Bolshoi ballerina Olga Smirnova, an international ballet star who recently publicly denounced the Russian invasion of Ukraine, has quit the famed Moscow ballet company and joined the Dutch National Ballet, the Amsterdam organization announced Wednesday…

In a brave but risky move, Smirnova had condemned the war in Ukraine last week in a post on the messaging platform Telegram, which is popular overseas.

“We cannot remain indifferent to this global catastrophe,” Smirnova wrote.

“I never thought I would be ashamed of Russia,” the ballerina continued in her post. She described herself as one-quarter Ukrainian, with a Ukrainian grandfather. Yet this alone did not drive her decision, she wrote: “It is that we continue to live as if this were the 20th century.”