Andrey Liscovich was at home in downtown San Francisco when he saw a tweet from the American politician Marco Rubio: “The #Russian invasion of #Ukraine is now underway.”
He felt sick. The 37-year-old Ukrainian had spent most of the previous decade working far from his native country, including as chief executive officer of Uber Works, a subsidiary of the ride-booking group, before creating his own tech start-up. But Liscovich was born in Zaporizhzhia, on the border of the south-eastern Donbas region now suffering intense Russian bombardments.
“When I saw the news, and that [president Volodymyr] Zelenskyy was staying, I knew I had to go back to fight,” he recalls. So he boarded a plane to Poland and made his way across Ukraine to Zaporizhzhia, planning to enlist. He wrote his will on the flight.