What a difference 12 months makes. Last year, at the Ikea in Rostov-on-Don, South Russia, I splashed out on some especially good Christmas decorations. I had an eight-year-old, half-Russian daughter growing up in that city, and wanted a tree and lights that were made to last and could be brought out each December as a kind of ritual.

Just over two months later, as Ikea closed its doors following Putin’s war, I took the decorations out and chucked them in a skip. My daughter had fled for Italy with her mother, my ex-partner, and my four years in Rostov – the cosy-melancholy city in which I’d planned to make a future – were over. There was no room for baubles or fairy-lights in my luggage, and not much to celebrate either.

Following the Russian invasion of Ukraine on 24 February, it was clear the party – Christmas or otherwise – was over. It was time to get out fast. Like many others I was losing nearly everything: home, possessions, city, security, and the chance to walk my daughter to school each morning. I reminded myself that many in Ukraine had lost infinitely more.

Leaving Russia in early March, dragging a carrier with my two cats in it, I began one of the strangest periods of my life – as traumatic in its way as being sent to boarding school. There was no going straight back to England: the cats needed blood tests, documents, and a long wait for clearance.

Getting out of Russia at all with them seemed miraculous, and the early days in Yerevan, Armenia – my first stop – were a strange mixture of relief, grief and fluttery dislocation. It was ironic: I’d long wanted to visit this idiosyncratic, almost monocultural country (98 per cent Armenian) with its ancient Christianity and its weird-looking alphabet. In the aftermath of Putin’s invasion, I couldn’t take it in at all.

But being unable to embrace another culture didn’t mean I longed for England. British friends, who for years had raised eyebrows when I said I lived in Russia, were only too happy now to tell me categorically about the four-year experience I’d had there. They spoke damningly and sweepingly about ‘The Russians’ – understandably perhaps, given that Mariupol was in rubble and the mass-killings at Bucha had just taken place. Yet few of those I’d lived among in Rostov fit the stereotype of the browbeaten, bug-eyed Putinist others imagined. Caught between these two worlds, no longer belonging to either, I began to wonder where I fitted in.

I still can’t believe the city I lived in for so long, and of which I have such poignant memories, no longer really exists

For the time being, it was almost certainly the Caucasus. Unlike Armenia, Georgia – my next stop – was emphatically pro-Ukrainian territory, hung with blue and yellow flags and pro-Ukrainian slogans everywhere. At my cheap hotel in Tbilisi I was surrounded by other ‘displaced persons’ like myself. We were in the same state of mind, understood each other, were careful in conversation. Like me, there was something manic, jittery and disillusioned about many of them. And angry too. One of a group of sailors who’d fled Kherson and was trying to get Western contracts told me, over morning tea, of an exchange he’d had with an unknown Russian woman on Telegram. ‘We are just coming to Ukraine to amend and teach you,’ she’d written, ‘Then everything will be normal again.’

Even telling this story to me, the sailor began to snarl with fury. ‘”What?” I said. “You ****ing b****? You’re going to ****ing teach us?’ As he lost control of himself, spitting the words out and banging the table, some saliva landed on my face. It was a measure of things that I didn’t flinch or pull away but just nodded. He was articulating a rage for both of us. We both understood.

There were Russians too in that hostel, mostly fleeing the draft. After Putin’s mobilisation in September the hotel – usually so quiet – filled up to capacity with them. They couldn’t go backwards, but where was forwards?

One Russian boy – beautifully-mannered and (I supposed) silver-spooned, became my smoking partner out on the balcony. He accepted Putin as a fact of life and though not angrily against the war, wanted no part in it. One morning I found his room festooned in sheets of A3 paper, with felt tip pens lying around and anti-war placards he’d been creating overnight.

‘Got to get photographed today with them,’ he said airily. ‘Convince the courts here I’m an anti-Putin activist.’ I should have been outraged, but we both, despite ourselves, started giggling. He was just as aware of the absurdity of it all, the hashtags beside ‘Stop the War’ he’d coloured in diligently in bright pink and yellow. Nor could I blame him much for wanting a future and being unwilling to die, aged 22, in his country’s squalid invasion.

My stay in Georgia lasted several months. The laid-back country was a good decompression-chamber, but it kept the war firmly in your head. Everyone around me was touched by it and the Georgians I met knew they might be next. I began to long for the comparative frivolities of Western Europe – which meant Italy, where my daughter was studying now. Thus began the exhaustive, exhausting process of getting documents together for transportation of the cats.

This too turned out to be a joke. In both Georgia and Italy I was waved breezily through customs, no one asking to see the documents at all. Perhaps I should have trusted in the Latin temperament (the Georgians without doubt being the Italians of Eastern Europe) and risked the journey seven months back. But what would I have missed? I had the encumbrance of my pets to thank, I knew, for my long stint in Caucasus hotel-rooms. It was a time unlike any other – a mixture of freedom, confusion, connection and loss – and one that felt strangely meant to be.

Now in Italy, my fourth country this year, I can see the Mediterranean from my balcony, and instead of taking my daughter to school through snow, ice and streets named after Soviet heroes, we walk along the coast. She can speak some Italian and is fast developing the range of Latin hand gestures. She’s also Anglicised her Christian name having – perhaps wisely – dumped her Russian one on arrival here.

I’m getting used to local children leaning out of Fiat 500 back-windows as the school-day ends and shouting ‘Ciao!’ at her – calling out a name I’ve never known her by or ever will. Cheap, excellent pizza and hot chocolate is in good supply, and we’re surrounded by postcard views. There’s shopping too, but the past year has made me wary of possessions, of anything that can’t fit into a single suitcase and therefore might easily be lost.

It’s Christmastime. In Rostov children will be sledging in Gorky Park and the square in front of the cathedral filling up with Christmas trees. The city’s clunking trams will be gamely decked out in streamers and tinsel. But friends there tell me the walls are now pasted with propaganda posters and there are frequent bomb-shelter drills. I still can’t believe the city I lived in for so long, and of which I have such poignant memories, no longer really exists.