Olga de Truchis did not last more than a day. Unthinkable for this 39-year-old Ukrainian, an executive in a large French bank in the Paris region, to continue her activities with the Russian partners and customers of her employer. The day after the Russian offensive in Ukraine, on Friday February 25, she sent an e-mail to her two managers telling them that she was no longer able “to support the company’s activities in Russia”.
However, this was her mission: Olga de Truchis had joined a cell dedicated to the development of the banking establishment and its subsidiaries in these eastern territories in April 2021. “I can no longer do business with Russia, she says. My bosses support me, but I don’t know if they’ll reassign me or let me go, whatever, I’m ready to lose my job. » In the process, she publishes a message on Facebook inviting her “Friends of the West” to follow her. A few days later, in a letter dated March 3, the company’s employees, supported by the CGT, asked their employer to “suspend its activities with Russia”.
Like Olga de Truchis, many Ukrainian executives working in France, professionally linked to Russia, say “ready to choose” even if it means losing their jobs or their customers, “to suffer financially”, but also to erase the “big plus” of their CVs. Originally from a small village located 30 kilometers from Kiev, daughter of a journalist and a history professor at the university, Olga de Truchis is Russian-speaking, like all her compatriots. Beyond his technical skills, mastering the language allowed him to get his first job when he arrived in France, in 2009. And the others then.
“A heartbreak for us”
Choosing is also “to give up without denying it” – “it is so deeply anchored in us” – to part of their « double culture », testifies Denys T., 42, a Ukrainian lawyer who has been living in France for twenty years. “In reality, it’s heartbreaking for us, many of us are in between, my wife is Russian, my children go to Russian school, I speak Russian better than Ukrainian, so the only way not to suffer too much from this situation is to tell myself that I feel hatred towards the Putin regime, but not towards Russia or towards the Russians”, he explains.
The fact remains that if even one of his clients of Russian nationality, wealthy real estate investors, suggests any form of support for Vladimir Putin or the Russian offensive in Ukraine, “It will be over, over, I will no longer work with them, I am not taken by the throat, I can choose”. Until now, he says, they regularly ask for news of his family in Ukraine.
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