Ukrainians Find That Relatives in Russia Don't Believe It's a War

[Eugene]

Source: New York Times

Ukrainians Find That Relatives in Russia Don’t Believe It’s a War

By Valerie Hopkins
March 6, 2022
Updated 6:18 p.m. ET

-snip-

“I’m trying to evacuate my children and my wife — everything is extremely scary,” Mr. Katsiurin told him.

He did not get the response he expected. His father, Andrei, didn’t believe him.

“No, no, no, no stop,” Mr. Katsiurin said of his father’s initial response.

“He started to tell me how the things in my country are going,” said Mr. Katsiurin, who converted his restaurants into volunteer centers and is temporarily staying near the western Ukrainian city of Ternopil. “He started to yell at me and told me, ‘Look, everything is going like this. They are Nazis.’”

As Ukrainians deal with the devastation of the Russian attacks in their homeland, many are also encountering a confounding and almost surreal backlash from family members in Russia, who refuse to believe that Russian soldiers could bomb innocent people, or even that a war is taking place at all.

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Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/06/world/europe/ukraine-russia-families.html

Non-paywalled link: url-share

[Karadeniz]

1. How very frustrating!!!

[JustAnotherGen]

2. This is brilliant

From within the article:

https://papapover.com/en/

But Mr. Katsiurin said he could not push his closest family members out of his life.

“They are our relatives, they’re the closest people we have, and this is not about them,” he said. “I am not angry at my father — I am angry at the Kremlin. I’m angry about the Russian propaganda. I’m not angry at these people. I understand that I cannot blame them in this situation.”

He said he thought about cutting his father off but decided that was the wrong response. “The easiest thing to do would be to say, ‘OK, now I don’t have a father,’” he said. “But I believe that I need to do this because it is my father.”

He said that if everyone worked to explain the truth to their families, the narrative could change. After a post on Instagram complaining about his father’s disbelief went viral, he launched a website, papapover.com, which means “Papa, believe,” with instructions for Ukrainians about how to speak to their family members about the war.

I feel like we need this in America too . . . how to talk to Trump Russia Loving family members.

[Sucha NastyWoman]

3. Oh so familiar.

[PortTack]

4. Ukrainians need to keep having captured Russian soldiers call their mothers. A really solid way of

Getting information into Russia, and believed on face value.