Family matters

But just a few months later, Kristina’s mum reached out to apologise to her daughter. “I’m ashamed of myself,” she admitted. “You tried to tell me the truth so many times, and I refused to listen.”

While many Russians have been unable to rebuild relationships with their loved ones that broke down due to political disagreements only growing since the war began, others found that the full-scale invasion of Ukraine and its consequences acted as a catalyst for finally changing their relatives’ minds.

Breaking the spell

“I remember, on the day of the invasion in 2022, I had overslept. I didn’t look at my phone straight away — when I saw the news, I phoned my relatives in Kyiv first, since I’ve always been close with them.”

Until 2014, Kristina and her parents regularly travelled to Ukraine to visit family. Her parents didn’t watch state television, and always seemed to think critically about the government. But by 2022, Kristina’s relationship with both of them was under pressure: her mother and father, now divorced, supported an invasion of Ukraine.

“When I finally called my mum that morning, I realised she was buying the government line.”

The narrative of “de-Nazification” of the Ukrainian state, promoted heavily by Russian media, was particularly convincing for Kristina’s mother.

“Mum was hugely influenced by her upbringing with her grandma — my great-grandmother — who had lived through World War II. When the war broke out with Germany she was only 14 years old, and was drafted to work 12-hour shifts in a weaving mill on the ‘home front’. My mum heard a lot of stories from that time when she was a girl.”

“And so, when [the media] told her that Russia was fighting against ‘fascists’ in Ukraine, of course Mum decided that was perfectly right.” From then on, every conversation Kristina had with her mother about the war ended in an argument.

“I tried to convince her that none of this was right, and that they were lying to us on TV. But nothing seemed to work. Even her colleagues, whose sons were being sent to the front, were telling her the same thing: they’re lying to us on TV. I suppose she was hearing all of that and taking it in, but she wasn’t fully processing what it meant.”

For Kristina, the situation was a traumatic experience. “I was in shock: it was as if they’d put my mum in a trace. I didn’t know how to get through to her.”

Over time, Kristina found she was able to break the trance her mother was in. She started sending her a few Youtube videos made by opposition politicians and suggesting interviews by dissenting journalists for her to watch.

In September 2022, the Russian government announced the first wave of mandatory mobilisation to the front. Kristina’s husband had previously completed his military service, and the couple were afraid that he might be called up again. His employer refused to grant him a deferment, so they decided they needed to leave Russia.

It was only after they left that her mother began to properly change her attitude toward what was happening, Kristina says.

“When we left, Mum started actively looking for information online, and reading the things I was sending her. And then, when we were in Kazakhstan, she called me to apologise. She told me she realised how difficult it had been for me and my husband, and that she felt guilty for leaving us without support. She was shaken by how well they’d managed to deceive her.”

After that, Kristina steadily rebuilt her relationship with her mother. When Alexey Navalny was murdered by the Russian government in 2024, they both sat in the kitchen and drank in silence.

Today Kristina’s mother has a different opinion entirely. She has taught herself to evade the government’s internet controls, watches independent Youtube channels, reads the news and regularly discusses current events with Kristina.

“Last New Year’s we celebrated together,” Kristina recalls. “It wasn’t a very cheerful holiday — we were constantly calling people in Kyiv to ask how they were, and hearing how they were sat there with no heating, no water, no power. I want to cry again now, just thinking about how they’re struggling.”

However, it’s not an entirely happy story — Kristina still hasn’t managed to “break the trance” her father appears to be in, and they are not on speaking terms.

More unites than divides us

As soon as the full-scale invasion of Ukraine began, 35-year-old Sergey phoned his father, a veteran of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan to lament what he called a sad example of history repeating itself: “Fascists are attacking Kyiv once again”.

Within a year, however, Sergey’s father had changed his opinion on the war dramatically, something that Sergey attributes to the effectiveness of the propaganda broadcast by Russian state media, which is targeted specifically at the older generation. The strongest influences on his father, Sergey believes, were the narratives about NATO and the West “seizing control” of Russia and imposing so-called “foreign values”.

When Putin announced partial mobilisation in September 2022, Sergey left Russia for good, and communication with his father became ever more difficult: their views were now poles apart, and the physical distance between them only made it harder for them to reconcile.

“I wasn’t in a great state of mind at the time,” Sergey says. “I was regularly arguing with friends and relatives, who had just accepted the war as something normal. But it seemed awful to argue, or just cut contact, with my father… I didn’t know what to do.”

Sergey began looking for advice on how to maintain relationships with loved ones in these kinds of situations. Plenty of people appeared to be in the same boat: there were materials online, seminars to attend and videos put out by Russians in exile on the subject.

“But because I got so upset when conversations [about the war] started, I just couldn’t pull off what those videos and posts told me to do,” Sergey says. “I wasn’t any good at talking to people who had a different perspective to me. I could barely even accept they were human beings, since they had so little humanity.”

Sergey began working with a therapist, and learned to handle his emotional reactions better. He suggested to his father that they should carry on talking, but stop discussing the war altogether, at least for a while.

“My basic idea was, why should we argue when we’ve got plenty of other things to talk about? We have far more in common than what keeps us apart.”

For a while Sergey and his father would only ever talk about everyday life. Then, Sergey began cautiously sending his dad news from independent Russian media — at first only snippets about the worsening economic situation.

“I started discussing some news that was fairly neutral, but which was nevertheless a consequence of the war. I asked him questions. Sometimes I went as far as to mention Russia’s lack of success on the front.”

“I realised that my father had his own skin in the game, just as any average Russian does. As long as our conversations were based on his reality, he was willing to listen: he was always particularly interested in how everything was getting more expensive.”

Beside rising prices, Sergey’s father also cared about losing access to social media and messaging apps. Although he didn’t use them very often, he was irritated that the government was making it harder for him to talk to his son.

The journey from full support to scepticism of the war took him approximately two years. Sergey thinks his brother-in-law also played a part in changing his dad’s mind: he was mobilised to fight for the Russian army in Ukraine, but periodically came home to visit and told stories from the front.

Today, Sergey takes it upon himself to talk to people who have radically different points of view.

“I’ve reached some level of Zen by now,” he jokes. “I can chat calmly with people who have bizarre opinions. It’s safe enough for me, and there’s value in doing it — after all, more and more of these people are starting to have severe doubts.”

No exit

Kirill first tried discussing politics with his mother in 2012, when he was 25 and she was almost 60. Though he wasn’t particularly political — he’d never been to any protests — he was critical of the regime and had always hated Putin.

“Mum thought of herself as a wise grown-up,” Kirill remembers. “She always told me that I shouldn’t get involved, that there wasn’t any point thinking about politics — I should just go to work and keep my head down.”

In 2014, after the Russian annexation of Crimea, Kirill tried again, telling his mother about the Malaysia Airlines plane downed by Russian separatists in Donbas. Again, he was met with disapproval.

“When the war started, I honestly thought she would come around quickly,” Kirill admits. “But no. She watched all the nonsense they were putting out on television, and decided that Putin was doing everything right.”

On the contrary, Kirill was shocked by how quickly his mother changed her mind in the opposite direction. When he was a teenager playing post-apocalyptic video games, he remembers her shaming him for his interest in nuclear weapons — until Russian propaganda started advocating for nuclear war.

“It was as if she’d totally forgotten what she used to think. All of a sudden nuclear weapons were a good thing, and Russia ought to use them. We Russians were doing everything right.”

She refused to believe that any of the atrocities in Ukraine, in Bucha or Mariupol, had even happened. When Kirill tried to argue the case, she called it “bullshit”. And beyond simple disbelief, Kirill says he had to endure personal attacks from her for expressing his opinions.

“My mum is a very vocal person. She’s always expressed her views emotively. I’ve been called a traitor, a misfit; I’ve been accused of betraying the Motherland and giving up my roots.”

Asked how he could carry on having those sorts of unpleasant conversations, Kirill replies that “there was no other option.”

“There’s a war on, that’s a fact. To stop talking to her entirely would be impossible.”

In the end, Kirill found that the only way to convince his mum was to show her how the facts presented in state media were inconsistent, or contradicted each other.

“Mum still wants to consider them an authority, she wants to believe that everything they say is the truth, and everyone else is lying. But she has started doubting that it is so black-and-white.”

“For one thing, every time I tell her something will happen that doesn’t line up with the narrative on TV, it turns out that I’m right. Even she’s now realised that the war isn’t going as planned.”

Kirill’s mother was most affected by his departure from Russia to work as a doctor in Germany. State media had told her it was impossible for Russians to get visas to live in Europe, but Kirill managed to secure a job anyway. Now he regularly tells her about his life in Europe — particularly the lack of hostility from the “Russophobes” that state media would have her believe are ubiquitous in the West.

“All this has shaken her beliefs somewhat,” Kirill imagines. “It’s hard to say what her true position is now. But certainly the tirades about taking Kyiv in three days, or the ‘fascists’ in the Ukrainian government, are over.”

“At the very least, she’s more inclined to think that getting involved was a mistake.”