Opinion: I lost a close friendship to Putin's war on Ukraine (via latimesopinion)
When I immigrated to the U.S. from Moscow in the mid-1990s, the first thing I learned was that people in the Soviet diaspora didn’t care where you came from. The fact that I’d spent half my childhood in Ukraine and the other half in Russia carried no significance in the new immigrant reality. The community consisted of families from Moldova, Belarus, the Caucasus, Central Asian countries and the Baltics as well as Russia and Ukraine.
After Russian President Vladimir Putin launched an invasion of Ukraine last February, rifts emerged immediately in our community and took many by surprise. While I was lucky that no one in my family, including those in Ukraine, Russia and the U.S., supported Putin’s aggression, I did lose a close friend, an immigrant from Russia. The last time I saw her had been a few weeks before the war.
That surprise of finding out which side people fell on has become a common experience in the diaspora during the past year. “I lost many friends I had, or thought I had,” Russian Armenian writer Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry told me. Lyudmila, a Ukrainian friend in the Bay Area, said she has a strained relationship with her mother-in-law, who is from Ukraine but watches Russian television at her home across the Bay.
These divisions are not dissimilar to those that shocked American society during the Trump administration. How many Americans have learned the art of staying away from politics during family dinners? The difference is that for my community, the split isn’t just political. It carries with it the destruction of whole cities and loss of human lives in a war.
The good news, if any can be found, is that Russia’s shocking invasion of its neighbor has also brought out solidarity. It’s not surprising that the Ukrainian diaspora has been a united force that continues to tirelessly fundraise, sending people and supplies to the war zone. However, they haven’t been the only ones. Last April,
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