The claim that strikes on Russian tech giant Yandex thinned out social media bots finds no support in the networks tracked by Ukrainian disinformation-monitoring company LetsData, co-founder Ksenia Iliuk told Euromaidan Press on 13 October. She cautioned that the strikes may still have affected networks outside the company’s view.

At the Warsaw Security Forum, Lithuania’s prime minister suggested allies should ask Ukraine to strike more Russian data centers because that might help protect European elections from foreign interference. Bot networks are one tool of that interference, so whether the strikes mute them carries weight well beyond Ukraine.

No drop in the networks LetsData tracks

Drones hit Yandex data centers in Sasovo and Vladimir between 8 and 11 October. Ukrainian drone maker Fire Point said its FP-1 drones struck Yandex’s Kaluga site in between. On 12 October, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy told the Warsaw Security Forum that once Ukraine’s response reached Yandex, social media had fewer bots.

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LetsData checked X and Facebook, where bot networks usually stand out clearly, Iliuk said. Its analysts looked at networks attributed to Russia’s influence ecosystem. Among them are groups of X accounts spreading domains from what she called a new wave of Doppelgänger, a Russian campaign that clones real news sites.

Those networks look unaffected, Iliuk said. None of them has stopped posting or broken its usual rhythm, she added. Some are slightly less active, but LetsData’s analysts say that is typical for them. The networks run on a weekly cycle, and the check fell in the part of the week when they post less.

A network that jumped from Germany to Ukraine

LetsData worked with two samples. One covers accounts that systematically target Ukraine, Moldova, and Armenia. The other covers bot networks the company has followed for some time that keep changing their target audience, so they have no fixed country.

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About two weeks ago, one network from that second sample wrote about elections in Germany and spread fake Die Welt sites, she said. It now posts about mobilization in Ukraine and shares a fake site of Ukrinform, Ukraine’s state news agency.

What the check can’t see

The company can compare only within networks whose usual behavior it knows, Iliuk said. Checking the whole internet is impossible because the scale is colossal, she said. A Cloudflare chart that circulated as evidence counted automated web requests from Yandex’s network, including its search crawlers, not social media posts, Cybernews reported.

So the networks LetsData follows show no impact, Iliuk said. That does not mean the strikes had no effect at all, she noted. They may have shown up in networks the company isn’t tracking now. LetsData will keep watching and report other signals if they appear.

UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham said Russia interfered in the 2016 referendum that took Britain out of the European Union, in podcast excerpts released on 11 October, the Associated Press reported. His remarks are believed to be the first time a British prime minister has publicly acknowledged such meddling.

Russia’s information war keeps running through Europe’s ballots. German security sources said in August that Moscow was escalating disinformation before state elections, and Ukraine’s Center for Countering Disinformation found more than 200 Russian fake news sites aimed at France last year.

One question, one clear answer

Burnham told The Rest Is Politics podcast that he asked his advisers whether Russia had interfered in the 2016 vote. He asked after taking office in July.

“I’ve had the clear answer that yes, there was,” he said.

He argued that such things must now be put clearly on the record. He did not say how Russia interfered or offer evidence, and Moscow has long denied interfering in foreign votes.

Burnham said he had discussed Russian interference with German Chancellor Friedrich Merz in Berlin the previous week. “You know he was saying to me that the AfD are clearly linked to Russia, funded I believe,” Burnham said, referring to Germany’s far-right Alternative for Germany party. Putting such interference on the record would help “voters in Germany and France understand that some of this politics is instigated via our enemies, namely Russia,” he added.

Years of silence

In 2020, Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee found that the government had actively avoided investigating whether Russia meddled in the referendum. The report noted open-source signs of Russian attempts to sway the Brexit campaign. The government, it said, had never looked for hard evidence.

The government rejected the committee’s call for a review.

“We have seen no evidence of successful interference in the EU Referendum,” it said.

That same year, London said Russian actors had almost certainly tried to interfere in the 2019 general election. The government said they did it by amplifying leaked UK-US trade documents online.

From 2019 to 2016

Three weeks ago, Burnham stopped short of this. At the UN General Assembly on 22 September, he said the Kremlin spends around £1.3 billion each year on manipulating information. That is roughly $1.7 billion at recent exchange rates. He cited evidence that Russian agencies tried to interfere in the 2019 general election, but he did not mention 2016.

In the same speech, he said Britain had already helped Moldova protect its elections from Russian interference.

Ukraine’s drone strikes on Russian tech giant Yandex thinned out social media bots, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on 12 October. Network data do show Yandex’s automated traffic collapsing after the strikes. Disinformation researchers say that traffic is search crawling, not trolls. A Ukrainian social media monitor told Euromaidan Press its own data show no clear drop in bot activity either.

Russian influence operations are a live threat to European votes. In August, the Matryoshka network fabricated news clips aimed at Sweden’s general election. German and French authorities flagged the same network targeting Germany’s local votes and French presidential hopeful Gabriel Attal. A way to switch such networks off would hand allies a new tool, which is why the claim needs testing.

The president’s claim

Addressing the Warsaw Security Forum by video link, Zelenskyy said that once Ukraine began answering Russia’s operation against Ukrainian data centers and its strikes reached Yandex, many social media platforms suddenly became a little easier to breathe on.

Many people noticed less hatred, discord, and provocation because there were fewer bots, he said. It was quite clear where those bots came from, he noted. Their disappearance once Yandex went down proves again that Europe is not the source of the problems, he added.

Lithuanian Prime Minister Mindaugas Sinkevičius said at the same forum that allies should ask Zelenskyy to strike more data centers in Russia, answering a question on how to protect their elections from interference.

Three data centers in four days

Drones first hit Yandex’s data center in Sasovo, Ryazan Oblast, on 8 October. Yandex said it shut the site down completely. The next day, a strike on its Kaluga site completely disabled several modules, the company said. Yandex calls Kaluga its largest data center, Russian science outlet T-Invariant noted.

Ukrainian drone maker Fire Point said its FP-1 long-range drones carried out that strike.

After the first strike, on Sasovo, a source at Yandex summed up the mood for The Bell: “Things are rotten. We keep working.”

Overnight on 11 October, drones hit the third site, in Vladimir. Yandex said it fully halted that data center too. Vladimir Oblast Governor Aleksandr Avdeev acknowledged an attack on “infrastructure” near the city. It started a fire and cut power to two substations serving 5,000 residents, he claimed.

What the traffic data show

Automated web requests from Yandex’s network fell to 0.4% of their two-week peak after the third strike, Cloudflare Radar data showed, Cybernews reported. That chart counts automated requests to websites, mostly from Yandex’s own search crawlers. It does not count social media posts.

The chart “has nothing to do with social media,” the Russian opposition analysis group Antibot4navalny wrote.

Russia’s overall bot traffic last week looked much like any other week. Yandex’s own figure began recovering on Sunday. Covert troll farms usually hide behind residential proxies, hacked devices, virtual private networks (VPNs), and Western cloud providers, the outlet added.

What Ukrainian social media shows so far

Yevhen Luzan tracks Ukrainian social media sentiment as an analyst at the Ukrainian nonprofit CAT-UA. Its daily reviews sample about 500 random posts. On 11 October, that sample showed an unusually small share of posts criticizing Ukraine’s authorities, he told Euromaidan Press. Accounts showing signs of bot activity made up only a few tenths of a percent of that criticism. That is within the margin of error.

The same day, though, US President Donald Trump’s deal for Russian diesel supplies dominated Ukrainian feeds. Luzan said a rally-around-the-flag effect could explain the shift, as outrage at Washington crowded out domestic stories.

“To state it definitively and draw a cause-and-effect link from this correlation would be too bold,” he said.

Across the wider pool of about 10,000 daily mentions, CAT-UA sees no significant drop in posting activity in recent days. The curve shows only the usual rises and dips around the start and end of the week, Luzan said.

“For now, even a hypothetical drop in bot farm activity dissolves entirely in the natural fluctuations of the information space,” he said.

How a crawler chart became a bot story

The claim that Russian social media bots fell by half is unproven and built on a misread chart, disinformation analyst Joohn Choe concluded in a fact-check. It traces back to an 8 October post by security researcher Jeremiah Fowler. That post said Russian bot traffic had dropped to 49%. On 11 October, radio reporter Jamie Dupree spread it on X. Tom’s Hardware then ran it under a headline calling the crawler traffic “Russian disinformation bot traffic,” wording it has since changed.

Ukrainian military analyst Tatarigami claimed that Texas separatist accounts with identical “Veteran, Christian, Father, MAGA” bios had gone quiet. He said Quebec separatists and Polish anti-EU accounts went quiet alongside them.

Polish military analyst Jarosław Wolski claimed that AfD’s online support fell 56%, posting a chart without naming its source. Another X user said “Polish” bots had vanished.

Russia is preparing to make daily life in Kyiv harder before winter, aiming at the ordinary places civilians use rather than at military sites, The Economist reported. Ukrainian officials say the push blends bombing, sabotage, and disinformation, and expect it to peak in November.

Every winter of its full-scale invasion, Russia has tried to freeze Ukrainians into surrender, and each year the strikes reach deeper into ordinary life. The civilian casualties recorded in 2026 have already passed the whole of last year, the UN says.

From the power grid to the grocery store

Russia has already turned its drones on Kyiv's supermarkets, food warehouses, and data centers this year. On 28 September, a Russian jet drone struck the National Academy of Sciences in central Kyiv. The strike killed two people, the Academy said. Survivors climbed from the windows of the burning building. A senior Ukrainian official told The Economist the Kremlin now wants shoppers too afraid to enter a store. Russia is also keeping its winter routine, hitting electricity, water, and sewage systems.

Cheaper jet drones that stream live to their pilots

Most of the damage now comes from Russia's cheap jet drones, The Economist said. Pilots guide them onto targets and watch a live video feed. They are hard to stop, and Russia's ballistic missiles are deadlier still as Ukraine's supply of Patriot interceptors dwindles. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Kyiv had agreed a new Patriot interceptor package, but it remains short of interceptors of its own. A security official told The Economist that Russia has thousands of drones stockpiled and plans to use its entire ballistic missile stock within two months.

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Sabotage, chaos, and a city that won't switch off

Ukraine's counter-intelligence services say they foil seven or eight Russian plots a week, and officials believe some sleeper cells remain. The campaign's third element, disinformation, targets war fatigue and corruption scandals. Russia runs the same plan every year, hoping its bot farms will push Ukrainians onto the streets to demand surrender, said Andrii Kovalenko, who heads the Center for Countering Disinformation at the National Security and Defense Council.

"It's nonsense," he told The Economist, adding that someone is feeding the idea to Putin so they can steal more money.

Kyiv is also far harder to shut down than Moscow assumes, Kovalenko said. The city's internet is too decentralized for a handful of strikes to knock out, The Economist noted. Energy expert Olha Babii said the test is how fast crews restore power, not whether it can be destroyed. The capital is emptying, its population down from about 3.7 million to 3.3 million by The Economist's count.

The Institute for the Study of War (ISW) published a map in its analytical report on 24 September that contrasts the claimed Russian encirclement with the location of Russian forces as assessed by the experts. Based on the evidence observed by ISW, the nearest area where Russian forces are present is 10.2 kilometers from the southeastern outskirts of Dobropillia.

Russia has been spreading disinformation about its successes around Dobropillia as part of what ISW calls a cognitive warfare effort to portray Ukrainian defenses as on the verge of collapse. Russia's Defense Ministry published a map claiming the city was surrounded. ISW's own map challenges it. The Ukrainian military says the city remains under its control.

Russian Defense Ministry claims it is already destroying encircled Ukrainian troops in Dobropillia and moving further

Units of Russia's Center Grouping of Forces continue combat operations against encircled Ukrainian forces in the Dobropillia area of Donetsk Oblast while simultaneously advancing toward Oleksandrivka, the Russian Defense Ministry claimed. ISW analysts, meanwhile, said they have not observed evidence supporting Russia's claim that the city is encircled. They also noted that Ukrainian officials "directly refute" the claim.

ISW observed evidence that Russian infiltrators, small groups, were operating east and northeast of Dobropillia on 19 and 20 September. The institute did not assess that these infiltrators had consolidated their positions.

Ukrainian forces maintain positions south and northeast of Dobropillia, military observer Kostiantyn Mashovets said on 20 September, according to ISW.

Russian forces have not made major gains in the Dobropillia direction, the chief of staff of an artillery reconnaissance battalion said on 22 September, according to the institute. On the same day, a Russian milblogger described the "alleged Russian encirclement of Dobropillia" as potentially meaning not the direct presence of infantry, but only the establishment of fire control over Ukrainian logistics, including roads west of Dobropillia and toward Sviatohorivka, according to ISW.

ISW noted that Russia's pervasive military culture of lying—what Russian milbloggers themselves call "beautiful reports"—has degraded the Defense Ministry's own ability to understand the battlefield and enabled inflated claims like the Dobropillia encirclement.

Russia uses this disinformation as a "diversion"

In its statement, the Russian Defense Ministry itself described Dobropillia as a "strongly fortified settlement" whose seizure would threaten key Ukrainian supply lines running from Dnipropetrovsk Oblast toward the Fortress Belt—the Sloviansk-Kramatorsk-Druzhkivka urban agglomeration.

Russia has recently renewed its attempts to break through toward Dobropillia.

Third Army Corps Commander Andrii Biletskyi said that Russian forces sought to bypass the fortified cities through Dobropillia and link up with troops advancing from north of Lyman, rather than launch a direct assault. ISW noted on 16 September that the Vivaldi operation disrupted Russia's two-pronged plan. In its 24 September report, ISW said Russia's claims about Dobropillia were partly intended to divert attention from Ukraine's elimination of the Russian salient north of Lyman, which has likely forced Russia's command to rethink its wider encirclement plans.

Ukrainian troops pushed into a front-line village Russian forces were sure they could never reach, an officer from the assault force told Army TV. He described a methodical, house-by-house clearing—then a Russian response that, once the village fell, called the footage an AI fake.

Through 2026 Russia has pressed on this stretch of the eastern front, creeping toward the fortress belt, the chain of fortified cities anchoring Donetsk Oblast. Retaking Serednie is one move in a quiet Ukrainian counteroffensive that has clawed back ground on this axis—which is why this village changing hands lands harder than the map suggests.

The terrain Russia trusted

Serednie sits on the Lyman direction in eastern Ukraine, an axis where Russian forces have been pressing toward Ukrainian-held Sloviansk and Kramatorsk. Troops from Ukraine's 66th Separate Mechanized Brigade entered the village during Operation Vivaldi, said the deputy commander of its first mechanized battalion, Kassta, callsign Timokha.

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Sitting on their own gains there, the Russians assumed no counterattack could follow and were certain the terrain itself ruled out any move into the village.

"The enemy, having success in this direction, did not expect that any counterattack or offensive could come in response," Timokha said.

Preparing for the operation took more than a day or two, he added, because the village was full of basements and buildings that each had to be checked. Reconnaissance came first, then fire from drones, heavy bomber drones, and artillery to grind down a garrison he put at at least a platoon, before assault groups moved in with friendly units alongside.

Operation Vivaldi as a whole, run under an information blackout, has cleared 75 km² of enemy infiltration pockets and de-occupied another 10.

Then the Russians called it AI

Small Russian attempts to retake the village broke apart on the approaches, Timokha said. The louder reaction came online: Russians claimed the Ukrainian liberation videos were made with artificial intelligence.

He likened it to Sviatohirsk, where Vladimir Putin announced the town's capture before the commander of Ukraine's Third Army Corps, Brigadier General Andrii Biletskyi, publicly denied it, Timokha said.

A coup is underway in Mali, though it has not brought down the governing junta just yet. The country’s military leader, General Assimi Goïta has, after days in hiding, appeared in public to claim, unconvincingly, that the “situation is under control.” But rebel forces — an alliance of Al-Qaeda affiliates and Tuareg separatists — have taken over provincial cities and are calling for a blockade of the capital Bamako. Mali’s military junta hangs on by a thread, in a familiar regional story of violence, civilian suffering and international intrigue.

On April 25, coordinated attacks across Mali exposed the junta’s fragile hold over the country. Jamaat Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM), the al-Qaeda affiliate that has driven insurgency across the region for over a decade, joined forces for the first time with Tuareg separatist groups — who have been fighting the central government for even longer — to simultaneously strike cities hundreds of miles apart, including the capital Bamako, Gao, Kidal, Sévaré, and the garrison town of Kati. A suicide car bomber drove into the residence of defence minister General Sadio Camara, killing him along with his wife, two grandchildren, and several civilians. Camara was one of the most influential figures in Mali's ruling junta and had been widely seen as a possible future leader of the country. He was also the key architect of Mali's military alliance with Russia. Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger, which together form the Alliance of Sahel States (AES), have all in recent years realigned away from France, the former colonial power in the region, and towards Russia.

Russian mercenaries, in the form of the Wagner Group and more recently the Africa Corps, have backed military juntas in the Sahel, after coups in Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger led to the withdrawal of French troops from France’s former colonies. But during these latest rebel strikes, it was Russian fighters that were chased out of the northern city of Kidal to the sound of jeers. Africa Corps, the Kremlin-controlled paramilitary group, described the insurgent attacks as a "coup attempt" backed by "Western intelligence services." RT amplified these claims, accusing France and the West of orchestrating the violence, even as it claimed Russian fighters successfully repelled rebels. In 2024, Ukraine’s military agency said it had provided information to help Tuareg rebels ambush and rout a Wagner convoy, killing dozens of Russian mercenaries. Both Mali and Niger have cut diplomatic ties with Kyiv. Burkina Faso has described Kyiv as a destabilizing force in the region, making the Sahel effectively a front in Russia’s war with Ukraine. 

The Kremlin’s combination of misinformation and mercenaries helped exploit growing anti-Western sentiments in the Sahel to give Russia a propaganda win in the region. Former colonial powers such as France didn’t help themselves, as can be seen even now in Madagascar, the latest nation to expel a French diplomat and accuse Paris of fomenting unrest. But the success of Russian propaganda hasn’t been matched on the ground. As Mali struggles to contain a rebel alliance that has fresh impetus and energy, Moscow’s control is weakening and the effectiveness of its military support is under question. Already, with Russian weapons in short supply because of war with Ukraine, it is China that the Malian junta turns to for arms. China’s strategic efforts in the Sahel have been similar to its efforts in the rest of the African continent – a focus on securing infrastructure contracts as part of the Belt and Road Initiative and securing access to mineral resources. But rebel attacks in the Sahel are bad for Chinese business. In February, the Chinese embassy in Niamey, the capital of Niger, warned Chinese companies to take their workers out of the firing line as rebels increasingly targeted Chinese infrastructure projects, including a $4.5 billion oil pipeline from Niger to Benin.

In 2024, the United States was forced to leave neighboring Niger after a coup, to withdraw from a $100 million base. It seemed the U.S. was losing ground to both Russia and China in the Sahel. Earlier this year, though, as security concerns in the Sahel escalated sharply, the U.S. adjusted its approach, choosing to deal pragmatically with military juntas. By late February, the U.S. lifted sanctions on top Malian officials, including General Camara, the recently slain defence minister. It may see closer cooperation with Sahel countries as essential to its security interests and a way to undercut Chinese access to Sahelian resources.

The three Sahel states, Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger, have turned away from France and Europe and towards Russia, while increasingly flirting with the U.S. and reliant on Chinese weapons. The result has been disaster. All three Sahel states are ranked in the top 5 for countries impacted by terrorism. And the humanitarian toll has been severe. Millions of people face internal displacement across the region and cuts in aid programmes mean many millions, especially children, also face acute hunger. But, as the great powers circle the region, jockeying for geopolitical gain, the talk remains about the logistics of propping up failing juntas, providing military solutions to human crises, and maintaining power rather than confronting problems.

Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger – all led by military authorities that came to power in a coup – have also isolated themselves from the rest of their neighbors by withdrawing from the West African regional bloc, Ecowas. Meanwhile, they sell their model as an alternative to Western-style democracy, a narrative that Russian propaganda networks have been all too eager to promote. But the strength of the insurgency against Mali’s government, and Russia’s apparent inability to protect it, sends a different message to the rest of the African continent.

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On the night of January 16, 2024, Egana Djabbarova was awoken by her wife and told that she needed to leave the country immediately. Djabbarova, her wife said, had been denounced by pro-war activists and framed as an enemy of the country. She had recently published her novel, “My Dreadful Body,” with a small, indie press that had been praised by mainstream critics, unexpectedly propelling her into the public eye. One of the book's central themes is surveillance: growing up in a community with strict behavioural codes, the protagonist's every move is under scrutiny.

In a dark echo of her work, Djabbarova was now under online surveillance herself. “I was just the perfect enemy,” she tells me, “because I’m queer, I’m not Slavic, I worked on decolonial and feminist projects… So boom, it happened.”

She is speaking to me from Hamburg, where she now lives. Djabbarova is part of the so-called fifth wave of writers exiled from Russia, alongside Maria Stepanova, Lyudmila Ulitskaya, and Maxim Osipov to name a few. Her upbeat tone during our call gives little indication of the arduous journey she has endured since fleeing Russia. Upon receiving a humanitarian visa from Germany, she spent months in a refugee camp. She lived, she says, “in a container house, literally a shipping container. You feel like you're not a subject, not a human being.” 

More permanent accommodation has provided a degree of safety and stability, but a sense of precariousness lingers. She describes her position as an exile as “strange” — on the one hand she has been welcomed into Germany’s cultural elite in winning the Hamburger Literaturpreis; on the other, she feels like a “ghost,” unable to express herself in German and often bewildered by the unfamiliarity of everyday tasks in a new country, and in a new city which, she tells me jokingly, is quaint and polite like the well-behaved boy next door. 

But there’s a deeper, historical layer to Djabbarova’s story of exile. Her father was a refugee from the region of Nagorno-Karabakh, while her mother was forced out of her family home. “Homelessness and exile — this is my heritage,” she says. Being othered became a common theme of Djabbarova’s childhood, as a child of Azeri parents living in Yekaterinburg. “In Russia you are constantly reminded that you're not Russian,” she says. “Then during the summer you visit your relatives in Azerbaijan and they laugh because you cannot speak Azerbaijani properly.”

This sense of double estrangement is mirrored in “My Dreadful Body” (published in Russian in 2023 and recently translated into English by Lisa Hayden). At only a touch over 100 pages, it is a slim but powerful account of the pressures on one woman growing up among the strict codes of an Azerbaijani family living in Russia. A sense of surveillance and conditional belonging defines the narrator’s upbringing: “In the world where I grew up,” she writes, “gazes penetrated every little corner. The evil eye, the neighbors’ eyes, the relatives’ eyes, the random pedestrian’s eyes, the unscrupulous men’s eyes, the women’s unhappy eyes. Life in the community was reminiscent of a reality show with constant video surveillance: no action, word, or undertaking went unnoticed.”

The story is based on Djabbarova’s own life. “Maybe 70-80% of this story is absolutely true”, she confirms. The narrator is named Egana, she grows up in an Azerbaijani family in Russia, too Russian for the family, not Russian enough for her friends at school. She also, like Djabbarova, suffers from a debilitating autoimmune disorder that is eventually diagnosed as dystonia, a neurological disorder that causes involuntary muscle contractions. During one episode, she describes her body as resembling “willow branches gone mad from a strong wind” — a potent image of struggle against external forces. Djabbarova describes the book as a way to reclaim her body through language. “I was trying to tell this story in a poetic way. I wanted to change my body into poetry.” 

Each chapter of “My Dreadful Body” begins with a different body part (“Eyebrows,” “Eyes,” “Hair” and so on), like the poetic blazons spun by Renaissance poets. Where those poems encouraged an idealized, sensationalized reading of each body part, Djabbarova’s chapters are more sober explorations of the physical limits — and personal and cultural stories — these body parts contain. 

In one of many poignant scenes, the narrator’s head is shaved in preparation for a procedure. She cries on seeing her “shorn scalp,” but the sadness is not aesthetic, it’s ancestral; the act marks a symbolic rupture with her lineage. “My past,” she writes, “the past of all the women in my family, the memory of my ancestors, the history of a single body — all that now lay on the cold floor.” After this scene, her grandmother’s dictum that only long hair was considered beautiful, rings even more sharply. 

Illness then emerges as another form of exile, from one’s sense of self, from what’s perceived as “normal” in society, from the culture and community one belongs to. “They do not see you as a subject, as a human being, and they do not recognize your existence… I realized if I wanted to be seen as a subject, I needed to do it myself.” Djabbarova is talking about the plight to be believed about her symptoms here, but she could easily be talking about the often dehumanizing experience of exile. In both instances there is something fundamental under question, or as Djabbarova puts it, “You’re trying to prove that you have the right of being. You’re trying not to be erased.” 

We often talk about exile in the context of loss, but how might exile liberate? Paradoxically, Djabbarova tells me, her diagnosis became a form of liberation. “I always felt I had so many expectations on me as a girl, as a woman, so when I was finally diagnosed it was a liberation because my parents realized I would never be this type of girl.” Exile breeds a particular creative liberation, too, evidenced by the fact Djabbrova wrote the novel from Taiwan where she was briefly teaching Russian. “Here I had enough distance from my own life and my own experience,” she says. “Maybe it’s easier to write about your story being on an island in the Pacific Ocean.”

Writing is arguably the real heroine of Djabbarova's novel. For the narrator Egana, it is a place free from surveillance and a source of protection, “like an invisible amulet.” Poetry, she told me “was the only safe space for me because nobody was asking anything of me. It's the only place where I don't feel judged. I don’t feel ashamed. I don’t feel questioned.”

The chapter “Hands” opens: “The most important parts of a woman’s body were her hands: they prepared food, rocked children, did laundry, ironed men’s shirts, sewed clothes, swept, washed the floor, and dusted.… Any woman in our family knew that her hands were not given to her for writing.” To use her hands, then, to write becomes both a symbolic and quite literal form of resistance against such gendered codes.

Notably, Djabbarova is not alone in invoking the body as a space to explore the upheavals of exile. In Maria Stepanova’s autofictional work “The Disappearing Act” — recently translated into English by Sasha Dugdale — the narrator attempts to purge herself by volunteering to be cut in half as part of a circus trick. Djabbarova’s approach to reclaim identity and agency through the body is less literal, and more personal, but through this specificity she has landed somewhere indisputably universal. 

“I realized the only way I can write this novel is through my body,” she says. “Because the only way I can rehabilitate my being, my agency, my subjectivity is through my body. And that's why I wanted every reader to feel my body… It's really important for all of us not to forget that this right of being is basic. It's not given. It's something you have from birth." 

At the end of our conversation, Djabbarova (who has been speaking in English) struggles to recall a word and jokes that learning German is slowly pushing her English out. “Certain words I only remember in German!” she laughs. Is this the beginnings of a kind of homemaking for Djabbarova, a sign that the seeds she has scattered in her new country are taking root? Like her protagonist, who finds solace and safety in words, it seems that Djabbarova’s most trusted tool for survival, for managing the condition of exile, is language. 

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