‘I want to hug an actual, living person’: How Meduza’s Russian readers are coping with wartime loneliness

In August, Meduza published a piece on how the war in Ukraine has caused an epidemic of loneliness in Russia. The people we spoke to described how the invasion destroyed their ties with relatives and friends and how everyday contact with the people around them disappeared from their lives. In that article, we asked Meduza’s Russian readers to share their own stories of loneliness and isolation, as well as how they cope with it. We are publishing some of the responses.

Caution: this text contains profanity. If that isn’t something you want to read, please skip it.

Alexander

Miass, Chelyabinsk region

My circle of friends is unrecognizable now, mostly because before 2022 I didn’t really have opinions about what was happening. When the [full-scale] war started, many of the people I talked to supported it, saying that was exactly what needed to happen — kill, bomb, whatever it took. Running into those same people now, in 2026, I see exhaustion in their eyes. They clearly want to get it off their chest. They want it to stop.

The only people I discuss the war and the whole fucking mess in this country with are my sister and her husband. We see things the same way. We don’t talk about how bad things are for Ukrainians — you can’t feel sorry for everyone, you can’t sympathize with everyone, there isn’t enough strength for that. Instead we’re trying to figure out how to keep living: what to do, how to accept the rules of the game and start playing by them even when they don’t suit you, how to adapt, where to cut corners.

I feel terrible, but life has to go on. I still have goals — a wedding, a child — but they keep getting pushed back because the politics and the economics make it hard. It needs to happen anyway, because I want it so much. So I try to “hit the right notes” [adapt to what’s going on].

Young people and older ones alike — anyone who just wants to live in peace, build up the country, and not fight with anyone — have had it drilled into us that holding different views costs you your freedom. I’ve already lost my moral freedom.

Igor

Volga region

It was clear right away, in February 2022, that reality had shifted — what had been allowed no longer was.

Conversations with people often ended relationships. I stopped talking to everyone from the older generation. It was like a crack splitting a rock.

Psychology has a concept called separation from one’s parents. Mine happened on an accelerated timeline — separation from my actual parents, and from the idea, hammered into us since childhood, that “society and the state are your parents.” I realized I’d stopped counting on outside help. If I got into an accident, for instance, I no longer expected anyone to come save me. That pushed me toward defensive life planning — risk management. You start leaving the house the way a peasant heads into the forest: a hostile, dangerous place where the best strategy is to grab what you need and get back out, if you want to keep living.

Then I realized that if I kept feeling responsible for everything, playing the good Samaritan the way I used to, I’d burn out and stop functioning — there’s simply too much evil around. So I gradually grew callous. My zone of responsibility shrank to 100 square meters (1,076 square feet) and three living creatures.

News that someone died somewhere no longer gets a reaction out of me. They died. We haven’t, not yet. If I die, everyone else will be just as indifferent, and that’s fine.

I had to stop communicating in Russian online. At some point it hit me that the man at the top had privatized the language. It’s his now, not mine — he decides what can and can’t be said in it. So screw him, I thought, let him choke on it. I’ve stopped consuming almost all Russian-language content, because nothing honest can come out of a privatized language, and I’m not even going to look for it. The one exception is a short list of outlets, including Meduza, which I keep around for warnings about imminent dangers.

In the end I started talking exclusively to foreigners, on foreign platforms, in English. There you barely have to censor yourself, though you do have to stay mindful of their own sensitive topics. That’s hard. But in some ways it’s easier — compared to the police, being cancelled is nothing, and the cost of a mistake is lower.

When ChatGPT entered my life in 2025, I felt enormous relief. Finally there was something that could sustain a discussion — probably better than anyone I know — without taking offense, while helping me refine and clarify my model of the world through dialogue. Now I can do that without other people, and without risking that someone will inform on me.

I’m essentially waiting for a technological revolution that will render today’s problems irrelevant, make countries and states redundant, and genuinely expand every individual’s capabilities. I’m waiting for the day the need to communicate directly with other people disappears entirely, because we don’t know how anymore and don’t want to learn.

I, for one, definitely don’t want to anymore. I’d rather hand my thoughts to an AI agent and let it discuss everything with the equivalent agent belonging to another person or organization. Let there be a layer like that, one capable of smoothing over the rough edges. Communication should be handled by an entity without a limbic system.

A decade or two from now, we’ll all be embarrassed to remember that we were even capable of waging war and squeezing each other economically over borders and flags nobody cares about — the way we now look back on the Crusades. But knowing a little more about humanity by then, we won’t talk about it. We’ll just pretend the 2020s never happened.

I no longer accept the concept of the nation-state at all. We don’t live on Earth, or in Europe or Asia, or in some particular nation-state — we live in a city or a village. Some people never venture beyond a few courtyards their whole lives.

I don’t want to fix a broken state. We’ve already spent decades trying and haven’t succeeded. It’s like an old car — at some point it’s simpler to send it to the junkyard and replace it with something conceptually new.

Andrey

Moscow

Before the [full-scale] war I had a large circle of friends and socialized constantly. Most of my closest friends scattered to different countries once the war and the mobilization began.

I didn’t leave — I have an elderly mother, and she has no one but me. Besides, I don’t speak any foreign languages and have no idea what I’d even do abroad.

I’ve always been interested in politics and tried to stay involved for as long as it was possible. Even if I could move to another country, I’d have no way to take part in political life there, and that doesn’t exactly make me want to leave.

To keep from losing my mind, I spent a couple of years on antidepressants after the war started, and thanks to them I quit drinking entirely. I decided that if I didn’t quit, I’d drink myself to death. Not long after February 24, the war had already claimed a friend of mine who couldn’t cope psychologically, started drinking, and, because of the alcohol, failed to give himself his insulin shot in time. He died.

Now I have to economize on antidepressants. I’m a freelancer in video production, and there’s less and less work, so I can’t afford a good therapist anymore. Going to the psychiatric clinic is terrifying.

I’ve had to cut ties with a bunch of people over their views since the war started. With some relatives and colleagues I now keep contact to a minimum. Only a handful of people are left with whom I can freely discuss what’s happening in the country.

The gist of it: I’ve retreated into internal emigration, just like Brodsky. I rarely leave the house except for work meetings with clients. You walk out of your building, see a poster for United Russia, tear it down — and a week later it’s back up again.

Spending so much time alone at home, I’ve gone back to playing video games the way I did as a teenager. Neural networks help keep me from losing my mind — I use them to dig into topics like the biography of Valentin Sokolov. It’s sad that I couldn’t find a single documentary about him, and I hope to make one myself someday. I also sometimes ask AI to talk with me as if it were a psychologist. And AI sex chats fill the loneliness that comes with not having relationships with women.

Anonymous reader

Moscow

I’m generally a solitary person, but once the [full-scale] war started I felt a much sharper need to find people like myself. I read people like me on Facebook, sure, but that’s not the same — I want to hug an actual, living person.

I can’t help myself — I throw probing, often careless remarks at everyone I run into: cab drivers, workers at pickup points, people I share an elevator with. My husband complains, but I can’t resist. For me it’s a kind of homemade sociology. I really want to know what’s going on in society.

Igor

Perm

I was living in St. Petersburg when the [full-scale] war started, but moved back to Perm in 2024 for family reasons.

Things are very bad here. In St. Petersburg I’d had a small antiwar circle of friends, but that disappeared the moment I moved. Now I’m immersed in an atmosphere of total support for the war — here it’s as natural as the weather. Whether what’s happening is “right” isn’t even up for discussion. What people do discuss is the deaths of mutual acquaintances (heroic ones, of course), weapons, new drones, “the West’s cunning plans.”

Neighbors greet SVO soldiers with vodka and snacks and sing at the top of their lungs until morning. Volunteers sewing camouflage netting look for helpers, and find them. Schoolkids run around the streets teasing each other: “You’re a Ukrainian — no, you are — no, you are — Ukrainian, Ukrainian, Ukes.” War and hatred are welded into the minds of people in this region.

Finding antiwar-minded people here is simply unrealistic. I feel locked in a prison of fear. All I have left is my family, who share my views — we’ve walled ourselves off and cut contact with the outside world, relatives included.

Changing the situation is practically impossible. I can’t leave, mainly for financial reasons, and I can’t leave my parents behind either. All that’s left is to accept it and wait. Real life is over. All that’s left is its empty shell.

Anonymous reader

There’s almost no one to discuss the war with anymore. Even everyday concerns and worries have become hard to talk about the way they used to be. I feel loneliness, deep sadness, powerlessness.

I discuss it with my therapist and with my boyfriend, though he’s not fully engaged — mostly I’m just venting. I try to spend time relaxing in nature and being around animals to cope with my psychological state. I keep my hope alive, do what I have to, and take small steps toward peace.

Alexander

Moscow region

In February 2022, when it all began, I was in the middle of changing my life — I’d taken a new job in a different field and made a lot of new acquaintances. I remember thinking: “This is going to be hard now, not just because I’m an introvert but because of what’s happening. How am I supposed to get along with new people if they’re “Za”? What if my new boss turns out to be one of them?”

But, strangely enough, no. I joined a large Telegram chat for specialists in my field from all over Russia, scrolled through the pinned messages, and found that people were horrified — but there were no war supporters there, or at least none who made themselves visible. When outright “Z-patriots” do wander in, they’re quickly shown the door. Back at the start of the war, some of the pinned messages were even strikingly respectful, along the lines of: “Given the latest news, let’s support our colleagues in Ukraine.”

I’ve since run into the same thing offline. I’m a freelancer who works with a lot of people and projects, and I go to gatherings now and then — everywhere it’s the same consensus. We either don’t mention the topic at all, or we bring it up cautiously, sadly, calling it “the trouble.” At business meetings and at parties alike, no one ever talks about the war directly, but from the averted eyes and the muttering through gritted teeth, I can tell everyone finds it deeply repulsive. A few times I got bolder and spoke more directly about it in private conversations, and every time, people clearly backed me up.

I’ve realized I’m surrounded by a lot of people who have both a heart and a functioning brain — more of them than I expected. When someone who supports the war does turn up, which is rare, I try to wrap up the conversation quickly. Trying to change their mind is both pointless and dangerous.

Alexander

Volzhsky, Volgograd region

My circle of friends shrank sharply, but I put that down to moving — I lived in Moscow from 2019 to 2023, then went back to my hometown.

At the start of the war, my close friends and I discussed it constantly. Then half of them left the country, though, to be fair, almost all of them later came back. Now I only discuss the topic openly with my fiancée, and even then only at home and quietly. I’m glad she shares my views.

I like to think I’m changing the situation. I try to be kind even to aggressive people, though it doesn’t always work since I can be harsh myself. People latch onto that these days, I think, and it makes them happy. I get the sense that people are tired of violence, rudeness, militarism, and all the other crap on TV — tired of the government’s rhetoric. But at the same time, it doesn’t seem to take much these days for a person in Russia to slide into hatred, violence, and radicalism. Then again, maybe I’m just judging by myself.

Polina

Ryazan

My circle of friends hasn’t changed since the [full-scale] war started, but my husband and I have gotten very careful about how we phrase things around people who support it. We don’t bring up the topic with our closest friends — we know where they stand, and we don’t want to lose friendships that go back years.

It’s a relief that my husband and I support each other and see things the same way. Without his support it would be hard, and I’d definitely feel lonely. My mother used to support all this “hype,” but she’s gradually starting to see the truth, which makes me very happy.

I try to focus on life’s small things — good food, new clothes, pleasant moments with loved ones, short trips to nearby towns. I do a bit of volunteering, helping clear the city’s riverside embankment along with other people who care. Some part of me is looking for a way to protest safely, but I haven’t found one yet.

Veronika

Moscow

I don’t really have friends anymore. In 2022 and 2023 I talked to people about the war constantly, trying to change their minds, and at some point it stopped seeming to mean anything. Now it’s just become awkward to even bring up the topic.

I managed to change my fiancé‘s mind, but no one else’s. I went to see [Boris] Nadezhdin, to vote in the [March 2024 presidential] election, to the Solovetsky Stone, to [Alexey Navalny’s] grave. I just loved being around people like me, watching them, even in silence — glad at how different they are and how many of them there are.