In the former summer residence of the Swabian Duke Karl Eugen in the Akademie Solitude in Stuttgart, the Russian artist Viktoria Lomasko sits in her room and weeps.

Solitude has recently become the refuge for the artist and author, and thanks to the Jean Jacques Rousseau grant she can stay here until September.

"I'm an artist and a dissident," says Lomasko, who at 43 appears young, vulnerable and defiant.

She tearfully recalls how a Ukrainian girl here recently told her that the war wasn't her fault;

she didn't throw any bombs.

She became friends with this Ukrainian at Schloss Solitude.

At the same time, attacks from social media have been raining down on them like arrows in recent weeks.

One from the Ukrainian village Musychi near Kyiv, fired by her artist colleague Alevtyna Kachidze, hit the hardest.

The two women are internationally successful, socio-politically committed post-Soviet artists.

Now the Ukrainian accuses the Russian of manipulating the West, of being an economic migrant, a Russian imperialist and a bad artist.

Their conflict represents the chasm between two worlds, which opened up at the latest on February 24, 2022, actually as early as 2014.

Until then, the Ukrainian and Russian art scenes were closely intertwined.

Success as a comic reporter

In 2013, Lomasko invited Kachidze as curator to take part in a Moscow Biennial project, Feminist Pencil 2 – the first major feminist artist project in Russia.

They faced a lot of opposition back then.

Two days after the opening, the exhibition space was smeared with green felt-tip penises overnight.

But Feminist Pencil was a revolution against patriarchy that connected the two.

That changed after the start of the war.

Lomasko, who comes from Moscow's periphery, made a name for herself as a comic reporter on the international art scene with her political and ironic drawings.

For years she visited juvenile delinquents in prisons and gave them drawing lessons.

In 2017 her book Other Russias was published, the result of nine years of observing political court cases, protests and everyday worlds: skinheads in jail, sex workers, orthodox activists, queer people.

From New York to Berlin and Beirut, Lomasko's works have been shown all over the world. This year's Documenta 15 invited her as a "harvester" to process the creation of the exhibition in an illustrated book.

Only in her home country has no gallery worked with the regime opponent for years.

Threatening calls after the outbreak of war

After the outbreak of war, almost all of their Russian acquaintances and friends received threatening phone calls from the police.

At the beginning of March, she first flew to Bishkek in Kyrgyzstan, then to Brussels.

The Belgian production company, which is making a documentary about her, got her a visa.

A month later, shortly after the pictures from the Ukrainian Bucha went around the world, the American magazine "The New Yorker" printed their comic report entitled "Collective Shame".

It shows Lomasko departing from Moscow airport and later in exile.

"What leeway do I still have?" she asks desperately.

"Caught between Putin, the shame of this war, and what feels like Western rejection of anything Russian." The text in the speech bubbles is by Lomasko,