The story of a sad reality, told primarily through the voices of Russian and Ukrainian USF students, who all long for peace. From left to right: Nadia Korostyleva, Grygoriy Voloshyn and Rauf Verdiev.
Courtesy of Nadia Korostyleva, Grygoriy Voloshyn and Rauf Verdiev
By Elizaveta Clark
For Grygoriy Voloshyn, a Ukrainian-American student at the University of South Florida, the night of Feb. 23, 2022, was the second time he had ever seen his dad cry. That was the night the news of a “special military operation” in Ukraine by Russian forces reached those in the United States.
“My dad was flying back to Tampa from Washington D.C. … with another Ukrainian family friend,” Voloshyn said. “I called my mom into the room and showed her what was happening, and we just stood there for a little bit, trying to soak it all in.”
When Volyshyn picked up his dad from the airport, he asked if he had heard the news yet. He was confused and didn’t hear anything due to being on the plane for the last couple of hours. His son told him, “It started.”
“And as soon as we pulled out of the garage, he took out his phone, looked it up, and that was the second time I’d ever seen my dad cry. That was really tough for me,” Voloshyn said.
In the early morning of February 24, 2022, the President of Russia, Vladimir Putin, announced what he called a “special military operation” to “demilitarize” and “denazify” Ukraine. By that point, Russian troops had already crossed the border of Ukraine, and the first explosions began the war. This development came as a shock to most of the world, including the Russian people.
“I actually want Ukraine to win this war,” said Nadia Korostyleva, who studies biomedical engineering at USF, “but I don’t want my parents and my friends back home to suffer because I don’t think they’re responsible –– or, probably half responsible –– but they’re definitely not guilty of what’s going on.”
Korostyleva grew up in Moscow and that is where the rest of her family resides. She started her journey at USF in August 2021, and since then, she went back home twice –– once for the winter holidays, just mere months before the war started, and the second time in the summer of 2022, when the war was already in progress. This is how she describes the difference between her two visits to Moscow:
“It was like those ‘before and after’ pictures they use in ads but reversed. Everything changed. People became more depressed, generally confused, and, I don’t know, lost probably. Much more drunk people there. Billboards everywhere saying like, ‘I’m at war; you should be too!’ You pass those billboards, and you’re just so angry and sad, and … you want to really just go and break it, take this out, and burn it. But then you’re thinking, ‘I can’t … probably something will happen to me if I do this,’” Korostyleva said.
This war has undoubtedly “tanked” the reputation of Russia and the Russian people in general in the eyes of the world.
“Russkiy Mir [Russian World/Order] is a cancer which is consuming not only the majority of Russian society but also poses a deadly threat to the whole of Europe,” said Mateusz Morawiecki, the Polish prime minister, in a statement to the participants of the conference held in the Czech capital of Prague in November 2022.
This understandably raises a question of how Russian students and other types of Visa and Green Card holders are being treated abroad.
“Here, very surprisingly, people are understanding; they know,and I’m open about it, that I grew up in Russia… I have never had any trouble with this, and I haven’t heard of anybody else on campus getting into trouble just because they’re Russian, although I expected the opposite, so I’m really happy about that,” said Rauf Verdiev, a junior at USF majoring in cell and molecular biology.
Even before the war, Russia had a permanent spotlight in the world’s arena. However, it is this devastating conflict that put a spotlight on Ukraine, its culture and its people. Now everywhere in the world, people can point to Ukraine on the map and want to hear how the country is fending for itself. Many Ukrainians say the world’s recognition due to undoubtable respect for Ukraine’s bravery ignited more patriotism in Ukrainians all over the world.
“Before Ukraine started being in the news, I’d say, ‘I’m Ukrainian,’ and people wouldn’t bat an eye. Now their jaws drop, and they start asking whether I have family over there. I gained a new identity as a Ukrainian in the states overnight, you know,” Voloshyn said.
Voloshyn’s family moved to America from West Ukraine three months before he was born. He visited his other family members in Ukraine and lived there for two or three years until preschool. He said he “speaks, reads, writes in the language and eats Ukrainian food” every day.
Voloshyn talked about the growth of patriotism and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky over the last year. Many people in Ukraine were either skeptical of Zelensky’s appointment at first or felt neutral about him. However, his famous response to the proposal of evacuating him from Kyiv at the beginning of the war –– “I don’t need an airlift; I need guns!” –– earned him the respect of his countryman and, perhaps, of the whole world.
“I feel like that kind of step forward, that kind of momentum people needed in the entire country, and everybody in the world needed to hear that. You know, we weren’t just going to stand by and let this happen. [It was] exactly what anybody would ask for a great leader to do,” Voloshyn said.
The questions of guilt and responsibility are on the minds of all Russian people who are against the war in Ukraine. Some people feel shame, and some are mad at how powerless their voices are. Many Russians apologetically look to the rest of the world with a feeble hope for the separation of terms Russia and Putin. What Putin wants is different from what all of Russia wants.
“It’s definitely Putin who attacked,” Voloshyn said. “I know that it wasn’t like a national vote ‘do we attack Ukraine, or do we not,’ a lot of the orders were given by the higher-ups in the Kremlin, so I know that a lot of people don’t even have a voice against what’s going on. But I have seen a lot of Russians support the war as well.”
This split – for and against the war – is dividing Russia, breaking families, and ruining life-long friendships. News reports are a mixture of devastating facts and wild propaganda. The older population who trusts Russian government TV channels often fall prey to the latter.
“I have friends at home who are conflicting with their parents because of this. That’s actually a pretty sad thing, and that’s pretty depressing to see. I know many of my friends started to get overall mental instabilities because of this,” Korostyleva said.
She said that “people who should be on one side with you and be supportive turn on you. It’s a very heated topic, and it’s definitely a topic that decides whether this person is someone you can actually trust. It’s a hard-yes or a hard-no position. When your parents turn out to be on the other side, you don’t know what to do.”
“I’ve broken many connections back in Russia,” Verdiev said. “When I hear them supporting the war, after I’ve given arguments against it and them not being able to hear me or to check out the information, I just figured that I cannot be in any relationship with these kinds of people. I think it’s mostly a positive effect of filtering out people. At least now I have people I can trust and who can’t accept what’s happening to their neighbors and brothers.”
Although Russia and Ukraine today are two independent countries with different languages and traditions, they have a lot of joint history and culture. Generations of kids were brought up on the same literature and had the same heroes. Streets in both countries were named after famous historical figures from both Imperial Russia and USSR territories and statues of famous poets marked park squares.
Due to Russian aggression, there is a significant rejection of that collective history and heritage in Ukraine. Streets are being renamed, and statues are being demolished. A lot of older-generation Russians are finding this heartbreaking.
“I believe there are people dying there right now, and they’re suffering, and they can’t live peacefully in their own homes. So, I believe they can do anything they feel like doing at the present moment, even eliminating everything that has something to do with Russia,” Korostyleva said.
Korostyleva is fond of her culture, history and Russian traditions. She hopes that long after the war ends, the two countries can reconcile and bring back some of the history. But, as sad as it is, Ukrainians have all the right to take away anything associated with Russia and, therefore, with pain.
Victor Peppard is a professor of Russian culture and literature at USF, teaching at the university since 1975. He speaks fluent Russian with a barely noticeable accent and enjoys classic Russian literature in its original language. Peppard’s wife has a cousin in Russia, whom they visited before. He also has colleagues there. With years of international travel issues because of the pandemic and now with the war, Peppard isn’t sure when he can get back to Russia to visit friends.
Peppard also shared his opinion about Russian culture –– a culture he wasn’t born into, but rather one he chose for himself. He said that the real tragedy is, of course, the war that should never have happened. But the rejection of Russian culture –– in Ukraine and everywhere else in the world right now –– is a tragedy in itself as well.
“It’s been pressing in a sense, not just that Russian culture is being brushed aside as it is being denigrated, if you want to use that word. Imagine a U.S. reading club enjoying Dostoevsky; well, now they stopped reading him. Dostoevsky had nothing to do with war. But he was Russian; there’s no question. He is Russian, and everything Russian is bad now,” Peppard said.
With the war going on for over a year now, Ukraine is holding strong. Nobody knows when the bombs and the deaths will stop. But as long as Ukrainians are standing proud and strong and there are some Russians who bear the responsibility and try to speak up against the war, there still might be some hope for humanity to one day get out of the hatred. Слава Україні!
