The War in Ukraine Is Dividing Lifelong Friends

Friends whom my parents haven’t seen in decades call every year for my birthday. Some have never met me. I was 2 when my family immigrated to Los Angeles from Chișinău, Moldova, in 1993. My whole life, I’ve watched my parents keep in close touch with friends who continued to live in former Soviet republics. First, they made phone calls, and more recently, they expanded to Odnoklassniki (a social network popular with friends and classmates from the former Soviet Union), and then Instagram, and WhatsApp. They regularly swap family photos and memes, life updates and transcontinental gossip. When I visited Russia for the first time in 2019, one of my mother’s childhood friends—whom I hadn’t seen since infancy—tearfully told me how much she adored me and held hands with either me or my mother everywhere we went. Nearly every diasporic person I know who grew up in the former Soviet Union has thriving long-distance friendships like this. The unwavering bonds among nashi lyudi—the Russian term for “our people”—across distance and time has always felt miraculous to me.

Yet, distance and time seem like quaint