It is a deep, seething bitterness for President Vladimir V. Putin, [and] ordinary Russians, either, calling them complicit through years of political passivity. The hatred is vented by mothers in bomb shelters, by volunteers preparing to fight on the front lines, by intellectuals and by artists.
The emotion is so powerful it could not be assuaged even by an Orthodox religious holiday on Sunday intended to foster forgiveness before Lent.
And this hatred has overwhelmed the close personal ties between two Slavic nations, where many people have family living in both countries.
Billboards have gone up along roadsides in gigantic block letters, telling Russians in profanity-laced language to get out.
And they have been mocking Russians in scathing terms for complaining about hardships with banking transactions or the collapsing ruble currency because of international sanctions.
“Damn, what’s wrong with Apple Pay?”
“Are your iPhones all right?” another Ukrainian writer, Andriy Bondar, asked Russians on his Facebook page, after a thinly attended antiwar rally in Moscow that was broken up by the riot police. “We are very worried about you. It’s so cruel they use rubber sticks, those terrible riot police.”
The authoritarian leader is to blame, almost all Ukrainians agree. But the frustration is also directed more broadly at Russian society.
Many Ukrainians chastise Russians for increasingly accepting middle-class comforts afforded by the country’s oil wealth in exchange for declining to resist limits on their freedoms. They blame millions of Russians, who Ukrainians say gave up on the post-Soviet dreams of freedom and openness to the West, for enabling the war.
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Zelensky did not hold back on how he felt about the Russian military.
“We will not forgive the shooting of unarmed people,” he said.
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…the war had driven a deep wedge between the Ukrainian and Russian societies that will be hard to heal. Russians…have become Ukrainians’ “collective enemies.”
“As for the Russians, I am not interested in their motivation now. They, with the exception of a few, were quite comfortable being in a full dictatorship.”
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Olha Koba, a psychologist in Kyiv, said that “anger and hate in this situation is a normal reaction and important to validate.” But it is important to channel it into something useful, she said, such as making incendiary bombs out of empty bottles.😂👏🏻
“When people are happy about the death of Russian soldiers, it is explicable,” she said. “There is a subconscious understanding that this soldier will no longer be able to kill their loved ones.”
“I will never forgive Russia,” the poet wrote.