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. The circus, its entrance blocked by a tank alongside cute cartoon posters of elephants was a five-minute walk from my house and a place I knew inside and out. The takeaway where masked Wagner soldiers slung with loaded automatics were shown pushing their way into the queue for breakfast-burgers was once my local McDonalds. Snipers had been sighted on top of Galeria Astor, the shopping centre where I used to buy my weekly groceries and pick up toys for my child. Watching packs of menacing soldiers and military hardware swarm over these locations was disconcerting, to say the least.

From a distance, Russians can seem other-worldly, mere zombie-citizens of Putinland. That is not how they were to live among

But it was a good chance to reestablish contact with people I’d fallen out of touch with since last year. Most intended to remain indoors – they’d been heavily advised to do so – but there were a few brave souls willing to go out to work. Given the comical end to the day, not a shot fired and Wagner’s troops cheered out of the city like rockstars, it now seems strange to think how imminent crisis seemed. There were already fears Wagner would start pillaging after a few days, and when a report came mid-morning that Kadyrov’s troops were coming from Chechnya to take on Prigozhin’s and drive them from the city, it only meant one thing. Fighting on the streets and almost certain escalation. Things spinning out of control before more of Putin’s ‘decisive measures’ made it all much, much worse.

‘Thank God you no longer live there,’ a British friend said to me. But I felt the queasy guilt of the deserter. This was not something I could get across to anyone at home. When dramas happen in far-off, strangely named places we have no plans to visit, in languages we do not speak, they seem barely real at all. The survivors, when they emerge, wear what Milan Kundera called ‘the halo of tragedy’ and seem strangely predestined for the weird, holy otherness of suffering. Yet knowing people there, I couldn’t see it that way.

Perhaps the constant emphasis of Western books on Russia’s bleakest side – the poverty, the alcoholism, the brutalist politics – has made the people of the country seem other-worldly, mere zombie-citizens of Putinland, but that is not how they were to live among.

There was, to choose from many, my landlord Oleg, who with his leather jacket and shock of spiky hair looked like a strutting white homeboy. But he had a kind of gruff saintliness, coming round to my house during renovation with a newly broken leg in plaster, to shift heavy cement sacks, knowing I hated sharing a living space with them; on my birthday, he left a pair of ludicrously expensive Cuban cigars for me to smoke. Or Masha, an apparently home-loving, buxom girl whose husband had left her after a year of marriage for another woman. At which point she’d lost huge volumes of weight, becoming suddenly, dangerously sexy, a femme fatale, juggling two or three men at a time and with an Instagram page which seemed produced by Conde Nast. She was warm and open-hearted, always gossiping and giggling, and lamented family arguments about the war: ‘I have to keep reminding myself as we quarrel – there is more to people than their politics.’

There was Polina, a young divorcee, with her earthy voice, her bleach-blonde hair, her kindness and terrific sense of humour – but also Russian nationalism. She had multiple sclerosis and I sensed (perhaps wrongly) that in her longing for a strong Russian state she wanted something to atone for the weakness and humiliation life, with her debilitating illness, had forced on her. No one could deny there was profound justice in the idea of war coming home to Russia but still, I wondered how these people, who planned such a different future, would cope with its arrival in their city. One could though say the same of any Ukrainian civilian – and without the conditional tense.

And there was, in the wider context, an undeniable frisson to the day, a sense of things finally on the move in Russian politics. A local journalist sent me a Twitter clip a few months back of a house, without warning, collapsing in seconds, till all that was left was a pile of rubble.

‘That is how,’ he said, ‘the Putin regime will go when the time comes,’ and it seemed he’d got it right. Prigozhin’s march on Moscow surely meant an end to the war as well. Ukrainian friends were more cautious, believing it all too hopeful not be a cosmic trick on them. When the march was aborted and Prigozhin made plans to scurry off to Belarus, I felt a mingled relief and disappointment: nothing seemed to have happened but shady deals, compromise and betrayal, propping up an intolerable situation. It was the cruellest of sick jokes for those Ukrainians who, for a few hours at least, had half-dared to see an end in sight.

Rostov’s occupation was finally a non-event, the city now famous as the scene of fleeting political farce. The only really meaningful image turned out to be the sight of fanboy-crowds chanting ‘Wagner! Wagner!’ at the departing soldiers that night.

But just as telling were words from a young friend living on the western edge of the city. ‘I had to stay at home all Saturday because of these stupid f***ing Wagner people,’ she muttered. ‘All my weekend plans in ruins…’.

There was little respect in her voice, just disdain and irritation. Or, as a current Rostov meme has it, in memory of that big-top blocking tank: ‘The circus still remains. All the clowns have gone now.’