Fuck You, Brother

The first time it happened, I was drunk and stupid.

The first time it happened, I was drunk and stupid. I was crawling to a bus stop in Central London after I had just puked on the pavement, a stolen glass decanter from ZIMA in my hand. As I was walking through a dimly lit street, music blasting in my AirPods, a skinny man in a dirty tracksuit approached me and said, “Hey brother, where are you from?”

In the state I was in, everyone was my friend. Even a skinny man in a dirty tracksuit in a dimly lit street. “Russia,” I said.

“Oh man,” he said and shook his head. “That must be tough.” And it is. But the words landed differently that night, not only because I was drunk but also because that very day, I had applied for asylum in the UK and had spent two hours at the Home Office building in East Croydon, explaining what would happen to someone like me if I were to return to Russia.

He spread his hands out in an embrace, and so did I. He patted me on the back and let go. He smelled funny, but I remember thinking: what a lyrical way to end the night. As he walked away, I wanted to change the song in my headphones, so I put my right hand into my jeans pocket only to find it empty. My drunk brain took too long to realise what had happened. A song was still playing in my AirPods, but the phone wasn’t there. I had just been embraced by a skinny man in a dirty tracksuit in a dimly lit street. The dots connected.

“Hey!” I yelled. He turned around, his eyebrows raised. “Where’s my phone?”

“I’ve got no phone, man! What you saying?”

“I’m saying I had my phone but it’s not there anymore. Where is my phone?”

“I’ve got no phone, man!”

This went on for some time. A few passersby walked past and looked at us without much interest. It was 2 AM on a Saturday and this was Central London. Anything goes.

The skinny man walked up to me and said, “Hey, you know what, search me!” He took everything out of his pockets: some change, what looked like bubble gum, an old Nokia phone I hadn’t seen since my early teenage days. Then, for reasons I still don’t understand, he took off his pants, revealing his small, hairy genitals.

“Man, what the fuck?” I said. “Put on your pants. Just give me my phone back and I’ll be on my way.”

It started to dawn on me that I might not be getting my phone back, but I felt like a sucker. This was the most clichéd robbery. Something resembling my mother’s voice came into my head: “Never embrace skinny men in dirty tracksuits at 2 AM in Soho. Even if they relate to how hard it is to be Russian.”

“Give me my phone back!” I yelled again.

“I’ve got no phone, man!”

We were slowly starting to sound like a street performance.

Out of options, I moved the glass decanter I’d stolen into my other hand and grabbed the man’s elbow. “You’re coming with me,” I said. “To the police. Let them figure it out.”

“Alright man, let’s go!” he said confidently, and off we walked, hand in hand, like a couple on a leisurely stroll. We walked ten metres or so, I don’t know what that is in feet, when he let go of my hand, turned abruptly, and ran away, in my drunk head, faster than Usain Bolt.

I watched his back as he ran away and wondered whether I should follow him. I imagined him turning a corner and other skinny men in dirty tracksuits standing there, with knives, or worse. Not worth it, I decided. My mother’s voice came again: “Serezha, if you’re drunk and in Central Soho at 2 AM and your phone got stolen and the robber ran away, don’t chase him! There might be people with knives around the corner…”

I looked down at my stolen glass decanter, looked up at the figure growing smaller in the distance, and yelled the first thing that came to mind, which was something along the lines of, “Hey, fuck you, brother!”

Then I sent the decanter flying forward, aiming at his back. I missed, of course, and the glass shattered across the pavement into a million little pieces.

---

The second time it happened, I was sober as British tap water, coming back home from a walk in Greenwich Park, talking to my mother on the phone.

She was telling me about seeing Ukrainian drones lying on the ground on her way to work.

“It’s scary,” she said. “It looked like—”

But I never learned what it looked like, because her sentence was cut off the moment my phone was snatched from my hands. I stared ahead as the man dressed in black rode away on his electric bicycle, faster than any neighbouring car, my heart racing.

I was shocked, sure, but somehow almost expected it. As the black figure swerved left and right, avoiding traffic, and grew smaller by the millisecond, I inhaled deeply and yelled what had already become my war cry in these situations.

“Hey, man, fuck you!”

---

Aside from the fact that Serge is a slow learner, the curious thing about both times my phone was stolen was that a) they happened within one month in the summer of 2025; and b) both times it was the same phone.

While I consider myself an expert at this point in what to do when your phone gets snatched, I appreciate the luck involved. After that first time, when I miraculously made my way home after the skinny man in a dirty tracksuit left me phoneless, I made a point of blocking my device and was surprised to learn you can leave a message. That is, in case someone finds it.

I had no hope of anyone finding my phone, so I put down a message that read something along the lines of:

I WILL PAY PEOPLE TO BREAK YOUR LEGS. YOU PIECE OF FILTH.
p.s. if you find this phone, it was stolen. here’s my number…

And the next day, I received a call from a man who introduced himself as Mohammad.

“I found your phone,” he said.

“Where?” I said.

“In a field in Hackney. It displayed a message with some bad words written…”

“Can you give it back?” I said.

“Meet me,” he said.

“No thanks,” I said. The image of the man taking off his pants and then running away was still too fresh. “Leave it at the nearest police station.”

“Okay,” he said.

And what do you know: a few days later, my phone was miraculously returned to me from a police station in a remote place called Barking. It took me two hours to get there. The officer opened a safe and handed it to me, intact.

“Sorry,” the police officer said, handing me the phone, which smelled suspiciously like wet autumn leaves. “We keep it with all the other drugs.”

That’s exactly the phrase she used: “all the other drugs,” which I don’t know about you, but I found quite profound.

---

While the whole thing is surprising for many people—

My friend who wanted to come visit me recently texted me, “Is it true that they steal your phones on the streets of London?”

I said, “Yes.”

And he cancelled his tickets.

—for us Londoners, this is hardly news. A recent stat mentions something like 70,000 phones stolen each year in London alone.

For a certain assholic cohort of people, it is a business of sorts. Nobody cares about your bank details or private data. They snatch the device, ship it to Shenzhen, and make an easy £300–500 a pop.

But it’s not just London.

Every country, it seems, has a problem of its own.

In Russia, say the wrong thing, and they beat you up, no questions asked.

In the Netherlands, if my sister is to be trusted, it’s the bikes. People have two, just in case.

In the US, they just shoot you in the face.

To me, this reflects a metaphor for the universal truth of life: nowhere is perfect, and everything comes at a price. The question is, what price are you willing to pay?

So when, as an asylum seeker in the UK for my anti-Putin public views, I am confronted with a choice—go to prison or be sent to war for my beliefs back home, or have my phone snatched occasionally here in the UK—it’s a no-brainer.

Unlike dying in Ukraine, which I can do only once, there’s an unlimited number of times I can inhale and yell, “Fuck you!” to the figure in the distance with my phone, growing smaller by the second.

I am also proud to say that I bought myself some phone insurance.