“I can’t speak with her,” says the 34-year-old Russian who moved to Ukraine 10 years ago. “She doesn’t understand me. She says it’s just Nazis killing each other, and that we are responsible for all this.”

“She just doesn’t believe me,” he adds. “We used to speak with each other a lot, but now there’s just no point.”

It’s the same for Natasha Henova. She has already fled her home near Kharkiv with her young sons and husband, as the bombs crept ever closer to their village. When she called a cousin who lives near Moscow to update her, however, the conversation was almost as upsetting as the war itself.

“She is sympathetic but says that we are being lied to,” says Henova, a 35-year-old English language tutor. “She says it’s all America’s doing. I say OK, but why are Russians hitting us if it’s all about America? She says Ukrainians have been so cruel to people in the Donbas.