The war in Ukraine is driving an ever-deeper rift within Russian society between those who are watered by official discourse and others who get information otherwise and denounce the “special operation”.
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Mariana has moved out of the apartment she shares with her grandmother in Moscow. She could no longer bear to hear him repeat that the “Russians went to save Ukraine“.
“My grandmother believes government propaganda. Our country is the one that defeated the Nazis. My great-grandfather came back from the war loaded with medals. This generation cannot imagine our country being the aggressor.” she says, describing an immense denial of Russian society.
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Elena, she saw her family fracture. She agrees to meet us, her face hidden by a mask that also stifles her voice. She describes her family and the generational divide that is becoming more and more evident over the course of the Russian offensive in Ukraine.
“My grandfather thinks we are right to intervene. My grandmother thinks they are Nazis, but the war is horrible and so are the economic sanctions. My mother thinks yes, we are destroying the country and it is high time to hide under the table and close it. My father is a dissenter.“
“They don’t speak to each other anymore and they don’t speak to me either. It’s painful, especially since we have family in Ukraine.”
Millions of Russians have relatives or friends in Ukraine. But even those who write from Ukraine to their relatives in Russia do not always succeed in convincing them. Maria read the exchanges between part of her family in Saint Petersburg and the other, who lived in Kharkiv and took refuge in Lviv. “Those from St. Petersburg, wrote in the family chat: ‘Why are you running away? The Russians will set you free‘. And those in Kharkiv replied: ‘Free us from what? Of life ?‘. And then their apartment was bombed. So those in St. Petersburg wrote: ‘It’s the fault of NATO and the Ukrainian Nazis. NATO forced Putin to do this‘. That’s their logic…“, she concludes.
Part of Russian society thus seems to live in a parallel reality shaped by Vladimir Putin, unable even to communicate with itself.