64.273666 percent.

Before he was drafted, they had been planning a trip to St. Petersburg. They wanted to walk together during the white nights, kiss on the Palace Bridge and finally see the Hermitage. Aside from a few package vacations to Turkey, they haven’t traveled much. They only know Russia from Google Maps.

Chat excerpts, Feb. 7

Him: We just passed through Perm.

Her: What do you think of Russia from the train window?

Him: It all looks the same. It’s like I’m going in circles.

Chat excerpts, Feb. 8

Him: I looked at our photos from the water slide park again. What a day. And what a night. ;)

Her: 🥰

Him: We should do that again.

Her: We still have everything ahead of us.

The two met in the hospital. Both have suffered from depression since their early twenties.

She, an only child, grew up with her mother, her father having left the family when she was two. During her childhood, the price of oil rose and a lot of money flowed into the country. Her mother, an accountant, earned more money during this period than in the pre-Putin era.

He is the son of a doctor and an intelligence officer. Until he graduated from high school, the family lived in a 30-square-meter (323-square-foot) apartment without a children’s bedroom. His parents saved up money for their only child. They had high hopes for him, dreaming of the day when he would serve the state, installing surveillance devices in walls, creating files on people and wearing epaulets on special occasions.

They bought him an apartment. His father tried to enroll him at the Intelligence Academy in St. Petersburg, but he failed the entrance exam.

Chat excerpts, Feb. 10

Him: Today I felt like a guest worker. We put up tents for the canteen.

Her: Do you get the food delivered?

Him: We have a field kitchen. There are rotating cooking shifts. The worst is the toilet. I’m not mentally prepared for something like that. Ten holes in a row. Don’t tell my mom about it.

She lives in an 8-square meter space in the student dorms. She has books by Plato, Jack London and Harper Lee on her shelf, along with a lavender candle. She looks younger than 25, but she’s the older one in the relationship. In times of peace, she would drag him to the theater, to the movies and set books on his couch. She talked to him about Putin.

They met at a time when she was just beginning to take an interest in politics. But she was even more interested in flowers and the music of Hans Zimmer. She can spend a lot of time pondering the fat content of a mushroom soup. "You can actually fill up your life nicely like that," she says.

You can look out of a cage in a way that you don’t see the bars. Her views started to change in March 2016. That was when she took part in a pro-Putin rally, joining because their dean wanted them to. It was the second anniversary of the annexation of Crimea.

"I went along with it, but all of the sudden, I felt like an object," she says, "like a flagpole."

Two years later, she submitted an essay in her politics seminar, a paper which today reads like a lamentation for a wasted youth. In it, she asks why the present is so gloomy in Russia. Why the Russians have been submitting to tyrants for centuries, why they let themselves be played with as if they were puppets, why, after giving themselves a democratic constitution, they show no interest in enforcing it. "Don’t we deserve to have a halfway decent leader?"

Her country’s leader famously had himself photographed bare-chested on horseback. He annexed a Ukrainian peninsula just because he could – instead of taking care of the territory already under his rule, the largest country on the planet. He had forests cut down, he allowed village schools to fall into disrepair and pensioners to beg in the streets. And he built palaces for himself.

The parents of her boyfriend voted for this president. As did her mother, the accountant.

Chat excerpts, Feb. 14

Her: Call your parents tomorrow – they’re worried, especially your mom.

Him: I don’t think so.

Her: You haven’t called her in four days.

Him: It’s not like it has been four months. I don’t have time.

Her: I’m angry with you. You didn’t send me any Valentine’s wishes.

As of mid-February, his unit is stationed in a village tucked in between Belarus, Ukraine and Russia, on the Russian side, a few kilometers away from the Ukrainian border. He lives in a barracks.

Each day, he unloads the rail cars that roll in from Russia. He hauls crates of ammunition. He mounts warheads on missiles. On the phone, he tells his fiancée: "We’re preparing enough missiles as if we're planning to wage war against all of Europe."

She’s sitting in a café and checks the silent switch on her phone. Is it on loud? He hasn’t contacted her in 10 hours. She writes to him: "Is everything OK?"

Her phone rings. It’s her grandmother. She hesitates before answering. The last time they spoke, her grandmother was crying hysterically because her granddaughter was protesting against the Russian army. She was born during World War II, in Stalingrad, and went into retirement during Putin’s rule. She has spent years watching what Putin calls the genocide of Russians in Ukraine on state television. She believes, says her granddaughter, that the Russians should bomb the fascists out of Kyiv, as they did in 1943.

The phone doesn’t stop ringing, so she finally answers it. "Grandma, I’m studying," she says. "I have a paper due today."

She hangs up and opens Telegram. In Germany, Telegram is the preferred app for conspiracy theorists and corona-truthers. In Russia, though, opponents of Putin use it to organize, to arrange rallies, to download PDFs of posters, to exchange information about which printing shops still dare to print protest posters, and about cafés where you can still talk without having to lower your voice. She scrolls through groups she has subscribed to and reads recent posts.

In one group, called "Spring," someone has drafted a petition for impeachment. Another, "Glue Fun," provides tips on how to dress when gluing posters (hint: put on clothes you would never normally wear). On the "We Take To the Streets" group, a protest for Sunday is being planned.

At peace rallies in Russia during the first weeks of the war, you mostly saw the Putin Generation. Among them were young Russians who had had no political consciousness until the war started affecting them personally. Although it directly affects entire generations of Russians, fewer people are resisting Putin’s war in places like Moscow, St. Petersburg and Novosibirsk than in Berlin or Paris. They know what they’re facing if they go to jail. Everyone in Russia has seen the torture videos from the country’s prisons that were leaked on the web last autumn, during the height of the protests against the rigged parliamentary election.

Young Russians who protested before this February know that even if you courageously and consistently revolt against Putin, he will still be there. His most courageous opponent, Alexei Navalny, survived a poison attack and is now rotting in a prison camp, where he has turned to Twitter to call on the people of Russia to stand up to Putin.

The young student in Siberia also continues to fight. She shared a video on Instagram, her generation’s channel. It shows her sitting on her bed with tears in her eyes as she speaks into the camera. "They almost arrested me yesterday. Will that stop me from going to demos? No. I’m going back on the street tomorrow and I’m going the day after tomorrow. I have nothing left to lose. The man I love is at war against his will. He’s unloading tens of thousands of missiles against his will and is attaching warheads to them. It’s now my war too."

Chat excerpts, Feb. 16

Him: Slaved away until 10 p.m. yesterday. And now I have guard duty.

Her: God.

Him: The unit whose barracks we’re staying in is returning. We don’t know where they will send us then. Hopefully home.

As he writes this to her, Russian units are encircling Ukraine from the north, from the east and from the Black Sea. In Crimea, armored cars are moving toward the border, behind them fuel trucks, field kitchens and medical units. These are the final days before the invasion.

Chat excerpts, Feb. 17

Him: I’m still on watch duty, and there’s no one to relieve me.

Her: Damn. I dreamed you were at home.

Chat excerpts, Feb. 18

Her: What are you doing?

Him: Hauling ammunition. First, we have to go back to the barracks. I wish they’d finally tell us something.

Chat excerpts, Feb. 19

Him: We’re about to go back to loading. Forgive me for not paying enough attention to you.

Her: Get some rest, you’re the one who needs support. All you get from me is whining.

Chat excerpts, Feb. 20

Her: The only things coming from Russia are provocations.

Him: Today, some major came and yelled at us for falling asleep. I’m curious to see what comes next. I’m running out of strength. So sick of this fucking shit.

On Feb. 21, Putin delivers a speech to the nation. He says Russia must protect the 4 million Russians in eastern Ukraine from the puppet government in Kyiv. It’s a declaration of war, even if the marching orders haven’t yet been given. She follows the speech on YouTube – it’s already deep in the night in Siberia.

Chat excerpts, Feb. 22

Him: They told us we’re not allowed to talk about it.

Her: About what?

Him: About our work trip, what we’re doing here.

Her: Jesus, can you at least give them a message from me? "Go fuck yourselves!"

A day after the war begins, she reads about the arrests of 1,600 protesters in 53 cities.

She puts her mobile phone in her jacket pocket and walks out. She loves the colorful lights in the shop windows of her city, the dry air, the fresh snow. At minus 15 degrees Celsius, the crunch of the snow is particularly loud.

The footsteps of strangers make her nervous now, and she turns around several times. It’s Friday night. They used to sit on the sofa at friends’ houses at this time of night. But this "earlier" feels like it could have been 100 years ago. People she used to call friends are now posting cat videos on Instagram. Her fellow students go out for burgers and take pictures of themselves. One friend got married on the first day of the war and has been posting wedding photos. Another, who works in the mayor’s office, wrote to say that although she was with her in spirit, there was no way she could afford to lose her job now. Those friends are also the Putin generation.

She has been confiding in people she meets on the streets for days. People with peace stickers, with Ukrainian flags. Today, she met a young artist, and they made an appointment meet in the forest on the outskirts of the city.

She’s standing outside the pharmacy when he finally calls. She needs her antidepressants. Her hand freezes on her mobile phone. She tucks it deep under her hood.

Her: Honey, you haven’t called in days.

Him: I’m not allowed to tell you, but I did the math, and in those four days alone, I hauled 15 tons of ammunition.

Her: You know what happened yesterday, right?

Him: What?

Her: Russia started the war.

Him: Officially now? Really invaded?

Her: Yeah, or did you think you were schlepping those boxes for nothing?

Feb. 24: A Russian ballistic missile carrying cluster munitions strikes a hospital in Vuhledar.

Feb. 26: A kindergarten in Okhtyrka.

Feb. 28: A residential building in Kyiv.

March 1: Freedom Square in Kharkiv

March 1: The TV tower in Kyiv.

March 4: The nuclear power plant in Zaporizhzhya.

When he was deployed to the Ukrainian border, his company commander told him it was "a logistical tour of duty" but provided no details. The mission was to last for a month, until March 6. Now the officer tells him that his tour of duty will be extended indefinitely. The word "war" isn’t used.

The word has taken on a new meaning in Russia these days. Right at the start of the war, Putin’s censorship authority issued warnings to the three critical national media outlets still remaining: the TV station Dozhd, the radio station Ekho Moskvy and the newspaper Novaya Gazeta.

They were instructed to replace the word "war" in their reporting with the term "peacemaking special operation.” Officially, Russia is not at war.

War is peace. This saying is chiseled into the white façade of the Ministry of Truth in George Orwell’s dystopian novel "1984."

When he calls her from the front, the soldier asks his girlfriend not to talk about the war. "I hate what I’m doing here, but please don’t go to the protests. What am I supposed to do if they arrest you?"

The snow is knee-deep on the field in Siberia. The sky is brighter here than it is in the city. She follows her new acquaintance, the young artist. There are about a dozen people walking in front of them, mostly women around the age of 30. They have clotheslines with them, canisters and a sled. It’s midnight.

They form a ring and stomp a circle into the snow as big as the helicopter landing pads on warships. A woman stays in the middle and leads the others around on the clothesline to keep the line clean.

They stamp a peace sign and the words "No To War" and pour yellow paint in the indentations. They want to photograph the work with a drone in the daylight before it gets covered by snow.

There’s not much more the Putin Generation can do to counter Putin. Their protests feel like a last gasp before the country completes its transformation into a warmongering dictatorship. Putin has never been as powerful as he is right now, nor has he been more unpredictable. The mood of the young people fluctuates between fear and shame. But it’s the shame that still prevails – for dropping bombs on cities in their name, for not stopping Putin.

Her mother calls, and she tries to shield her phone from the wind. "I’m at an art opening," she says.

She doesn’t have the strength to argue with her mother. Most recently, they argued about a friend from Ukraine. The woman, whom they had met while on vacation in Turkey, had called in a panic when the first missiles struck her town. Her mother told the friend: Those aren’t our missiles, they’re coming from Kyiv.

Around 11 million Russians have relatives in Ukraine. Their parents and grandparents fought together against Hitler. Many Russians are calling their relatives in Ukraine these days and saying there is no war. They claim the Russian army is only freeing them from this clown Zelenskyy, the drug-addicted fascist who destroys daycare centers and hospitals with cluster bombs all over the country. Russian state television provides daily updates on Zelenskyy’s purported war of extermination against Ukraine.

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is Jewish and speaks better Russian than Ukrainian. In one of his many war speeches, he addresses the Russian people directly, urging them to stand up to Putin: "For you, this is a struggle not only for peace in Ukraine! This is a fight for your country."

Her third day of war begins with packing. Water, a toothbrush, clothes, charger, disinfectant, reading material – someone has posted the list on Telegram. It’s all the things you should have with you if you get arrested. She chooses Julian Barnes’ "Nothing To Be Frightened Of," a book about death and faith.

She has trouble sleeping again. At 9 a.m. her mobile phone lights up with new messages.

Chat excerpts, Feb. 26

Him: They are storming Kyiv. I’m shocked.

Her: Maybe deserting is better than that?

Him: Rotting in jail isn’t part of my plans. There are only four months left – then I can forget this like a nightmare. But the way prices are going, I can forget about getting a new computer.

She is sitting alone in a restaurant and listening to the Ukrainian president on YouTube. "Our army is here," Zelenskyy says, "our civil society is here, we are all here. We are defending our independence, our country."

Her coffee is getting cold. Someone is celebrating a birthday at the next table, and it smells like shashlik. She continues reading the news. Street fighting in Kyiv. The ruble is crashing, the U.S. and the EU have closed their airspace to Russian planes, the rating agencies have downgraded Russian bonds to junk status. She wants to know how many Russian soldiers have died. The military in Kyiv has reported the deaths of at least 3,500 occupiers since the war began.

The Russian military doesn’t publish any figures. On television, Putin praises his army. "They fight courageously," he says, "professionally and heroically."

She looks at a photo from Kharkiv for a long time. It shows a Russian solder lying on his back next to a burned-out tank, hands outstretched. The body is covered in snow.

She calls her fiancé.

Her: Promise me one thing. If they send you in now, just say "no.” Please don’t sign anything. I read that they pressure recruits. You won’t become a professional soldier – say "no” to them, you promise? Even if they torture you?

Him: I’m not going to sign anything, girl, I’m not an idiot. They’re not going to send us in, either. We’re just schlepping things around here.

The next day, she buys 11 white roses, all the florist has left. When the policemen arrive, she wants to start distributing the roses among the demonstrators. She’s hoping the flowers will somehow protect her from getting arrested. She changes the settings on her phone so that it can no longer be opened using facial recognition. The Telegram channel where the protesters arrange to meet in their city now has a conspiratorial name: "Kindergarten Parents’ Group."

It’s Sunday, tens of thousands are taking to the streets again across the country. A message comes in from him as she is getting dressed. "Actually, you’re the brave one," he writes. "You openly say that you’re against this madness. I’m proud of you. I probably just lack your courage."

She sends him a heart emoji.

As she is climbing into a taxi, he sends her a photo. His hand, and one finger is in a splint. "I hadn’t told you," he writes. "I dropped a box." He says that there was no time for an X-ray. "They’re not going to take me anywhere. They don’t give a shit. We’re on alert."

She joins a peace march that begins in front of the city library. Around 200 people move through the city, with several police cars driving behind them. The officers wear helmets and carry sticks. They block people’s way several times, dividing the column into smaller groups and leading away individual protesters.

"Occupiers!" someone shouts.

She walks in the middle and hands out the roses.

Two dozen people arrive at the small park at the end of the route. The sun is starting to go down. They stand with the flowers in their hand and remain silent. They commemorate Boris Nemtsov, who died on this day seven years ago.

Nemtsov was Putin’s greatest enemy until Navalny replaced him. After the annexation of Crimea, Nemtsov stood at the microphone at a peace rally in Moscow holding a Russian flag. "What is Putin going to achieve in the end?!" he roared. "What he will achieve is making Ukraine our enemy! I am a patriot of this country! I don’t want to see soldiers’ coffins coming to us, to Moscow, Yaroslavl or Nizhny Novgorod."

A year later, Nemtsov was shot dead on a bridge not far from the Kremlin.

When two special police officers run up to her, she doesn’t try to run away. She holds a rose out to them.

Chat excerpts, Feb. 27

Her: I was arrested.

Him: God, and I’m not with you. It’s all my fault – I let you down in these times.

Her: You carry no blame.

Him: They’ve put the nuclear weapons on alert.

As she walks out of police station, she is shaking her head. The policeman was surprisingly nice to her, she says, as if he was uncomfortable with his job. Not all the officials support Putin’s war. This one lets her go again, merely admonishing her only for not wearing her face mask properly.

She’s unable to fall asleep again that night. Zelenskyy and Putin send delegations to Gomel for talks. Her fiancé is stationed not far from Gomel.

Chat excerpts, Feb. 28

Her: Let’s emigrate when you get back.

Him: Agreed.

Her: If a miracle happens, we can stay, but I’m afraid no miracle will happen. Then we have to join the partisans.

Him: There are no miracles.

From a poll, she has learned that 68 percent of Russians support Putin’s "peacemaking special operation” in Ukraine. She has also started seeing the "Z" sign more and more often in her city – on the back door of a VW, on T-shirts, in shop windows, on balloons. Inside City Hall at night, some windows remain lit. They form a "Z."

The Latin Z has become the hallmark of Putin supporters. They display it for several days without really knowing what it stands for. It isn’t until the eighth day of the war that the Defense Ministry finally reveals what the Z stands for: "Za pobedu," Russian: "for victory."

The Russians still don’t know how many of their soldiers have died in Ukraine.

On YouTube, she sees videos of Ukrainians interrogating Russian prisoners. Men who say they didn’t know they were being sent to war. That it was all just a military exercise.

The Ukrainian General Staff reports the Russian losses.

On Feb. 26: 3,500 deaths.

On Feb. 28: 5,300.

On March 2: 5,840.

She sits on her bed with her legs tucked in and tries to pull up the livestream of the TV channel Dozhd. It doesn’t work. The radio station Ekho Moskvy has also been shut down. The editorial staffs of both media outlets refused to comply with the wartime censorship.

Novaya Gazeta, whose editor-in-chief was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize two-and-a-half months earlier, is now conducting a survey among its readers: Should we bow to wartime censorship or shut down the newsroom?

She can see satellite images of the Russian military convoy rolling toward Kyiv on YouTube. A 60-kilometer-long line of armored vehicles. But the column is barely making any headway. She sees pictures of burned-out tanks, of broken-down off-road vehicles, of missile trucks in the mud with their tires peeling off. A Ukrainian sniper reportedly killed a Russian major general near Kyiv.

She clicks on a video from Britain’s Telegraph newspaper showing a IN-50.1K mobile crematorium. The back door of a truck opens and a lid pops up revealing a gray cavity. There’s a lifting platform, a sliding platform and remote control. The British defense minister has warned that the Russians could use these crematoria in Ukraine. It would allow the army to secretly burn its dead to cover up their true losses.