Kyiv, Ukraine – The war between Russia and Ukraine caused me to lose contact with my step-sister.
Our father died 20 years ago.
He lives in Russia, in a big city in Siberia, and I won’t mention his name because I know that one day he will regret his opinion about Ukraine.
Since the war, we have been in contact only twice.
“How are you? Where are you?” he texted me on February 24, the first day of the war. I also wrote that I am in Kyiv.
He didn’t answer.
I could say more.
I could almost say that I heard the explosion of a distant bomb that fills you with adrenaline and awakens the reptilian instinct: find a hole to hide in!
That my 81-year-old mother and I slept all night on thin rubber mattresses, on the granite floor of the subway station, where we hid from the bombs.
That we could not sleep because of the fearful conversation of hundreds of people, their crying babies and crying animals, and some of them smoked cigarettes inside the black hole of the canal, near where there are two Arab students sleeping on their prayer mats.
But I didn’t write anything to him.
I was busy thinking about stocking my fridge with food and planning take outs.
The Russian army was located just north of Kyiv. Soon, Ukrainian government officials and international organizations will report that Moscow’s military killed and tortured hundreds of civilians.
‘Ukrainian fascists’
My step-sister doesn’t like Russian President Vladimir Putin, but she hates the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, because he caused the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.
They know that our grandfather was killed by a firing squad in 1937, and our father spent many years in an orphanage because his mother was in prison for “theft”.
But my step-sister is deeply saddened by the loss of the international power of the USSR.
He insists that the West wants to destroy Russia and give away its mineral wealth.
Six months after the war, he asked me, “How are you?”
I also wrote that Russian troops are being driven out of large parts of Ukraine.
I wrote that my daughter, my sister’s niece who lives in Russia with her mother, happily drew Ukrainian flags and composed a childish, vague poem about a war that made me proud.
“What are the warlike people around you?” I asked my step-sister.
“Many want the war to end,” he replied.
Wow, I thought, that sounded encouraging. Understandable.
But then he went on what sounded like a line from the Kremlin playbook.
Many Russian workers arrived at the city’s hospitals, were treated, and some were amputated.
He wrote: “Atrocities of the Nazis.
“And where are the Nazis?” I asked.
“In Ukraine,” he replied, repeating what the Kremlin had said.
“Bye, coat coat,” I wrote, shutting him up.
“Cotton coat” is the cheapest winter clothing in Russia that resembles a prison uniform and refers to those who believe the TV spiel in Moscow – whether they are in Russia, Germany, the US, any republic of the Soviet Union or Ukraine.
Brother Mykolay Trofimenko, a 43-year-old construction manager in Kyiv, told me: “I was wearing cotton.
“I started watching [the famous Russian TV personality Vladimir] Solovyov, he thought, ‘Let’s see what he has to say about Ukraine’, and soon he realized that I was nodding my head in agreement,” he recalled.
After the war, Ukrainian Internet providers blocked Russian media, and Trofimenko stopped watching, cool style.
“I woke up,” he said.
But some Ukrainians still agree with Russia’s point of view.
A woman who was wounded on the front line in southern Ukraine told me that her old mother said that her wound was “punishment for the blood of the children of Donbas”, who were allegedly spilled by Ukrainian shells.
One Russian dissident, who left Armenia after the war began, told me he stopped talking about the conflict with his elderly parents living in the separatist Luhansk region of Ukraine.
A Russian woman from Uzbekistan does the same when talking to her parents.
“I have only one mother and father,” he told me.
‘incongruity’
If there is one word that can describe the effects of fake news, it is “incoherence”, the division between real life events and the methods of reporting that help them understand what is happening, according to a Ukrainian psychologist.
Sometimes this division can be great, making what is happening to a person’s experiences, events and actions almost unrelated to what they think about themselves, said Svitlana Chunikhina, vice president of the Association of Political Psychologists, a group in Kyiv.
Russian “propaganda” in particular makes the division even greater, he added, so that people in a highly disorganized state are unable to make informed and self-reliant decisions – and instead rely on the authority of their television channels.
“That’s why Ukrainians often find it difficult to understand why their Russian relatives and friends don’t want to hear anything about the situation in Ukraine,” he told me.
“Fake news prevents them from responding to real situations – theirs and others,” he said.
For one psychologist, lies provide a way to protect false thoughts. “It’s like a woman beaten by her husband who still believes him when he says he loves her.” [She has] there is no power to do real things,” a Moscow-based psychologist told Al Jazeera on condition of anonymity.
Therefore, the Kremlin-sponsored videos that are funded by the Kremlin make millions of Russians vulnerable to face reality, he said.
“And vulnerable people are easy to convince,” he said.
Too late
My step-sister found out that I had been in Ukraine for four years – and that I reported on the annexation of Crimea by Moscow-backed separatist rebels in southeastern Ukraine in 2014.
But he didn’t care to ask me what was happening in Ukraine, on the ground, between the explosion and the fear, the death and the will to win.
He liked his TV more than me.
After the war, he may realize that he made a mistake in the war – but only because he can hear it on TV.
If he says I’m sorry, should I answer him?
