Even before English media reported the use of the letter "Z" as Putin's emblem, Alexandra Tolstoy had alerted her Instagram followers to the "horrendous Nazi-like symbols" popping up all over Russia.

Even her twelve-year-old son, who speaks Russian, noticed straight away that there is no "Z" in Cyrillic, Tolstoy says in the kitchen of her rented brick terraced house in South London.

She gets angry at her deluded Russian acquaintances and has made it her mission to enlighten her followers, which include thousands of Russians, about Putin's propaganda bubble.

Gina Thomas

Features correspondent based in London.

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Between family photos, job advertisements, and fundraisers for Ukrainians, she posts messages, views, and comments.

She also gets her information from Russian and Ukrainian users as well as from Russian Putin critics who are friends of hers.

One of them wrote that her nephew had been used as cannon fodder.

His passport and phone were taken away from him and he didn't know where he was being sent.

The family is relieved that he was injured and is now in the hospital.

The dream of saving country houses in Russia

Her campaign against the war has brought hateful comments to Alexandra Tolstoy from paid internet trolls, but also from ordinary users who accuse her of spreading Western propaganda.

She lost thousands of followers, but also received encouragement and thanks.

Every post speaks of her commitment against the war and for the Russia she fell in love with when she was eighteen.

The people, the wide landscapes, the life there matched her temperament.

But Putin is also Russia or the patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church who adopts its nationalistic rhetoric.

Tolstoy fears he will never return to Russia.

Her dream of rescuing neglected country houses with a monument protection organization modeled on the English National Trust has long since passed.

With the name Tolstoy, one is perhaps predestined to be drawn to the land of one's ancestors, even though Alexandra was raised as a senior daughter in rural England with an English mother and an Anglicized father.

The fact that it bears the name of the great writer Leo Tolstoy draws attention to it.

The 49-year-old Anglo-Russian made headlines at an early age due to her thirst for adventure and her participation in television documentaries, for reasons that were not always pleasant for her.

Since the beginning of the war, she has been in demand in the British media as an expert on Russia and the former partner of a former Putin confidant.

Luxury villas behind electric gates

Alexandra Tolstoy is a distant relative of the author of War and Peace, or Special Operations and Peace, as she has come to call the classic after Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

Her grandfather was saved from the Bolsheviks in 1920, when he was a seven-year-old orphan, by his English nanny, who passed him off as his illegitimate son.

With her he got from Moscow to England, where he later became a respected crown attorney.

As a historian, his son Nikolai, Alexandra Tolstoy's father, dealt with the fate of Russian prisoners of war and anti-communists who had emigrated during the civil war and who were forcibly repatriated by the Allies to the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia after the Second World War.

Since he accused the British of committing war crimes,

in the late 1980s he was involved in a libel suit which he lost.

The judge awarded the plaintiff millions in damages.