Hello. My name is Anastasiia and I'm Ukrainian.
I grew up in a big family. In fact I have only one sister. But also my mom has a brother Andrew and two sisters (cousins): Lida in Ukraine and Tatiana in Russia now. These sisters have their own four kids. And you see: family is very big. All of them were born and grew up in Ukraine. They all moved to Russia 30 years ago. But every year they all come back to Ukraine for a couple of months.
We resided in a small village in Western Ukraine (our small homeland) and every summer we all lived there. We celebrated all birthdays together, and all Christmases and more. Every year. It was my life in a very big family. Until 2014.
After the beginning of the war in Eastern Ukraine in 2014 my aunt Tatiana and uncle Vladimir who live in Noiabrsk, Russia, started telling us that we are nazi. They told us that there was no Russian army fighting the Ukrainian army back then – that all of them were just "free people of Donetsk and Luhansk". Moreover, they told us that in Western Ukraine there are a lot of people who are related to Stepan Bandera, a controversial yet pro-Ukrainian figure of WW2, and that those who like him eat russian-speaking babies! That really sounds ridiculous (babies don't speak any language, and Ukrainians do not eat any human beings), but the truth was they believed in that. They truly believed in that, and that was truly horrifying.
We started talking a lot. I really tried to explain them the truth – not just some "my point of view", but the objective truth that there was a very small number of actual nazis in Ukraine, and that many people just supported their country as much as they could – and that is not called nazism. Still, after many talks, the Russian relatives didn't trust me or any other member of our family in Ukraine.
Nowadays, they all still live in Russia – my aunt Tatiana Kondyliuk, her son Vladimir with his wife and two kids, her daughter Alla with her husband and two children, one of them is my adult niece Nadia (she is around my age) with her son. Nadia was like a sister to me. We spend our childhood together. I have so many wonderful memories with her. She pierced my ear in my mother's kitchen when we were teenagers.
In 2014, they came to Ukraine as usual. They lived in my mother's home. Every day they watched Russian state channels, despising even the possibility to try to watch Ukrainian television. Every day, they went to their room, closed the door and turned on the russian tv. Every day. And they always repeated phrases from Russian propaganda. These phrases became more and more absurd.
Nadia stopped writing to me a couple of years ago. But they all come to Ukraine every year and live here half a year as usual. They have their own house in Ukraine and my aunt Tatiana even has a Ukrainian passport.
When i woke up at my home in Kyiv on February 24 at 4 am from the sounds of bombs dropping on city, I was shocked. I heard explosions through my windows, I heard an air alert. It was awful, scary, horrible, and terrifying. We hid in a bathroom and hoped that a bomb didn't hit us.
I wrote to my niece Nadia: 'Your president has begun a war against Ukraine, the Russian army is attacking my Kyiv now. I hear bomb attacks outside.'
And she answered: 'We don't want war. But there is so much information nowadays, you know, so many fakes. You should filter all information.'
And she answered: 'We don't want war. But there is so much information nowadays, you know, so many fakes. You should filter all information.'
To say that I was shocked is to say nothing.
Then I wrote her more and more about war, what I saw through my windows, I sent her videos from my friends from other towns and cities that were bombed by Russia. What has Nadia done? She read all this and blocked all my accounts on social networks. She even blocked my cat account on Instagram too!
Then my uncle Andrew from Ukraine wrote to my brother Vladimir Kondyliuk in Russia about the war. They are the same age and they were very good friends. 'Were' because of the fact that one side wasn't ready to accept the truth.
Vladimir wrote back: 'What you're saying is a lie. A fake. Your stupid army is bombing your stupid towns. Russian army is the liberators, they are coming to Ukraine to save lives of innocent people from the nazi government, and that's how you treat them?'.
Since then, I think I can say that I don't have family in russia. We can't speak with them, as they simply don't trust us. They thought that we all zombified nazis, but it seems now that it's all the other way round.
#sketch
#stoprussia #stoprussianagression
#stoprussia #stoprussianagression
