katsiurin: Ukrainians find that families in Russia do not believe it is war

LVIV: 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, had not called to check on him. “There is a war, I’m his son, and he just doesn’t call,” Katsiurin, who is 33, said. So, 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,” Katsiurin told him. He did not get the response he expected. His father, Andrei, did not believe him. “No, no, no stop,” Katsiurin said of his father’s initial response. “He started to tell me how things in my country are going,” said Katsiurin, who 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, 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. These relatives have essentially bought into the official Kremlin position: that President Putin’s army is conducting a limited “special military operation” with the honourable mission of “de-Nazifying” Ukraine. Putin has referred to the Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky, a person with a Jewish background, as a“drug-addled Nazi” in his attempts to justify the invasion.
Those narratives are emerging amid a wave of disinformation emanating from the Russian state as the Kremlin moves to clamp down on independent news reporting while shaping the messages most Russians are receiving. An estimated 11 million people in Russia have Ukrainian relatives. Many Ukrainian citizens are ethnic Russians. Russian TV channels do not show the bombardment of Kyivand its suburbs, or the devastating attacks on Kharkiv, Mariupol and other Ukrainian cities. They also do not show the peaceful resistance evident in places like Kherson, and not protests against war that have cropped up across Russia. Instead they focus on Russian military’s successes, without discussing the casualties among Russian soldiers. On Friday, Russia also banned Facebook and Twitter. All this, Katsiurin said, explains why his father told him: “There are Russian soldiers there helping people. They give them warm clothes and food.”