What Russians think about the Ukraine crisis

Moscow Valentina Ivanovna has experienced a lot: the Second World War, existing socialism, the Cold War, glasnost and perestroika, and finally the Putin era. And now, at the age of 91, she is following a new chapter in world history in her apartment in the Moscow suburb of Podolsk. The former teacher, who is now hard of hearing, sits for hours in front of her television with headphones on, watching what the Russian media is reporting on the Ukraine crisis.

She shakes her head. “I never thought adults could lie so much,” she says. She is asked who is lying during the crisis: “The USA, of course, they’re all adventurers anyway, ever since the country was founded,” she replies with determination. The fact that Russia wanted to attack someone was “nonsense”, after all “Crimea came to us voluntarily and without bloodshed”.