An existential war: even wealthy émigrés are prepared to fight for Russia

If you’re wondering where all those urbane, clever, westernised Russian travellers have gone since the onset of the Ukrainian war – a war which has largely barred them from the West – I can tell you that at least two of them will be found in the tiny Armenian hamlet of Gnishik, high in the summery peaks of the Caucasus. I know this because I met them there last week. And what they told me – about Russia, the war, their lives since the war – was illuminating.

This meeting wasn’t planned. I’d made the long, pot-holed drive from the sunburned Areni winelands, lost in their redrock canyons, up to the wild-flowered heights because I’d heard you could find bears up there, maybe even leopards, along with 6,000-year-old megaliths carved with intricate 10th-century quasi-Celtic khachkars (talismanic Armenian crosses). I never saw the bears. I did find the knackered and poetic khachkars, guarded by wild horses, and then – in the glassy guesthouse kitchen – I came across two thirtysomething Russians, Mikhail and Ludmila, eating organic greens and Megrelian salami.