I coincidentally meet my uncle, who went missing in Russia 13 years ago, on Facebook. We secretly exchanged messages for four years, but he was living in addiction and solitude, hiding as if on the run in the mountains of the Russian Far East. Just before Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022, he left me his final will and disappeared without a trace. I headed to Russia in the midst of war to find him, and the story begins where my uncle vanished.