This is Tanya's story, but her experience is not exceptional.
Farah Stockman met Tanya, a Ukrainian who moved to the United States in 2020, in Warsaw shortly after Russian forces invaded her former home. "I saw her Ukrainian passport and her eyes, puffy from crying, and asked her to tell me her story," Farah said. |
The two have since traveled to the Ukrainian border together. Tanya had been desperately searching for her sister who lived with her family in the center of Mariupol, a city that is now besieged by Vladimir Putin's forces. |
Yet Tanya's parents, who live in Donetsk, continue to cling to Russian propaganda about the war. (Tanya is a nickname. She didn't want to use her real name in an effort to protect her parents from possible retaliation.) |
That one family could offer two seemingly incompatible experiences of the war may come as a surprise. But Farah learned that Tanya's story is a familiar one: "The war in Ukraine is often portrayed as a battle between autocracy and democracy; the East against the West. Tanya's story reveals that, for many families, it can also feel like a civil war, pitting the old against the young." |
As this grim war enters its second month, it's worth considering how it has divided families, not just nations, and the ramifications of that in the years to come. |
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