Today I had a huge quarrel and blocked the second-to-last friend from my childhood still in Russia.
She got upset about my post on parenting in Russia and accused me of being “inhumane” and inciting hatred. I wanted to part on at least a somewhat civil note, but then I started hearing the usual arguments: “we’re suffering here too, and you’re speaking from your comfortable Europe.” And “there are people here who fled the war in Ukraine, and they’re doing well, building their lives.”
That last point is where I completely lost it. I called her something not very nice and blocked her.
So Ukrainians are “doing well” in Russia, huh. Sure, I guess some people are. Meanwhile, we’ve helped volunteers evacuate some others nobody knows how, just so their children wouldn’t be taken away, or so the FSB wouldn’t torture them. But yeah – life is just great for Ukrainians in Russia, they’re “building lives.” Building death too, probably – kids from occupied territories are likely already being sent to assemble drones.
God spare you from this mindset of “everyone is suffering, we should feel sorry for everyone at once, all sides suffer and all wars are bad, so we’ll just sit here and morally condemn those awful people who dared to actually try to do something about these wars – or worse, try to win them.”
These are completely non-overlapping realities.
I see people who are “apolitical, for everything good and against everything bad.” Over these four years, they were mildly horrified, and then carried on – building careers, having children, visiting their parents’ country houses, going to gatherings. And occasionally being appropriately horrified, just for form’s sake.
And then I see people who have lost absolutely everything – either because they went to fight and defend their country, or because Russia destroyed their world completely. Their home, their family, their career.
And of course, we’re all egocentric, so I think about myself too. This war has practically destroyed me – even just from the cognitive overload. For four years I’ve been living in a constant stream of messages: bring this, take that, call someone, find someone, save someone, find money, find equipment, find a person; here there’s a search, there there’s shelling, here someone lost a leg, there we need to arrange to get a dog out from the front line. And most of this you’re handling remotely, not even on the ground.
This is my choice – but really, it isn’t, given the values I was raised with. Not doing this would have meant losing myself.
And while people from that first category are having children and building careers, I can’t afford to have another child, or to focus on my work 100% so I’m not just drifting along as average but actually achieving something again. I can’t go visit my parents at the country house. I can’t visit friends.
And when people come to lecture me that I wrote something “wrong” and hurt someone’s delicate feelings, and that “this might push away those who are still undecided” – undecided people in 2026 need to not just be pushed away – you would better draw a circle of salt around them.
We’re supposed to “build dialogue,” apparently – after four years of pure hell. Make polite curtsies. And the thing is, I’m still being relatively mild compared to how I actually feel.