“[Mr] Putin must be tried and hanged. “But only in accordance with the law,” Gazprom’s vice president told The Telegraph. He watched the “special military operation,” as Putin described it, unfold on his phone and received SOS calls from people who said they had to be rescued by Russian troops launching an attack on the besieged country. “I was stuck on my phone. “I felt like I was sitting in a cozy cinema watching a horror movie,” Volobuyev was quoted as saying. “It’s such a miserable feeling when people call you and tell you, ‘The Russians are killing us.’ You work for Gazprombank. You are an important guy. Can you do something to stop it? “ A senior Gazprom official appeared in Kyiv last week saying he had left Russia to fight alongside Ukrainian troops in a dramatic sudden exit. “I could not watch from the sidelines what Russia did in my homeland,” said Volobuev, who was born in the northeastern Ukrainian city of Okhtyrka. “The Russians killed my father, my acquaintances and close friends. My father lived in a cold basement for a month. “People I knew as a child said they were ashamed of me,” Volobuyev said. From his childhood friends, he continued to receive videos of shells falling on his Ukrainian hometown of Okhtyrka. He had spent two decades at Gazprom and became Russia’s third-largest bank vice-president of Gazprombank, but he felt guilty as the series of invasions intensified in his homeland. “For eight years I was in this internal turmoil: I was not just working in Russia, I was working for Gazprom. “I worked for the Russian state,” he said, according to the report. He thought he wanted to move to Ukraine, but family obligations tied him to life in Russia, and the dilemma only escalated on February 24, as troops sent from Moscow began rolling their tanks into former Soviet territory. “I could not live like this for much longer: I had to choose between my family and my homeland and I chose my homeland,” Volobuyev said. Within seconds, he drove to the Russian-Ukrainian border, parked his BMW there indefinitely, and walked to his hometown, starting for the next 30 miles in the middle of a war. His childhood friends warned him. He could be shot by Ukrainian border guards or a Russian drone could end his life. Mr Volobuyev then bought a ticket to Riga, Latvia, via Istanbul and went to the airport with only a handful of luggage. He was carrying as much cash as he could to leave the country – .000 8,000. What remains discreet is his methods of secretly entering Ukraine, he said, citing security concerns. He adds that leaving Russia was easy, but getting to Ukraine was as difficult as flying to the moon. He is among hundreds of key Russian businessmen and monarchs who have faced a fever of financial losses following Western sanctions on the Kremlin. Now, his savings from Gazprombank accounts are zero because not only did he lose access to his Visa, but he said his MasterCard is also just a piece of plastic after the company suspended operations in Russia.
