The Story of Ivan and Anna from Popovka

On February 23, 2023 – the eve of the first anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine – Ivan Kunitsky left his village of Popovka to stage a one-man antiwar protest in the nearby city of Omsk. That very evening, a neighbor attacked Ivan’s home, where he lived with his pregnant wife and two teenage daughters.

That evening, Kunitsky, a 42-year-old electrician, received a telephone call from a friend, who told him: “A policeman came to visit me and was asking about you. He said they were going to make your life ‘interesting.’” Later, the Kunitskys found out that police officers had visited many of their neighbors in Popovka to talk about them, but only the one friend warned him, and only because the friend’s wife asked him to. “Vanya, if they come to your place and the topic of friends comes up, you can say that you and I are no longer friends, right?” he asked at the end of the call. Ivan nodded knowingly.

THE PREVIOUS DAY, Kunitsky had seen a live broadcast of the government’s rally and concert at Luzhniki Stadium in Moscow, where children from Mariupol were paraded onstage.

“What bothered me most of all,” Kunitsky recalled, “was that they brought Ukrainian children on to the stage and talked about how happy the children were. This was a nightmare, like dancing on someone’s grave.” That very evening, Ivan made a sign saying “No to Putin’s tyranny! No more wars.” The next day, February 23, he went to the center of Omsk and held up his sign in a one-man protest. Within half an hour, two police officers, a man and a woman, approached him and asked him to follow them. They took Ivan to the police station. They left him waiting for an hour, and then the interrogation began.

“You’re doing the Cossacks’ bidding, aren’t you? They recruited you in Poland – didn’t they?”

In 2021, Ivan had traveled through Poland on his way to Germany for work.

“And what were you doing in Kazakhstan? You’re a deserter, aren’t you? Were you trying to avoid being handed an enlistment notice?” the police major continued. After the war started, Ivan had gone to Kazakhstan to get a foreign bank card. “You think you’re brave, don’t you? You ruined our holiday [the anniversary of the invasion]! You’ll defend the Motherland at the front! Is that clear?” After the interrogation, they photographed Ivan and wanted to take his fingerprints, but Kunitsky knew the laws on this and refused. He spent three hours at the police station.

When he decided to stage his protest, Ivan realized there would be consequences and was prepared to pay a fine. But when the police officers started gathering information about his family, he immediately decided he had better move out of his home for a while. His 37-year-old wife, Anna, a kindergarten teacher, was one month pregnant, and he didn’t want her to worry. He also wanted to protect their daughters – Valentina (15) and Vasilisa (13) – from unpleasant questioning.

The Kunitskys lived in a two-story house they had built themselves. In the evening, after the daughters went upstairs to sleep, the parents began to pack Ivan’s things. A little before midnight, Anna and Ivan heard a knock. They didn’t think anything of it, assuming the children were having trouble sleeping and were still up. The knock grew louder, and the Kunitskys realized that someone was at their door. It was their neighbor, Andrei Pereshivkin, and he was yelling: “Come outside, Vanka, let’s talk.” Anna could see through the window that Andrei was holding a spade. And he was drunk.

The Kunitskys weren’t friends with Andrei, but they had neighborly relations without any conflicts and exchanged the standard greetings, like “How are things? How’s life?” When Andrei was building his home, he borrowed tools from the Kunitskys.

“You had a good time standing there, didn’t you? Come out, let’s talk” continued Andrei. Ivan wanted to open the door and calm him down, but just then Anna saw through the window how Andrei dropped the spade and took out a knife.

“What are you doing?” Anna began to shout at him. “Go home!”

“Your husband will answer for everything he did!” Andrei said, raising his voice. “You stood there while our boys are dying at the front! So I guess you’re against the war, right? Well, come out now and answer for what you’ve done!”

The children came running downstairs, having seen through the window that other neighbors had already gathered outside the fence, drawn by Pereshivkin’s yelling. At that moment, Andrei dropped the knife, picked up the spade, and began pounding the door and then the windows. Anna and Ivan remained at the door: if Andrei managed to break through, he would have to be stopped. Meanwhile, the youngest daughter, in tears, called her parents’ friends and asked them to come and take them away from the house. The youngest contacted the police. “Ah! The Kunitskys! But where are your parents?” a voice at the other end of the receiver demanded. “Did they leave you at home alone?”

“They are right here! Please save us! Our home is being attacked!”

The friends arrived at the Kunitskys’ home an hour later. The neighbors were still there when they pulled up to the house. They were greeted with sneers: “You’re defending fascists!”

“We immediately became enemies and killers to them,” Anna recalled. “Although, in fact, we are against the war and against people dying.”

According to Anna, the friends really helped: they “held the fort” and kept watch so that nobody got into the house. Meanwhile, the Kunitskys were able to get their car out of the garage and load their belongings into the vehicle. After 1 a.m., the Kunitskys left the house, never to return. The family didn’t hang around for the police to show up.

“I think,” Anna reasoned, “that it must have been the police who ordered Andrei to come to our house. But maybe I’m mistaken and Andrei himself turned out to be so abnormal. But, indeed, the police didn’t arrive at our place right away. As I later discovered, they only got there around 5 a.m.”

AFTER SPENDING THE NIGHT at their friends’ place, the Kunitskys decided to go to stay with Anna’s mother in Samara. To be on the safe side, Ivan turned off his cellphone, and the family used Anna’s smartphone for navigation. Along the way, she received a notification that there had been attempts to log in to her Google account from other devices. “After our house was attacked, nothing surprised me anymore,” said Anna. “They would have no compunction about hacking my account, cooking something up, and pinning anything on us they wanted. On top of that, for several days the police have been looking at our pages and our relatives’ pages on Odnoklassniki, searching for whatever they could find.”^[1]

When she tried to log in to her Google account, Anna immediately received a call from an unknown number. She answered, and police investigator Aleksandr Klassen was on the line. Anna knew him personally and said that “they used to hang out with the same group of friends in their youth.” On February 23, Klassen had visited Anna’s and Ivan’s pages on Odnoklassniki.

“Klassen started to ask us where we were,” Anna recalled the conversation. “Of course, by then we realized that if we told them where we were going, they would come and take Ivan, so I gave them an incorrect address. I told them that we left Omsk Oblast to go to Yekaterinburg, where we also have relatives. Then he started to say that we should not have left, that we had to come and report what happened when [Andrei] Pereshivkin came to our place that night. I sent him video recordings – my daughters recorded everything on video to save as evidence of the attack.”

In Samara, the Kunitskys decided that Ivan had to leave the country for a while – “to sit it out until everything quiets down.” He flew to Armenia and planned to return in two weeks. “In any event,” Anna thought, “the country couldn’t have gone so crazy as to tear our lives apart over a protest sign.”

In the meantime, Ivan received a message from his employer: “They came to talk to me about your case at work and asked all kinds of questions. Sorry, but I’ve got enough problems.” So, Ivan lost his job.

Police officers also visited the principal of the school where Anna organized events for children. At first, they requested information only about her – about her attitude towards the war in Ukraine, whether she talked about antiwar protests in school. Then the school started receiving questions about the family. One of the teachers later told her: “Anna Pavlovna, it’s not only the police who are requesting specific information, but also child and family services agencies. It seems they want to take your children away from you.”

“I had a panic attack, and I couldn’t breathe. I was actually lying on the floor, unable to do anything, but thinking: I’m not allowed to worry, after all, I’m pregnant. But if they take my children away from me, then I won’t be able to live because the children are everything to me, this is something sacred.”

Ivan told Anna that she and the daughters should also leave Russia. “And what about an apartment? And school for the children. How will we live going forward?” Anna asked, unable to wrap her head around the idea. “We’ll sort things out about how to live going forward,” said Ivan. “But now, if they take the children away, then we won’t be able to live at all.”

“I was in a total state of shock,” Anna recalled. “It felt as if the entire world was tumbling down on you, the sky hit you in the head, and now you didn’t know how to go on living.” The next day, following her husband, Anna and the girls left Russia.

THE VILLAGE OF POPOVKA, where the Kunitskys lived, is 15 kilometers outside Omsk. Popovka appeared on the map in the late nineteenth century. It was founded by Germans who resettled there from Samara and Saratov provinces. It’s now a typical village with approximately 500 residents where everyone knows each other. Popovka has a group chat on WhatsApp called “Our Village” for quick communications and to discuss problems facing the community.

Anna had also been part of the chat, but she was removed from the community after her husband’s protest in Omsk. After they left, a friend sent her screenshots of messages from the chat where the residents were accusing the Kunitskys of being “traitors” and calling the assault on their home a “made-up” story.

“I didn’t think that these people were capable of writing such nasty things about my family,” said Anna. “After all, I taught their children: first, in preschool, and then, at school.” Anna published the video recordings that her daughters filmed during the attack on their home in WhatsApp Stories, then re-added herself to the chat and copied the video recordings there.

“Stupid woman”; “You should be swept away for good”; “And furthermore, if anyone thinks that the Kunitskys or anyone else will get away with stunts like that, they won’t. All the relevant authorities are dealing with them, and they will be subject to punishment,” some villagers wrote in reply.

“People were no longer ready to listen to us; they just started to write that the whole thing was staged. But, in the video, you can clearly hear how our windows are being hit, how Andrei was shouting at us, and how the children were crying hysterically,” Anna recalled. When she reread the messages in the “Our Village” chat, she began to shake.

Talk about the Kunitskys wasn’t limited to WhatsApp. Several weeks later, an acquaintance wrote to Anna: “Today, my daughter came home and asked me, ‘Mama, is it true that our Anna Pavlovna is a criminal?’” Apparently, Andrei Pereshivkin’s mother-in-law teaches second and fourth grades, and she had been telling the children during class time that the Kunitskys are bad people and criminals because they are speaking out against Putin.

“When I found out about this, I wrote to the principal and asked her to put a stop to it,” recalled Anna. “The children should be left out of this. Why would you allow a teacher to say all sorts of vile things and brainwash the children during the teaching process? The children have to live their own lives. Apparently, after my complaint, the teacher stopped brainwashing the children.”

THE KUNITSKYS NOW live in the United States. Recently, their son Leo (Leonard) was born. Their eldest daughter, Valentina, fit in quickly at her new school – she already has friends and even went to her classmates’ birthday parties a couple times. Their middle child, Vasilisa, is finding it more difficult to get used to things and is asking to be home schooled.

Ivan was issued a fine of R30,000 for “discreditation of the army.” The money for the fine was automatically debited from his Russian bank card. In October, Ivan found out that a credit card had been opened in his name and 300 rubles was charged on it. He recently received a notification from the bank that his funds were blocked in accordance with a decision of the state authorities.

Ivan has found a job in his profession, as an electrician, and Anna is taking care of the home and looking after baby Leo. The Kunitskys are trying to start a new life, but their former neighbors refuse to be forgotten. After the Kunitskys left for the United States, the villagers created yet another chat – this one devoted to Ivan and Anna. This chat spun a fantastical theory: that Anna works as a surrogate mother, and it was specifically money earned by selling children that enabled the Kunitskys to afford a house and a car and then move to the United States.

Through this, the villagers are not only putting pressure on Anna and Ivan, but also on their relatives back in Russia. Anna’s mother, Nadezhda, who was born in Popovka, has lost almost all her friends. Before the incident, women from Popovka would visit her in Samara. Now they don’t even write to her.

On the other hand, an acquaintance with whom Nadezhda communicated much less often supported her at the height of the harassment, telling her, “Nadezhda, we know you; we know your children! You keep your chin up!” Nadezhda’s acquaintances in Samara don’t know about what happened, but now she is afraid to associate with them, worrying that she might let slip that her children had left for America, causing people to start treating her differently. Some relatives call her once in a while and say: “You did such a bad job of bringing up your children! They became traitors and ditched you.”

The Kunitskys’ daughters noticed that, immediately after they arrived in the United States, friends began to unsubscribe from their social media pages. A boy who had been friends with the younger daughter wrote to her one day: “You went away to your damned America. You are a traitor, but I loved you so much!”

“Mom, it’s okay,” Vasilisa responded.

“I remember that boy,” Anna sighed. “He was the sweetest child in kindergarten; he was so good. I realize these are not his thoughts; these are the thoughts of his parents that he must have overheard. Children are so very susceptible to their parents’ influence.”

Anna’s brother remains in Popovka. His children, Anna’s nieces and nephews, are sometimes greeted in the school corridors with phrases such as “Oh! Here come the relatives of traitors!” Anna laughs fondly when she recalls her brother, saying that he loved Russia so much that he makes a point of buying everything made in Russia – furniture, electronics, etc. But he didn’t turn his back on the Kunitskys when the harassment began. When Ivan staged his demonstration, he simply asked: “What did he do that for? Was he drinking?” Anna explained patiently: “No, he wasn’t drinking. We’re simply against this idiocy that is taking place.” It was only later, when the Kunitskys were leaving Russia, that he told his sister: “You know, I never thought that it could be like this, that everyone would gang up on him because of some sign...”