Russian fears for relatives in Kyiv and Mariupol: "War can never be a solution"

Created: 04/13/2022Updated: 04/13/2022 10:51 PM

By: Catherine Brumbauer

Feels caught between two chairs: Physiotherapist Jelena Strein, who has family in Russia but also in Ukraine.

"I can't separate it," she says.

© Thomas Very

Physiotherapist Jelena Strein was born in Russia.

But her mother was born near Donetsk in the Ukraine.

She has relatives on both sides of the front line.

Garmisch-Partenkirchen – Jelena Strein painted a poster a few weeks ago.

"Putin is not Russia," she wrote on it.

With this banner in hand, the Garmisch-Partenkirchner, who works as a physiotherapist in the children's rheumatism clinic, stood at a vigil for peace on Richard-Strauss-Platz.

"It's the first time in my life that I've done something like this," says the 52-year-old, who comes from Perm in the Russian Urals.

Russian woman from Garmisch-Partenkirchen stands up for her people and against Putin

Strein felt the need to emphasize that her homeland is not generally responsible for this war of aggression against Ukraine: "I blame Putin.

Just saying his name is torture for me.” She knows the suffering caused by the Kremlin despot's invasion of Ukraine.

"War can never be a solution." She fears for friends and relatives in the port city of Mariupol.

So far, Strein's memories of Mariupol have always been shaped by summer vacations that she spent there as a child.

There, where her mother, born in Donetsk in 1934, was taken in by her aunt at the age of six as an orphan.

Now the physiotherapist sees that all that's left of the city is ruins.

Ukraine war: cousin fled Donetsk to Kyiv in 2014 – now he has to seek protection again

A cousin Streins is on the run for the second time in his life.

In 2014, as fighting in the pro-Russian separatist areas of eastern Ukraine, Donbass, escalated, Vladimir lost his home in Donetsk to the bombs and built something new for himself in Kyiv.

Now he has made his way west from the capital.

At first he found protection in the apartment of friends in Lviv (formerly Lemberg).

Also present: his son, his son-in-law and his daughter, who gave birth to a child on February 26 in Kyiv.

The 53-year-old cannot leave the country.

All men younger than 60 are prohibited from doing so.

In the meantime, Strein has heard from her cousin that he has returned to Kyiv.

His house is probably not too destroyed.

The family remains afraid.

I get so many perspectives.

Some say this, others that. Sometimes I don't know what to believe anymore.

Jelena Strein

On the other hand, Strein hears the narrative of Putin's propaganda from former fellow students with whom she studied business administration in St. Petersburg.

The West is the aggressor, NATO has planned a military strike on Russia that has been anticipated.

A nationalist Ukrainian government is threatening the pro-Russian population in Donbass - and Putin's army is only there for defence.

War in Ukraine: Strein was shocked when she heard about the Russian propaganda

"It was a shock to me to hear that." Her brother, who lives near Moscow and served in the Soviet army as a young man, also says Russian forces liberated Ukraine from Nazis.

On the phone he told her: "Gorbachev sold Russia to America, Yeltsin got Russia drunk and under Putin we finally started to live." Strein himself couldn't understand that at all, say his brother and fellow students.

You've lived in the West for so long.

These statements leave the physiotherapist just as speechless as the news from a pro-Russian cousin from Luhansk who was looking for her sister and mother in the devastated Mariupol.

"I get so many perspectives.

Some say this, others that, sometimes I don't know what to believe anymore."

By the way: everything from the region is also available in our regular GAP newsletter.

Even when the mother of a former patient tells the physiotherapist that her husband brought the family from Zaporizhia to safety and went back home to defend the city against the "enemy", Strein winces.

Because: "By enemy she means the Russian army, but they are also the sons of my former classmates."

Appeal: Russians are also suffering from Putin's war of aggression

Strein lived in Russia until 1993.

She grew up in the Soviet Union, which collapsed two years earlier.

"Russia, Ukraine - I can't separate them, we all had the same passport," she emphasizes.

She doesn't want to miss her youth in the Soviet Union.

"It wasn't all bad," she says.

But when she met her first husband, a German who worked at a Russian Siemens plant, "of course it was a window to Europe for me."

So the business administration graduate moved from St. Petersburg to a tranquil village in Saxony-Anhalt - at first with "rose-red glasses".

Her diploma was of little value in Germany, however, and Strein had to reorient herself professionally.

The offer from the employment agency was: training as a physiotherapist.

Strein agreed.

She came to the county in 2000.

Two perspectives on the Ukraine war: Strein finds it difficult to combine the two

Strein wants to raise awareness that there are not only Ukrainian refugees who need help in this country, but also people from Russia who are affected by the whole situation.

Seeing your home country as an aggressor in a war "hurts." The different views that emerge in conversations with your brother and former classmates are additional ballast for your psyche.

In addition, the completely contrary statements of her cousin and her acquaintances from Mariupol.

"I have the feeling that these two chairs I'm sitting between are getting further and further apart." But Strein wants to remain brave, not let the horror news keep raining down on him, and put his cell phone away from time to time.

"I want to stay strong, because nobody needs weak people at the moment."