Is Berlin or Istanbul closer to the front line in the war in Ukraine? Granted, Istanbul was not invaded by the Russians. Still, the Russian army did advance to the gates of Istanbul once (see Boris Akunin’s Turkish Gambit) and, from the other end, occupied Kars (see some of the architecture in town).

In the German capital Berlin, the architectural traces are from another era. Last December, our walking tour of the East Berlin highlights coincided with the Berlin-wide phone network check, which meant that at the preprogrammed hour – and we happened to be on the underground – the phones of those who had German cards went off with a loud alarm that sounded like an air raid siren. To say that it felt unheimlich would be putting it lightly. At the time, Berlin, and the whole world, were discussing whether the Germans would supply the Ukrainians with tanks, and there were several large graffiti, particularly in East Berlin, that read "Das ist nicht unser Krieg," which means "This is not our war."

A couple of months later, I revisited Berlin to report on the Berlinale and commuted to Potsdamer Platz from my cousin’s student accommodation in Tier Park, famous for the statues of animals made from the molten statue of former Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, in deep East Berlin. The opening night included a speech by Wolodymyr Selenskyj (as the Germans transliterate Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s name) in which he stressed how art cannot remain apolitical and that "cinema can overcome borders and walls." My cousin and I mused how Zelenskyy would promote his film in another world at the Berlinale. But instead, the festival-goers were treated to a documentary by Hollywood actor and director Sean Penn about our khaki T-shirt-wearing hero, which I have overheard one British journalist refer to as "the story of how Sean Penn saved Ukraine."

There were a couple more documentaries on the conflict: ‘Iron Butterflies,’ which was about the downing of the Malaysia Airlines flight over Donetsk and in which one victim’s relative urged Europeans to stop buying gas from Russia – back in 2014. The other I managed to see was "Shidniy Front": I’d been wondering how much Ukrainian I would understand with my paltry Russian. It turned out the Ukrainian volunteers whose journey to and at the front the documentary follows were all Russian speaking, and they took turns explaining how the war has torn families apart.

‘Yes, this is our war’

The Berlinale programming made sure I visited every possible corner of Berlin, and I saw that a number of the "Das ist nicht unser Krieg" graffiti had been graffitied over to say, "yes, this is our war." One film venue was close to the Oberbaum Bridge, which made me do double-take when I stepped out of the station. The street was called Warsaw Street, and at the end of it rose these two red towers that looked more Kazan than Warsaw. The fact that at the other end of the bridge, one entered Kreuzberg’s jurisdiction further increased the drama.

Taking a breather between two screenings, my cousin and I sat at a cafe and decided to exercise our German by reading a review of Christian Petzold’s film "Roter Himmel." We had been hearing on the radio about possible protests marking the war’s first anniversary, and our attention was turned to a piece about what was planned for the day. We read and double-checked the German sentence that said a destroyed Russian tank would be placed in front of the Russian Embassy." So on the day, after seeing an Argentinian film and having lunch at a German restaurant run by a Turk, we made our way to Unter den Linden in a very rainy and cold Berlin, where the wind felt, excuse my protesting too much, easterly.

As we approached the embassy, we pinched ourselves, seeing a tank pointing its nozzle at a very much closed-for-business Russian Embassy. It was early afternoon, and the crowd hadn’t yet assembled. We tried to guess the route of the tank and marveled at how restrained the gathered Ukrainians were. We had flashbacks to the demonstrations after the coup in Türkiye, where people from all walks of life climbed the abandoned tanks and took trophy photos. It has to be said things are a bit different when you’re a few meters away from a Russian Embassy that is the size of a neighborhood. Still, our eyes scoured the crowd for the likely lad who would do it. Finally, our eyes settled on the same one, a young man in his 20s who could easily be one of our Trabzon cousins. I learned later that some people climbed on it, including some who replaced the Ukrainian flag with the Russian one, which was duly replaced by the Ukrainian one again.

Street protests

Not finding the ‘stimmung’ that we expected, we followed the lead of our ears and walked toward the Brandenburger Tor. After a bit of no man’s land, we saw people speaking on a platform. It took our combined linguistic capabilities to realize this was another "no war" protest, but one where the "no war" would be achieved by not sending weapons to Ukraine and leaving NATO. We were quite disheartened that this counter-demonstration made more noise and hoped the pro-Ukraine one would gather momentum by the evening. Just as we were wondering about the motivations of these self-proclaimed Ossies, someone with flyers approached us in German, and as usual, after the third sentence, we had to switch to English. She explained she was part of a team doing "protest research" at the University of Bielefeld and asked if we could complete the online survey – no rest for the wicked or the anthropologist.

The cold was getting to us, so to wait for the pro-Ukrainian protest to kick off, we went into a cafe where 20-odd police officers seemed to have had the same idea. When we decided that critical mass had been reached and the demonstrators were making some noise, we walked back toward the Russian tank and listened to the mistress of revels speak In English on a float. She introduced several people, most interestingly Enno Lenze, whose idea (along with Wieland Giebel) it was to put the Russian tank in front of the embassy. He said that while visiting the war zone, he saw a Russian tank with "to Berlin" written on it, and that’s when he had the idea. And he received no welcome or thanks from the embassy for all his pains, he joked.

The convoy moved toward Brandenburger Tor. Then there were a couple of speeches, including one by a Ukrainian climate activist, which emphasized that gas and oil dependence leads to wars and that the only way to secure lasting peace is concentrating our efforts on green energy. It sounded so simple and natural, standing next to people who thought similarly, I thought maybe, just maybe, fear of Russia could help Europeans rethink their energy sources. And then I thought it was unlikely that Europeans would bear the cost themselves and that they would find a way to make the global south pay for it.

On our way back, we crossed the Brandenburger Tor again to go to the Ubahn, where we looked at posters of the gate’s history. The Berlin Wall had once stood right where we had stood listening to those speeches. And I thought how, for the longest time, as an Istanbulite, I had found it funny that Berlin advertised itself as the city between the East and the West. Now feeling the frost of the "easterly" wind in my bones, I could feel a bit of what the Berliners were feeling: the Ossies’ fear of a war with Russia and pro-Ukrainians who thought it was a good idea to engage Russian President Vladimir Putin now before his troops reached Warsaw Street.