“I couldn’t bury my parents”: the history of the separation of Russian-Ukrainian relatives

There are many stories of breaking family Russian-Ukrainian ties among domestic stars. Russian actor Vladimir Gostyukhin admits that amid political disagreements, he cut off all communication with his sister, who lives in Kharkov, as well as with his illegitimate daughter Alexandra, who lives with her husband in the United States.

According to the artist, he hears “anti-Russian speeches” from his sister, which he cannot stand. As for the daughter, who was born in 1986, Gostyukhin said about her this way: “The daughter moved away from Russia. She took the American side.”

“I didn’t even tell about the death of my mother”

A military pensioner from Moscow, Anatoly Ivanovich, told his story of discord with relatives living in Ukraine. He was born in the Kherson region in 1940. Father is Ukrainian, mother is Russian. His family tragedy is similar to millions of others: Anatoly Ivanovich’s father never saw his son, he died for the Motherland in the Great Patriotic War. He went to the front as a 19-year-old boy when his wife was pregnant. After the war, mourned, my mother remarried a Russian man, Ivan, and Anatoly had two half-sisters, Galya and Sveta.

Immediately after the end of the decade, Tolya entered a military school, served in the Armed Forces of the USSR and Russia, and, having wandered around the country, ended up with his family in Moscow.

In Soviet times, Kherson relatives often came to Moscow to visit their brother and his family. Often his mother also visited them – she came to her son until she was 90 years old … Kherson relatives did not live well, and Tolya – both during the service, and only then as a military pensioner – constantly helped his mother and sisters with money.

“One of the sisters, Galina, once again came to visit us, met a Muscovite, married him, and became a Muscovite herself,” continues Anatoly Ivanovich. – And her daughter and her husband remained in Kherson.

After the Maidan, and as Ukraine was overwhelmed by Russophobia, our relationship with my second sister Svetlana, who had been living in the Kherson region with her children all this time, became cooler. Needless to say, they especially worsened when her son, that is, my nephew, volunteered to fight against the Donbass militia.

And Galina has always, from the very beginning, been an active opponent of the events in Ukraine in 2014 and a patriot of Russia, like her daughter. Svetlana, on the other hand, became more and more hostile towards the Russians, and, of course, towards us, her relatives, too.

Anatoly Ivanovich, due to age and illness, could no longer visit Kherson in recent years, but he communicated with Svetlana via video link, continuing to transfer money, including for their old mother. But after February 2022, Sveta stopped calling her brother and answering his calls altogether. It got to the point that she did not even tell him about the death of his mother, and he learned about it from distant relatives. He could not bury his mother … However, he still could not come to the funeral, even if he knew about them – due to the termination of communication between the two countries.

Any connection between Anatoly and Galina with their sister and her children and grandchildren was interrupted. Where and how she lives now, they do not know. It is only known that one of her daughters moved to Spain with her family, two other children live and work in Poland. Anatoly says: “She is still a sister, and we are worried. There is only information from friends that she and her eldest daughter still live in a village near Kherson, it seems that they did not suffer.

“One sister turned away from us, we communicate with the other”

Forty-year-old Muscovite Elena comes from Western Ukraine. Her parents are Ukrainians, and she herself, respectively, too. She came in her youth to study in Samara, then she met her future husband, and they moved to Moscow. They have been living in the capital for 18 years.

In the Ivano-Frankivsk region, she left her parents, a brother and two sisters. Previously, Elena often visited relatives in Ukraine, but after 2014 she visited them only once – in 2019. After the trains between the two countries stopped running, and even more so after the start of the special military operation, Lena no longer saw her relatives.

“Her parents died one after another in 2020 from covid, but she couldn’t even say goodbye to them,” Elena’s husband Sergey told MK. – Only on Skype, relatives showed her a wake … She then cried a lot.

At that time, it was already possible to get to Ukraine only through Belarus, and this is not one day, and she would not have had time for the funeral. Lena is very worried, yearns that she has not been able to see her family for several years now, they communicate only remotely via Skype.

– And how are the sisters and brother of the wife now disposed towards you and her?

– One sister turned away from us after the start of the special operation, all these months she does not talk to us at all. But the wife communicates with her brother and younger sister via video link almost every day. In conversations, they try not to touch on the topic of politics. If they do, it’s very delicate.

– Relatives feel the current situation?

“They say that they have power outages, they turn off the light, and that their gas is very expensive, and they have to save it all the time.

According to Anatoly Ivanovich, there are countless such stories in his environment. “What can we say about the relations between Russians and Ukrainians, even if family ties are cracking and torn, and relatives find themselves, as in a civil war, on opposite sides of the barricades,” he says.