I'm a farmer, went on holiday but as soon as I told the locals I was a farmer they recruited me for the local harvest so I had spent weeks on farms and got instagram famous as a foreigner as dumb and drunk as every other farmer in the province, and sort of as a joke I was invited to Russia, blasted off my ass without even a valid drivers liscence in any country I decided to drive to this Russian farm. There was no real border it's just farms on both sides so who the hell cares. Wheat didn't know what county it was in and neither did I.

Anyway word of my arrival and tomfoolery in Russia reached the authorities, the federal ones, the local police didn't care i was driving combine harvesters around and fixing drum lifts and welding things. Eventually though the FSB, probably not understanding the rural nature of this situation, decided they'd kidnap me as a spy and interrogate me. I remember the locals were deeply concerned but I still didn't really grasp the significance and sort of thought I'd been pulled over for drunk driving.

I remember their surprise how cooperative I was, then their frustration at how useless a witness I was.

Firstly my identity was readily confirmed, and when I said I was a farmer that wasn't some kind of maoist answer, I was literally a dairy farmer which is something I imagine is hard to fake.

Secondly I knew nothing of interest to mother Russia, nothing about the army, politics, science apart from ag science and they really didn't care about pasture density and cattle rearing. In fact I didn't even know things which were common knowledge, and in fact couldn't even tell them which town or province I was in so was ignorant even my local standards. The farmer who knew nothing about anything, only plough and cow. Didn't even know who the Russian prime minister was not the prime minister of my own country. Least useful intelligence asset on record since Stalin arrested ukranian farmers.

Then they tried to break my will with vodka, which seemed to be working well but by that point I was sobering up and their officers got well drunk and at that point they'd realised the whole thing was a farce and the interrogation degenerated into karaoke with some random person in the next cell, and their warden almost fell over laughing because everyone was drunk except their boss and there was no police work of any kind to be done that day.

And so the next day I was deported from Russia, the ukranians were meant to pick me up but they didn't show, so the fsb just uncuffed me and ordered me to walk to the next town and not come back.
You could say I got off lightly but I got lost, slept in a ditch and was then arrested in Ukraine for being homeless. They didn't really believe or understand that the FSB had just dumped me in their country then went though a far more serious, protracted interrogation in Ukraine for being a Russian spy.

Then I got deported from Ukraine for having no liscence, passport, money or baggage, much to the anger of the ukranian farmers who were glad I was just alive and blamed themselves for me driving into Russia for a joke.

So all this politics, war, on some level understand it's totally rediculous, it's two farms without even a proper fence inbetween them, the people on both sides are neibours and every second person there is a farmer, and at least at the start of the war nobody really gave a shit about anything but farming and drinking. Not to discount the seriousness of the war, but where it became serious, initially it was like an argument on Facebook. The people who wanted to fight were douchebags by common consensus, everyone hates the feds, tax. And which farm belonged in which county meant very bloody little to the farmers who worked there.