POLITICO Nightly: JD Vance’s TikTok flop

By Anusha Mathur Republican vice presidential nominee Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, speaks at a campaign event at Wollard International, Aug. 7, 2024, in Eau Claire, Wis., as seen on a monitor. | Alex Brandon/AP BALANCE OF POWER — When Kamala Harris opened her own personal TikTok account in late July, separate from her existing campaign account, within days she received millions of likes and hundreds of thousands of supportive comments welcoming her to the app. The same can’t be said for JD Vance. The Republican vice presidential nominee’s account, which he opened last Friday, isn’t sparking much hype at all. Vance’s entrance onto the app was something of a disaster, and now his account is barely breathing. It’s emblematic of a recent turn of events in the campaign social media wars — with Harris replacing Joe Biden as the Democratic nominee, it’s overturned the balance of power on apps like TikTok. Prior to Harris’ ascension, Trump dominated Biden in the social media space. When Trump joined TikTok in June, he outpaced the Biden campaign’s total follower count within mere hours. But Harris changed the equation. When she joined TikTok, enthusiastic Gen Z users were already mobilizing in her support – meming her distinct laugh, creating audio edits of her funny phrases, and compiling videos of her best roasts of Trump. That receptive environment made it easier for her account to gain the traction needed for lift off. She alluded to the organic support in a brief debut video on July 25: “I’ve heard that recently I’ve been on the ‘For You Page’, so I thought I’d get on here myself,” she said directly into the camera. TikTok users loved it. The acknowledgement — and winking appreciation — of the existing content served as encouragement for the people creating it. And the video’s simplicity — it was just a few seconds long — avoided the sheen of inauthenticity. As of today, the post has amassed 31.9 million views, 4.7 million likes and 140,300 comments. The top comments are overwhelmingly positive. Harris has taken full advantage of this momentum in her personal account, creating 16 videos in 14 days and amassing 24.5 million likes in total. Her campaign account, Kamala HQ, has posted 64 times – over three times per day – since Harris moved to the top of the presidential ticket, and the account boasts 65.5 million likes in total. That momentum has carried over to her new running mate, Tim Walz. The Minnesota governor doesn’t have a TikTok account as yet, but he has caused a stir on the social media platform in the 24 hours since he was tapped, with memes circulating of him at the state fair with his daughter and various compilations of the Minnesota governor calling the Trump/Vance ticket ‘weird.’ The Harris campaign’s proliferation of TikTok content stands in stark contrast with the Republican ticket. Trump, too, has a large following on TikTok — 9.7 million followers — and he has amassed 30.5 million likes. But he is not very active: he has posted 9 times in total since creating it on June 1. One of his videos remains up even though there is no sound accompanying the text on the post. Trump has yet to post a single time with Vance. By comparison, Harris has posted content with Walz in it three times in the last 24 hours. Without getting any lift from Trump, Vance’s account has floundered, despite a debut video that seemed poised to go viral. Vance had partnered with the Nelkboys, a Canadian-American YouTube channel and entertainment company that are a Trump family favorite. Donald Trump Jr. was one of their first podcast guests in 2021. Trump himself has worked with the Nelkboys several times , and even personally praised them at a rally in Nevada. The Vance/Nelkboys collaboration was part of a new initiative called Send the Vote, a $20-million voter registration and turnout program aimed at courting the kind of crowd attracted to Nelk's content — young men. "Yo JD, we want to welcome you to TikTok," Kyle Forgeard, a founder of the Nelkboys, says in the TikTok video as he hands Vance a box of Happy Dad, a brand of hard seltzers founded by Nelk in 2021. But, despite what seemed to be a high budget operation, the video itself was average at best. While the full interview posted on YouTube is well edited, the TikTok appeared to be an afterthought — nothing more than a series of shoddily spliced clips of Vance posing for photos with the Nelkboys and sitting for an interview with them. Now, it stagnates at 187,400 likes and 9,041 comments – an unusually high number of them ridiculing Vance. Worse, every single top-liked comment alluded to a false rumor started on X that Vance wrote about having sex with an "inside-out latex glove shoved between two couch cushions" in his memoir Hillbilly Elegy . Some users expressed surprise at how poorly Vance’s debut post went: “Imagine your job is running jd vance’s tik tok account and dude asks ‘how’s the video doing on tiktok,’” one comment reads. Vance has not released another TikTok since. Some chalk up the unflattering rollout to a numbers game – they say young people are statistically more likely to support Democrats, so naturally Harris supporters flooded Vance’s comment section. While it does appear that the majority of comments under Vance’s post are written by Democrats, it’s also true that Trump has 5.5 million more followers than Harris and an organic army of smaller MAGA content creators, and these people have not jumped to Vance’s rescue. Nor have they followed Vance’s account, which sits at only 121,500 followers. The fact that Vance’s team hasn’t deleted the multitude of couch comments is another sign of its failure to launch. Unlike other social media platforms, TikTok provides users the option to delete comments, which many people take advantage of. Before Vance created his TikTok, Mary Morgan, 23-year-old Trump-supporter and influencer who runs a YouTube channel called Pop Culture Crisis, told POLITICO that Republicans have shown a consistent disregard for the importance of energizing their base on social media in this election cycle. “Trump had this thing called meme magic on his side in 2016,” Morgan said, speaking about how 4chan created a space for young conservatives to rally behind Trump. “And now, the tables have kind of turned even though the pattern stays the same. Trump is running against a woman again. The tables have turned because now the right wing doesn't understand TikTok.” Morgan worries that the party’s inability to move its young base on social media could cost the party the 2024 election. “All of these sound bites that are being shared around from Kamala – ‘do you think you just fell out of a coconut tree,’ or Venn diagrams, or whatever stupid sound bite it may be,” Morgan said “Trump had moments like that non-stop when he ran for the first time. And that really energized young voters, specifically young male voters, if we're being honest. And now the opposite effect is happening for young female voters.” Welcome to POLITICO Nightly. Reach out with news, tips and ideas at nightly@politico.com . Or contact tonight’s author at amathur@politico.com or on X (formerly known as Twitter) at @AnushaMathur4 .   During unprecedented times, POLITICO Pro Analysis gives you the insights you need to focus your policy strategy. Live briefings, policy trackers, and and people intelligence secures your seat at the table. Learn more.     What'd I Miss? — Market turmoil gives Fed ‘license’ to cut rates: Growing anxiety about a weakening economy is fueling pressure on Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell to move quickly to calm market jitters. But he’s showing no sign of alarm. The central bank chief has been under fire since Friday’s jobs report showed an unexpected jump in the unemployment rate — the kind of number that would’ve led Fed policymakers to cut borrowing costs at their meeting last week if it had come only a few days earlier. Still, they’re giving no indication that immediate action is necessary to avoid a recession, with unemployment still at only 4.3 percent and inflation looking close to being tamed. — Education Department delays release of financial aid form — again: Education Department officials announced Wednesday that they will delay the release of its financial aid application , another embarrassing hiccup for an agency that has struggled to fix problems with a revamped form for nearly a year. The department will make the form available on Dec. 1, with a limited number of students and schools able to receive a test form on Oct. 1, the usual deadline. More will get the form in November, part of a phased release meant to avoid last year’s disastrous fate when issues with a new form led to months of delays. — Azerbaijan government comped trip to New York City mayoral aides: A former New York City mayoral aide, whose home was raided by federal agents last fall, visited Azerbaijan with another Eric Adams official last year, according to public documents and information provided by City Hall. The Azerbaijani government paid for the two mayoral aides to visit the country on what was billed as an economic development trip, just months before the raid. Nightly Road to 2024 NEAR COLLISION — Vice President Kamala Harris and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz spent their first full day as running mates on Wednesday rallying Democrats across the Midwest, but also got an idea of just how hotly contested the region will be when they overlapped on a Wisconsin tarmac with Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance . The Democrats’ trip began in Wisconsin before shifting to Michigan and was aimed at shoring up support among the younger, diverse, labor-friendly voters who were instrumental in helping President Joe Biden win the 2020 election. LABOR FALLS IN — Vice President Kamala Harris has rapidly consolidated the support of the nation’s most powerful labor unions , adding critical organizing muscle to her campaign as she tries to limit former President Donald Trump’s inroads with the working-class voters who could swing the election. Since taking over the top of the ticket, Harris has stressed to top labor leaders that she plans to stick with the staunchly pro-union agenda that President Joe Biden instituted, leaning on the administration’s record to secure the backing of a movement that’s enjoyed its closest relationship with the White House in decades. PROTO-WALZ — Kamala Harris never got close enough in her first presidential run to seriously consider choosing her running mate. But the working theory behind her selection of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz was floated more than five years ago . There was just a different running mate in mind — Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown. When Harris’ top aides at the time privately mused about the kind of partner they wanted to see on the ticket, they spoke about an avuncular, and at times rumpled white man with broad appeal across the industrial Midwest. The ideal vice president would be someone with a proven record of winning battleground races yet also deeply credible with progressives and organized labor; someone who could lay the wood to Republicans, but also could connect with her West Coast credentials via their shared warmth and genuine banter; someone who was a bit older, perhaps, and comfortable playing her No. 2. In these admittedly premature conversations from Harris’ camp five years ago, two advisers put a name behind some of the qualities: Brown. AROUND THE WORLD Taylor Swift performs at Wembley Stadium as part of her Eras Tour on Friday, June 21, 2024 in London. | Scott A Garfitt/Invision/AP TAYLOR SWIFT SHOWS CANCELED — Taylor Swift’s concerts in Vienna were called off by organizers after Austrian police foiled a terror plot linked to Islamic State . Austrian authorities said in a statement late Wednesday that they had arrested two men, a 19-year-old in the Austrian town of Ternitz and a second man in Vienna, who were preparing to carry out a terror attack. Pop star Swift was supposed to play three shows in Austria as part of the European leg of her sell-out Eras tour. ‘LARGE-SCALE PROVOCATION’ — Following reports that Ukrainian troops are engaged in fierce combat on Russian territory , Russian leader Vladimir Putin on Wednesday called it a “large-scale provocation.” According to his statement at Wednesday's Cabinet meeting, Putin said that “the Kyiv regime is conducting indiscriminate shooting from various types of weapons, including missiles, at civilian buildings, residential houses and ambulances.” Exiled Russian units allied with Kyiv have launched cross-border attacks into Russia in the past, but this week's reported incursion into Russia's Kursk region is one of the largest. It is also the first that has apparently involved regular Ukrainian forces — and has sparked the greatest alarm in the Kremlin. THE FUGITIVE — Police in Barcelona are trying to stop the separatist leader Carles Puigdemont from going ahead with his threat to sneak into Spain and be in the Catalan parliament when it votes on a new regional president on Thursday. Puigdemont wants to return to Spain even though he faces immediate arrest. He took to social media Wednesday to make his plan public, saying of the vote in the parliament: “I have to be there and I want to be there. That is why I have embarked on the return journey from exile.”   SUBSCRIBE TO GLOBAL PLAYBOOK: Don’t miss out on POLITICO’s Global Playbook, our newsletter taking you inside pivotal discussions at the most influential gatherings in the world. Suzanne Lynch delivers the world's elite and influential moments directly to you. Stay in the global loop. SUBSCRIBE NOW .     Nightly Number 800 The rough number of missiles launched by U.S. forces against the Iran-backed Houthi rebels that have controlled Yemen since November. U.S. forces have also launched seven rounds of air strikes in what has become the most sustained military campaign by American forces since the anti-ISIS air war in Iraq and Syria. RADAR SWEEP MONEY TRAIN — Olympic medalists, it turns out, get more than just a medal for their feats. While the International Olympic Committee does not give out prize money for winning medals, several countries do reward their athletes with medal bonuses . The best country to win a medal for? Hong Kong (technically, a special administrative region of the People's Republic of China) which hands out $768,000 for gold, $384,000 for silver and $192,000 for bronze. Singapore is another that offers a big payout, paying its athletes $745,000 for a gold. The U.S., by contrast, pays $38,000. Lee Ying Shan breaks down the medal payouts for CNBC. Parting Image On this date in 1986: Veterans, holding their medals they received from three wars, stand beneath a banner in San Francisco, Calif., protesting America's policies in Central America. | Jim Gerberich/AP Did someone forward this email to you?  Sign up here .   Follow us on Twitter Charlie Mahtesian @PoliticoCharlie Calder McHugh @calder_mchugh   Follow us

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June 5, 2023 HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

June 5, 2023 HEATHER COX RICHARDSON JUN 6 This morning, CBS News cameras captured on video the sight of former president Trump’s lawyers entering the Department of Justice.  Shortly after their two-hour meeting ended, a message appeared on the Trump-affiliated social media site Truth Social, in all caps: “HOW CAN DOJ POSSIBLY CHARGE ME, WHO DID NOTHING WRONG, WHEN NO OTHER PRESIDENT’S [sic] WERE CHARGED, WHEN JOE BIDEN WON’T BE CHARGED FOR ANYTHING, INCLUDING THE FACT THAT HE HAS 1,850 BOXES, MUCH OF IT CLASSIFIED, AND SOME DATING BACK TO HIS SENATE DAY WHEN EVEN DEMOCRAT SENATORS ARE SHOCKED. ALSO, PRESIDENT CLINTON HAD DOCUMENTS, AND WON IN COURT. CROOKED HILLARY DELETED 33,000 EMAILS, MANY CLASSIFIED, AND WASN’T EVEN CLOSE TO BEING CHARGED! ONLY TRUMP - THE GREATEST WITCH HUNT OF ALL TIME!” It appears there is reason to suspect Trump’s lawyers delivered to the former president bad news about Trump’s refusal to return to the government—that is, to the American people—the classified documents he stole when he left the White House.  The Twitter account of the Republican National Committee promptly tweeted footage of House Oversight Committee chair Representative James Comer (R-KY) suggesting that the “Biden family” has engaged in “a pattern of bribery, where payments would be made through shell accounts and multiple banks,” in a system of “money laundering.” There is no evidence of these accusations, and their framing of Biden as part of a “family corruption scandal” is pretty transparently designed to make the Bidens look like the Trumps, although there is no Biden family business as there is a Trump Organization.  Republican leaders have tiptoed around former president Trump even if they were hoping to move him offstage, but that caution broke today when the governor of New Hampshire, Chris Sununu, who in February said he would vote for Trump if he is the 2024 nominee, warned in a Washington Post op-ed that the Republican Party must break free of Trump and the culture wars or face “electoral irrelevance.”  Sununu announced that he would not seek the party’s presidential nomination himself, keeping his powder dry to try to correct the Republican Party’s course. In a clear shot at the many Republicans jumping into the race, he warned that “candidates should not get into this race to further a vanity campaign, to sell books or to audition to serve as Donald Trump’s vice president.” He promised to work for whichever candidate he thought best positioned to win in 2024. Sununu called for returning the party to “classic conservative principles of individual liberty, low taxes and local control,” saying that Republicans need to “expand beyond the culture wars that alienate independents, young voters and suburban moms” and appeal to new voters on substantive issues. He also took on the issue of abortion, which has created a groundswell of opposition to Republicans, saying that “Republicans should recognize that every time they open their mouths to talk about banning abortion, an independent voter joins the Democrats.” Indeed, as Kate Riga of Talking Points Memo wrote today, the abortion issue is suddenly toxic for Republicans. After years of calling for the end of the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion, Republicans got their wish almost a year ago with the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health decision. Republican-dominated states promptly began to pass antiabortion laws at the state level. But a majority of voters actually support abortion access, even in Republican-dominated states. They are eager to restore abortion rights, while the evangelical base of the Republican Party wants a federal abortion ban.  Republicans running for president are now trying to avoid the issue, since they need to support a federal ban on abortion to win base voters but will repel a majority of general voters if they do. Putting Republicans into power will likely mean a federal ban that will run badly against the popular will. It is not clear how Republican candidates will square this circle, but it is unlikely to go away simply because Republicans try not to talk about it. While many eyes in the United States are focused on domestic political events, today’s news also included reports that the Ukrainian military may have begun its counteroffensive to push Russian invaders out of Ukraine (although Ukrainian officials denied it, saying that no single action would indicate that a counteroffensive had begun).  The U.K. Ministry of Defence reported that there has been a “substantial increase in fighting along numerous sectors of the front, including those which have been relatively quiet for several months.” It also said that the feud between the mercenary Wagner Group and the Russian Ministry of Defence has “reached an unprecedented level.” It is not clear they will continue to cooperate. Natasha Bertrand, Zachary Cohen, and Kylie Atwood of CNN reported today that Ukraine has encouraged sympathizers and agents in Russia to sabotage targets there, diverting Russian attention from Ukraine and bringing the threat of war home to Russians. Tonight, part of the Nova Kakhovka Dam was breached, sending a flood down the Dnipro River. The breach will create flooding downstream. It will also affect drinking water, and the electricity for more than 3 million people. It threatens the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant, whose reactors are cooled with water from the reservoir above the dam, but tonight the Ukrainian state nuclear energy company Energoatom said the situation is under control.  — Notes: Twitter:  RonFilipkowski/status/1665762038281322496 atrupar/status/1621233676909514757 DefenceHQ/status/1665951346464309249 MarkHertling/status/1665922657408147457 mefimus/status/1665942450362372096 Osinttechnical/status/1665907948986458113 RNCResearch/status/1665769123111129088 https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/05/us/politics/trump-justice-dept-classified-documents.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/06/05/belgorod-russia-ukraine-counteroffensive-militias/ https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/05/us/politics/pence-2024-president-candidate.html https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2023/jun/06/russia-ukraine-war-live-dam-near-kherson-blown-up-by-russian-forces-ukrainian-military-says https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/06/05/chris-sununu-trump-gop-2024/ https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/republican-haley-desantis-trump-abortion https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/05/politics/ukraine-sabotage-agents-russia-drone-attacks/index.html

FOCUS: 'Everything Changed': The War Arrives on Russians' Doorstep

 

 

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FOCUS: 'Everything Changed': The War Arrives on Russians' Doorstep
Valerie Hopkins and Anatoly Kurmanaev, The New York Times
Excerpt: "Fifteen months after Russian missiles first roared toward Kyiv, residents of the Russian border region of Belgorod are starting to understand the horror of having war on their doorstep."

With cross-border strikes, residents of the Russian region of Belgorod are starting to understand the horrors of war being waged at their doorstep.

Over the last five days of May, Ruslan, an English teacher in a Russian town near the Ukrainian border, heard the distinct sound of a multiple rocket launcher strike for the first time. Shelling would begin around 3 a.m., sometimes shaking his house, and continue through the morning.

He had heard the thud of explosions in distant villages in the past, he said, and in October shelling damaged a nearby shopping mall. But nothing like this.

“Everything changed,” he said.

Fifteen months after Russian missiles first roared toward Kyiv, residents of the Russian border region of Belgorod are starting to understand the horror of having war on their doorstep.

Shebekino, a town of 40,000 six miles from the border, has effectively become a new part of the front line as Ukraine has intensified attacks inside Russia, including on residential areas near its own borders. The spate of assaults, most recently by militia groups aligned against Moscow, has sparked the largest military evacuation effort in Russia in decades.

“The town became a ghost in 24 hours,” said Ruslan, 27, who evacuated on Thursday after a sustained campaign of shelling.

In the last several days, The New York Times interviewed more than half a dozen residents of the border region to get a sense of the deepening anxiety among Russian civilians. Like Ruslan, most insisted on being identified by only their first names, citing a fear of retribution for speaking about the war.

“Shebekino was a wonderful, flowery town on the border with Ukraine filled with happy, neighborly people,” said Darya, 37, a local public sector employee. “Now only pain, death and misery live in our town. There is no power, no public transport, no open businesses, no residents. Just an empty, shattered town in smoke.”

The hardship is familiar to Ukrainians, who have seen cities like Bakhmut obliterated and others ravaged by civilian casualties. So are the sleepless nights; Russian missiles targeted Kyiv at least 17 times in May. But many Russians had not expected something similar to happen on their home turf.

Explosions are audible, too, in the city of Belgorod, the regional capital 20 miles to the north of Shebekino, and residents there have increasingly begun seeking access to basements that can be used as bomb shelters. People who had previously tried to go about their daily business suddenly discovered they could not.

“We are at a turning point right now,” said Oleg, a businessman in the city. “When this all started,” he said, referring to the war, “the people who opposed it here were a minority. Now after four days of being shelled, people are changing their minds.”

Belgorod’s regional governor, Vyacheslav Gladkov, said 2,500 residents had been evacuated and taken to temporary shelters in sports arenas farther from the border. Thousands more left on their own accord, residents said in interviews.

Mr. Gladkov said nine residents had died from shelling over the past three days. It is unclear how many Russians in the border region have been killed overall, but this was almost surely the deadliest week for the Belgorod region since the start of the war.

Flare-ups and cross-border shelling between Ukrainian and Russian forces have occurred regularly throughout the war. The recent attacks on Belgorod were undertaken by two paramilitary groups made up of Russians fighting for Ukraine’s cause; they have claimed that they target only security infrastructure, and portrayed their fight as one for liberation from President Vladimir V. Putin’s rule.

But their claims have clashed with accounts of widespread residential destruction described by witnesses and seen in videos posted on social media and verified by The Times. One of the two groups, the Russian Volunteer Corps, has also acknowledged shelling Shebekino’s urban area with “bouquets of Grads,” a Soviet-designed multiple rocket launcher that covers a large area with explosives.

As footage of that shelling filled Belgorod’s public chat rooms, citizens volunteered to drive affected families to safety, donated money and opened homes to refugees. In doing so, they underlined what they said was the inadequacy of the local government’s response, and the growing realization that they had only themselves to rely on.

It was a sign of spontaneous social organization that Mr. Putin has systematically undermined in recent years as he tightened control. The arrival of the war on Russian soil is rekindling a grass-roots civic spirit borne of necessity, with as yet unpredictable consequences for the country’s politics.

To some in the region, the assaults on Shebekino, the most sustained attack on a Russian town since the start of the war, made clear Moscow’s lack of concern for their fate. In social media posts, they used the hashtag #ShebekinoIsRussia, a cry for attention from the wider public across the country, which has largely carried on with daily life. In interviews, some in Shebekino expressed anger at how state television anchors struggled to pronounce the town’s name, even as they lauded the evacuation efforts.

“It seems that in Moscow they don’t understand what we have going on here,” said Ruslan, the English teacher. Citing explosions over the Kremlin last month, he said: “When drones flew to Moscow, there were immediately big stories, it was all over the news. And here people have been under fire for months, and nothing.”

Despite an uptick of attacks on Russian soil, only one in four Russians is following the war closely and most likely going beyond state media to seek information about it, according to a May poll conducted by the independent Moscow-based public opinion firm Levada Center. Almost half of respondents said they don’t follow the conflict at all, or only cursorily.

Levada’s director, Denis Volkov, said it was too early to say whether the escalation of border attacks would rally Russians around the flag.

“We have a very disjointed society,” he said. “No one has much interest beyond their own nose.”

But the violence is causing residents of Shebekino to re-evaluate their apathy or support for the war, and the disruption of the last week is breeding resentment against authorities who they believe have failed to protect them.

“People are disappointed that it has gotten to this stage, that this was permitted to happen,” said Elena, a Belgorod resident who volunteered to evacuate people from Shebekino.

Darya, the public sector employee, described a chaotic evacuation. As the sounds of explosions grew near, she said, her family gathered necessities and waited for the official transport promised by regional authorities. When it didn’t arrive, they called an evacuation help line set up by the governor and were told to wait, in vain.

They eventually left the town in their private car, leaving behind an older relative who could not be easily moved.

“We saw many Shebekino residents sitting on the side of the highway in their cars, because they had nowhere to go,” she said.

Evacuation did not always bring safety. Two women died near Shebekino after their car was hit by a shell on the side of the road on Thursday, according to Mr. Gladkov, the governor. His claim could not be independently verified.

There is also the realization among border residents that there is no end in sight to the war.

Russia has annexed parts of four Ukrainian regions that it has occupied, and is planning to hold elections there in September, despite the expected Ukrainian counteroffensive aimed at wrestling back territory from Moscow’s forces.

“I don’t understand the point of these annexations, I don’t even know where they are,” said Alina, 31, a social media manager in Belgorod.

“This is just some kind of farce.”

In the city of Belgorod, with a population of 340,000, the pain and confusion of the war is made more acute by historical ties to Ukraine. It is only 25 miles from the border, and only 50 miles from Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second largest city.

Before the war, people from Belgorod traveled to Kharkiv to shop, or even just for a night out. Many have relatives living across the border.

Ruslan, the English teacher, said that he was always opposed to the war, and that his position hasn’t changed with the destruction of his city. But his feelings toward Ukraine have.

“I thought I was able to empathize, but when it comes to your home, it’s a completely different feeling,” he said.

“I understand that it’s all because of Putin, but at the same time I have a slightly different attitude toward the Ukrainian armed forces,” he continued.

“Now I think, maybe they are no different from ours.”

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