From the Deep of My Heart
Can I offer you some humanity in these trying times?
Well, shit!!
This week we’re going to look at what is happening in Ukraine following President Vladimir Putin’s invasion last Wednesday. Three weeks ago, we looked at the history of the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian War and why the conflict that unfolded was likely, which was definitely a little more tongue-in-cheek than this piece will be (but, as we know, I’m entitled to one serious E4P a year).
As the days have gone on and more information has come out and everything has started to feel bigger and bigger, I have to acknowledge my own limits: there are conversations to be had about racial disparities both within Ukraine and in all areas of conflict.1 There are conversations to be had about the language used at times like this, notably regarding casual xenophobia and casual misogyny. There are conversations about American exceptionalism (new bingo card), the omnipresence of anti-Semitism, the politics of refugee crises, the shortcomings of bureaucratic safety nets, and men and their damn egos again!!!!
There are so many conversations and all of them need to be had, but not all of them can be had by me—I’m just one itty bitty person with one itty bitty newsletter. Still, this week, I had a call with former-colleague-turned-bestie Laura Cooper about her reaction to the invasion as a Russian with family living in Ukraine, as well as what she believes could happen next.2
Laura is from ~unincorporateddekalb~ next to Decatur, GA. She works at her family’s company, Cooper Piano. She has over 60 plants in her apartment and a beautiful dog named Sasha. Laura enjoys a good family jam session with songs from Pink Floyd to Ella Fitzgerald to Slavic folk songs.
All Quiet on the Bila Tserkva Front
For the first time in Emily For President’s history, we’re genuinely starting with the most important point—no funny business this time!!
Emily: I think it was intentional that this didn’t happen during the Trump Presidency.
Laura: That would have definitely been World War 3.
In these trying times, relying on traditions matters. But in all seriousness:
Emily: What’s happening with your family now?
Laura: For this whole week, I’ve been checking in with everyone, saying, “Hey what’s going on? How are you guys?” I messaged my younger cousin at the beginning of the week, and she’s like “Oh you know. I’m just studying for exams. I’m having a hard time figuring out which university I want to go to” because that’s the culture, that’s all Eastern Europeans. It’s this blasé, “it’s going to be fine” attitude. All of my family says, “You’re being dramatic because you’re half American.”
But then I was right.
Emily: Your family is Russian, but they live in Ukraine?
Laura: My grandparents, my mother, and her sister have lived in Ukraine since the 1970s, but ethnically they’re Russian. All the younger relatives of mine, they really identify more as Ukrainian. I identify as Russian, I don’t identify as American. That’s kind of the opposite attitude they have with identifying as Russian— it’s not that they’re ashamed. They’re just like, “This is where I live. These are my friends and family [in Ukraine].”
All of my family live in a town called Bila Tserkva and then we have family friends who are in Kyiv. Bila Tserkva is about an hour outside Kyiv to the south, slightly southwest. Things have been not too crazy because where the Russians are coming from, it kind of can bypass them. It hasn’t been bypassing them completely but more so than other cities that are on the path. What concerns me more than being close to Kyiv is being close they are to Chernobyl. Although they’re 100 miles south of the plant, it’s still quite scary. Russia has taken that, the troops have taken that. That’s scares me because one wrong move, whether it’s an accident or not, and the effects would be very serious. That’s how my grandfather died— he died from radiation poisoning from Chernobyl.
[Update from 2/28—Laura: Things are starting to get bad again in Bila Tserkva. My cousin Vika said, “we’re having a terrible time right now, 3 explosions in town, they blew up a three story military dormitory.” Apparently they hit a hospital over there as well. Vika said, “the blows were unexpected.”]
Emily: What are the dynamics like between Russians and Ukrainians, and how is Putin misrepresenting that?
Laura: The big thing that Putin keeps pushing and what we’re hearing a lot here is that Russians are against Ukrainians, like Russian people are against Ukrainian people which is not true.
Ukraine was Ukraine before it was in the Soviet Union. There’s a language, there’s culture, there’s things that are separate Russian culture. But there’s also a lot of similarities. If you are in Russia and you don’t know someone living in Ukraine, that’s a rarity, or you didn’t go there or go to school there. They’re very connected cultures.
What I will say is that the older community in Russia has been horribly brainwashed. It’s the same thing that’s happening here with conservative people who just accept what Fox News is telling them. They believe in Putin and the news that is being presented to them. Anyone who is younger doesn’t support Putin because they know how to use the internet and look at other news sources.
Emily: So Putin’s like a bad authoritarian who’s not banning the internet enough?
Laura: Yeah, and he just is constantly making stuff up.
I think the thing with him is he is intelligent. He sounds smart. He is funny, he says funny things. Not the way Trump says funny things; Putin says things that are actually— if someone else said, it might actually be a good joke. That’s annoying. But I think that makes people trust him more. My grandmother, she was back and forth on all of this because she is watching Russian news because she doesn’t speak Ukrainian very well. She watches Russian news. It took a lot of us telling her, “Look here’s what’s going on. Here’s the picture that you’re not being presented.” She came around but then she wouldn’t believe how serious it is and that’s another reason why she wasn’t inclined to leave.
I think the Russians in Ukraine who had some skepticism [that Russian troops would invade], that’s all gone now because their lives are in danger. The people who still believe Putin, it’s because they’re being fed this lie that it’s Ukraine’s fault, Ukraine is perpetrating it, Ukraine is killing their own people. Which is just absurd… an absurd thing to say.
Emily: This is a very complicated issue that I think a lot of other members of the global community don’t know a lot about. Is there a reason why it became so complicated?
Laura: I feel like that’s on purpose— how hard it is to follow. Not just the history of things, you can read a book on that. But what’s happening right now is hard to follow because of how many people are saying very different things. It’s like mirroring Covid: the government says one thing, the CDC says something that’s confusing, and then the politicians are saying stuff and your auntie on Facebook is saying stuff, and it can be very hard to confirm the truth.
The confusion makes it so that people don’t trust any news sources, except for their eyes. I was messaging with my cousin, I’ll read this out to you. I was checking in and she said, “Today everyone promised the shelling of our city but we hope for the best,” and this is what is scary: “Black marks began to appear on residential buildings. The news says it’s for air attack. Today people started tracking these and painting over them. Our house had one too,” and then she sent a picture and said they glow so you can see them from above.
I said [to Vika]: “send me stuff that your friends are posting so that i can share it because people will believe things the most if they can see if and not just read about it.” I was talking about how much misinformation is going on and she said, “Well yeah that’s the problem, even about these marks. Is this a trick by Putin to make people more scared? It’s so hard to say and then by the time you figure out what the truth is, it’s because you’re being bombed.”
She just turned seventeen so she’s still in that part of her life where she hasn’t had to think about politics as much. She even said, “I don’t know if I’m mature enough to understand the seriousness of this situation” but then once you look outside your window and see a plane flying over your building, a couple of yards up, you realize the gravity of it all.
There is the purposeful misinformation that is being spread by Putin and the Kremlin, but then there’s the accidental misinformation where something got mistranslated from Ukrainian to English or a picture was confusing. It’s tricky.
The following is Vika’s poem from the competition she mentioned in her message:
To Ukraine:
I always admire the glamours of your sky.
The reflection of spring, hope and light.
But, pity, often I feel sad. You are so strong and fearless with the wings of angels comforting us all.
We are all grateful for you for giving us life, respecting every tear in your crying eyes.
In harmony you are so peaceful and inspiring. So you should not be on your knees.
Get up and celebrate new peaceful morning glory.
Then you will fly like a child. Feel the spring in your heart.
Believe in dreams, my beloved Ukraine.
Believe in future full of happiness and joy!
You will then blossom with flowers of love. Falling in love with your beauty.
Believe in all the goodness of it all.
Forget the sadness.
Your kindness is the Victory, my beloved Motherland!
Putin on the Ritz (I’m so sorry)
It is a truth universally acknowledged that Vladimir Putin is a cold-hearted bitch. With seemingly little regard for his country or its place in the international community, Putin has just been marching (into a sovereign nation) to the beat of his own drum. In the last day or so, new reports are coming out discussing Putin’s mental state and behavior following his order to put nuclear forces on high alert.
While Laura and I did not get into the nuclear fallout of it all, I did ask her a number of questions about Putin’s whole everything:
Emily: What reaction are you personally having as a Russian who does not support Putin, living in America? You’re culturally identified with his culture in this conflict but—
Laura: Well see it’s interesting that you used the word “his” because he is trying to create his own culture. He’s trying to create this separation from the rest of the Eastern European countries, and it’s not his. The actual Russian culture has nothing to do with the bullshit he’s pushing. Bu then he’ll say stuff like “Ukraine doesn’t like Russia’s culture and Ukraine wants to get rid of all the Russians in Ukraine.”
Emily: That’s so middle school girl of him.
Laura: It’s scary for me just because I don’t know if I’m always going to get in touch with my family. My family has no qualms with Ukraine ever. They decided to live there, they wanted to live there. That was a decision.
I don’t know how I’m feeling and it’s weird and it’s complicated because I know where I stand and I know where my family stands, which is that we love being Russian and we love the country, even though I’ve never actually been there. I’ve only been to Ukraine. That’s the thing: we love being Russian but I haven’t been there. I’ve only been to Ukraine and that’s home for my family, not Russia. Even though Russia was home at one point, it hasn’t been for a very, very long time.
Emily: I think it’s interesting you said that Putin is almost creating his own culture with Russia right now and trying to portray it that way, but it seems like he’s going trying to recreate the Soviet Union in some ways.
Laura: I have an interesting thing to say about that. Last night, I was over at my parents house because we’re performing at maslenitsa.3 Last minute, we’re replacing a bunch of the songs that we don’t really have to sing with Ukrainian songs. One of the ones we’re not going to sing this one was a song from this movie that came out in the 1970s. It was about World War 2 and Ukrainian and Russian soldiers fighting together against Nazi Germany and that’s the whole premise— that they’re getting along and fighting side by side and there’s jokes. It’s a sweet movie.
What Putin is pushing is the opposite of that. He’s making it seem like the opposite of that, but what we’re seeing with the protesting that’s happening in Russia is that there is camaraderie, there is that solidarity. Russian police arrested 1,700 people [now over 6,000] protesting this invasion, so you can see Putin being like, “No, no camaraderie. I’m not allowing it, I’m not allowing you guys to support Ukraine. I’m shutting it down.”
The other thing about camaraderie: the apartment building where my grandma lives is one of those classic soviet buildings, so everyone in the building has been living there since the 1970s pretty much. My grandma and her upstairs neighbors are Russian but the rest of her neighbors are Ukrainian. Granted, everyone speaks Russia except for this one really, really old lady who… might be dead now.
Anyway, there’s the two Russian units and then everyone else is Ukrainian but they were all believing the same thing which is that it wasn’t going to actually come to this. But everyone got together to clear out the basement and when the sirens went off, they went down there altogether as a community because that’s what the reality is, especially for the Russians in Ukraine.
They want to be there. They love their neighbors— it’s not this division that’s being portrayed.
As Laura mentioned, there have been a number of anti-war protests taking place around Russia in the past week and over 6,000 people have been arrested as a result. The general energy is exactly as Laura shared: Putin’s actions do not represent the sentiment of his people.
The more serious economic sanctions imposed by nations around the world have begun to take effect and the people who are feeling it the most are those who have never wanted anything to do with this escalation of war. I asked Laura:
Emily: Can you talk to me about the protests and what you see moving forward for Russia? It seems like so many people there don’t want to be at war, don’t seem to want to be tied to this at all. What do you see for the future of Russia?
Laura: I feel similarly about what’s going on in our country which is the percentage of young people who are on the wrong side of history is a lot less than those who are on the right side of history. Our country here keeps getting more progressive because every year because harmful ideology just doesn’t make sense in our society anymore.
I think there is a parallel universe where Putin dies of some natural weird cause or poisoning or something like that and all these people in his government that are licking his little butthole, enough of them are like, “Oh shit, we were only doing this because we were afraid and we didn’t want to go to jail or get killed and we didn’t want to leave our families behind.” And in this parallel universe, when he dies, all these politicians are like, “We do not like him and we need to make changes,” and it would be a long process but eventually, it would become a properly democratic country.
To a lot of Americans, war is abstract, unfathomable. You've never seen a city in pieces. You've never feared war planes overhead. It's so surreal that perhaps you reach for a joke out of discomfort. If this is you, don't.But that feels like a silly child’s naive dream to have because [Russian politicians] are so deep in it that it would take some drastic shit for them to get out of it. I don’t know. I know what I want: I want there to be real democracy over there, real authentic democracy, and I want them to get out from under this desire to control stuff that is not theirs to control.
If I could make my dream come true: the government stands up against Putin, he gets kicked out or something, the Russian people take back their country, are able to vote for someone they actually believe in, and get real news. It’s the same thing I want for this country, the exact same thing I want for this country. Granted, we have democracy but it doesn’t always feel that way.
That Ol’ American Fighting Spirit!!!
On Friday, almost immediately after our conversation, reports began to come in that Russian troops were nearing the Ukrainian capital city of Kyiv. That night, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy—who is genuinely having an insane time in office between President Trump’s impeachment and President Putin’s invasion— addressed his country and the world about how what happened in the coming would be vital to Ukraine’s outcome.
Ukrainians have continued to defend their city and country now nearly a week in.
Emily: What do you think is likely to happen short term as well as long term? U.S. officials have said Kyiv is going to fall, Zelenskyy is going to get *murder noise*, and then Putin is going to put in a proxy government. But there’s a video I saw today of a journalist in a car with a Ukrainian man and the man said, “They [the Russians] could take over the government. They can think that they won, but we’re going to still keep fighting back.”4
Laura: That is, in the short term, what i think is going on. I think Zelensky is doing a very honorable thing because you can’t really stand by your country if you’re not in it and you run away. That’s what happened in 2014: everyone just fucked off because that’s what happened on purpose to create instability. Once you have a power vacuum, it’s so easy to get in there.
If Putin pushes in this proxy or puppet government, if that happens, the military is not going to stop and the amount of civilians who are arming themselves and are already getting involved in fighting, they’re not going to stop.
Emily: They’re going to create a government for themselves to govern a people who refuse to be governed by them?
Laura: If they do take the capital, if they do this proxy government and the people and the military keep fighting against them —which I’m positive they will— how long can that go on before you’re like “Fuck it? We can’t do this.”
Emily: Then what was the point? Why do it in the first place?
Laura: It’s as simple as: Putin said that he wants Ukraine, that it’s Russia’s land to take—he’s said it, so now he has to do it. The last thing a character like him can do is look like a coward and look like he’s scared.
There are more Russian deaths right now than Ukrainian deaths. There will be a lot of deaths, regardless of if he takes the capital. The more people die, the more mad the families in Russia are going to get— the ones who support Putin. The longer this goes on, the longer their children are dying, the harder it’s going to be to support it.
Emily: Seeing the disconnect between Russia’s leader and its people, do you think there’s any potential for the Russian people to overthrow him or is he too powerful?
Laura: Obviously we’re seeing protests and in greater numbers than the west might have expected but they’re getting arrested just for protesting. That’s just what we’re seeing in the news—there could be killings that we’re just not privy to yet.
I think that there’s too many people who are too scared for their lives and the lives of their families to overthrow. There would have to be someone in his government, someone in the military— it would need to have more than just the people. Americans have a much better shot of overthrowing their government because of how armed the American people are.
Not the flex Americans want, but the one we deserve. Speaking of the exceptionalists in the chat:
Emily: Americans have such main character energy put themselves at the center of everything but I also think a lot of people here want to care about an issue they never learned about before. what’s the best way to be a part of this issue without being the center of attention?
Laura: I’ll say this: maslenitsa, this celebration, it’s a week-long thing celebrating the coming of spring. The event that my family is playing at is probably going to be a lot of Ukrainian people because it’s celebrated a little more intensely there but all Slavic countries celebrate it with their own traditions. As I said, we redid our repertoire to include more Ukrainian songs because music is healing, music is how you unite people.
We play Russian instruments so my dad asked the woman organizing if she still wanted us to perform. It’s stuff like that that’s important, asking, “Am I doing the right thing? Am I saying the right thing?” and doing your own research to figure out “Is this something i should say?” The organizer said, “We need to do this. They can’t take this away from us.” When she was thanking my dad, she said, “I thank you from the deep of my heart.”
We are celebrating their culture and we’re celebrating our culture because it is a beautiful culture. That is what I think people here should be doing: celebrating their culture. On your social media, not being like “I stand with Ukraine.” Post something that celebrates the country, talk about the good history and the positive things that Ukraine has done. Follow Ukraine’s Twitter. The majority of their Twitter is sharing Ukrainian artists, choreographers, musicians, historians, scientists. That’s the way to make it not about us and not be like, “This is my pain—I am suffering for you.” It needs to be, “I’m celebrating you. I’m celebrating your culture to protect your culture.”
I am having a bit of main character syndrome in all of this—because of how strongly I feel about protecting Ukraine and not letting Russia take it, there’s parts of me that want the U.S. to go fight. But it’s very conflicting because I don’t want World War 3, I don’t want this. Yet at the same time, how can we stand by much longer watching this happen? In the middle of a conflict, it’s easy to be a bystander. Even just a couple years after the fact, you’re like, “God how could I have done that? Why didn’t I do something?” How long did it take us to get involved in World War 2?
Emily: We didn’t get involved, I believe, until 1941 and it started in 1939…? [This is factually correct.]
Laura: How many lives were lost that we could have prevented as a major presence in this world? Can we live with that? Can we live with doing that again? World War 2 didn’t feel like it was going to be what it was at first. No one knew how far it was all going to go, and it was easy to ignore. And then it did get serious and it did get real and we still waited to get involved. What happened when we got involved, and fighting alongside everyone else? We won.
A win means less and less the more destruction happens before you win.
Truly so much has changed over the course of the last week and more insanity will undoubtedly continue to develop. Please vet your news sources, journalists, and Tweets before sharing information about the invasion. In addition to the physical fighting, there is a massive war against misinformation.
A million thank you’s to Laura for being so willing to talk about her and her family’s experiences with this conflict, and her thoughts on such an emotional issue. Follow her on Twitter for insight during wartime and laugh-out-loud moments when there’s peace. And a big thank you to Vika for her wonderful poem that made me cry on the M15 bus and for sharing her thoughts with us.
For conversations about race in Ukraine and other Eastern European nations, I recommend following Kimberly St. Julian-Varnon and Terrell Jermaine Starr. Kimberly's research and commentary are incredible and necessary, and I've been following Terrell's reporting from Ukraine where he has literally been risking his life to offer factual coverage.
We had this conversation on Friday and so much has developed in just the four days since we talked.
Update 2/28: the maslenitsa celebration Laura’s family was performing at was canceled on behalf of a member of the organizer’s family being injured in Ukraine during the conflict.
The video was previously on Terrell Jermaine Starr’s Twitter but I can no longer find it.