Mila Kunis says the Russian President Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine makes her feel like part of her heart “just ripped out”.
The ‘Forgetting Sarah Marshall’ star - who moved to the United States as a child in 1991 after moving from her birthplace, the Ukrainian city of Chernivtsi - admitted that despite being “LA through and through”, she was heartbroken to see her first homeland being destroyed by shelling and be witness to potential war crimes, which has left an unconfirmed number of civilians dead.
Speaking to journalist Maria Shriver on her digital platform, ‘Sunday Paper’ , the 38-year-old actress said: "This happens and I can’t express or explain what came over me but all of a sudden…I was like, 'Oh my God, I feel like a part of my heart just got ripped out. It was the weirdest feeling.”
Mila - who with her husband, Ashton Kutcher, 44, has has raised more than $20 million to aid the humanitarian crisis after more than 3.5 million people have become refugees due to the conflict - thinks this feeling is odd to her because she has “always felt like an American”.
She said: "I very much have always felt like an American," before she explained that for ease she would tell people she was from Russia because there was a better chance they had heard of it.
Mila said: "It's been irrelevant to me that I’ve come from Ukraine. It never mattered, so much so that I've always said I'm Russian, right? Like I've always been like, 'I'm from Russia' for a multitude of reasons."
The ‘Black Swan’ star has been passing down her love of her heritage to her and Ashton’s two children, seven year-old daughter Wyatt and five-year-old Dimitri.
Mila told Maria: "I turned to my kids and I was like, 'You are half Ukrainian, half American!' Like, I literally was like, 'Look, you!' And my kids were like, 'Yeah mom, I get it.' And I was like, 'No! You are Ukrainian and American.' I was like, 'You are half Iowa [where Kutcher was born], half Ukraine.' And they're like, 'Ok, I get it.'"
She said: "I am from Ukraine. I mean, everything’s changed."
However, despite her reclaiming of her dual nationality, Mila urged people to not “consider the people of Russia an enemy” as they live under an oppressive regime.
She said: "I don't think that we need to consider the people of Russia an enemy. I do really want to emphasize that. I don't think that that's being said enough in the press. I think that there's now, 'If you're not with us, you're against us' mentality. And I don't want people to conflate the two problems that are happening. I don't think it's the people of Russia and so, I don’t want there to be a thing of ‘All Russians are horrible human beings.’ I don’t want that to be a rhetoric, so I do encourage people to look at it from a perspective of, 'It's the people in power, not the people themselves.'"
