03-07-2022, 12:22 PM
Quote:The 25-year-old has been speaking regularly to her mother, who lives in Moscow. But in these conversations, and even after sending videos from her heavily bombarded hometown, Oleksandra is unable to convince her mother about the danger she is in. "I didn't want to scare my parents, but I started telling them directly that civilians and children are dying," she says. "But even though they worry about me, they still say it probably happens only by accident, that the Russian army would never target civilians. That it's Ukrainians who're killing their own people." Ukraine war: 'My city's being shelled, but mum won’t believe me' - BBC News
Quote:Four days after Russia began dropping artillery shells on Kyiv, Misha Katsiurin, a Ukrainian restaurateur, was wondering why his father, a church custodian living in the Russian city of Nizhny Novgorod, hadn’t called to check on him.Ukrainians Find That Relatives in Russia Don’t Believe It’s a War - The New York Times
“There is a war, I’m his son, and he just doesn’t call,” Mr. Katsiurin, who is 33, said in an interview. So, Mr. Katsiurin picked up the phone and let his father know that Ukraine was under attack by Russia.
“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.