Fun fact, Sergey: quite a few of those Ukrainian refugees (who are native Russian speakers, as you pointed out) still feel triggered and uncomfortable when they hear Russian-speaking strangers abroad — especially if those strangers have “Russian Russian” accents. And a huge

number of those same Ukrainian refugees happen to have been brought up as Russian speakers are now switching to Ukrainian. Not because anyone’s “shunning” them, but because they feel disgusted whenever they use Russian. My close friend, who has always been Russian-speaking and

has Russian-speaking parents and a Russian-speaking husband, called me up the day after the atrocities in Bucha had been uncovered, and told me she’d be trying to speak exclusively in Ukrainian from then on. Since then, she’s never used Russian when talking to me. Her husband

still prefers to use Russian, and their household is now very bilingual. Nobody shuns anyone, she just feels more comfortable using Ukrainian, while he’s fine using Russian. And yet, both of them regularly say that they flat-out can’t imagine how stressful travelling after the

war is going to be, because they’ll inadvertently run into Russian tourists and have to somehow deal with all of the anger and sadness and hurt they’ll obviously feel.