Rostov returns to reality after Wagner’s botched coup

Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last year, it always seemed likely that the war would come back to Rostov-on-Don, the city which until then had been my home. Rostov isn’t just close to the border but feels it. Most of my university students were from the Donetsk and Lugansk, refugees from the 2014-2022 war. It’s the military hub of southern Russia, the first major city you come to from the Donbass. It felt like a sitting invitation.

It was also somewhere I knew intimately and had been part of my life since my half-Russian daughter’s birth a decade ago. I took to Rostov-on-Don with an outsider’s greed for all four corners of the city, but lived bang in the centre. When images of the Wagner Group’s invasion of Rostov began to appear on Saturday, they were in places I knew as well as you know your own local Tesco or all-night garage.