Anna Temirbekova fled Kiev on Thursday. Her family had the spent two weeks prior sleeping in the hallway of her apartment building, to try to protect themselves in case the Russians shelled close by. After weeks of anxiety and little sleep, she heard one explosion closer than ever before, and realized she had to leave. She packed her bags and — together with her husband and their nine-year-old son — boarded a train for Poland the next morning. Her mother stayed behind in Kiev.

Amidst these weeks of trepidation, Temirbekova and her mother received text messages from cousins in Russia. “They asked, ‘How are you?’ How should we be? We’re under bomb attack,” she said, incredulous. “My relatives in Russia said, ‘Don’t worry, we are coming to rescue you from these neo-Nazis,’” she added, shaking her head. Temirbekova’s husband is originally from Kyrgyzstan, and the two speak Russian at home. They find ridiculous the Kremlin rhetoric that Russian speakers in Ukraine don’t have rights. “My husband has been in Ukraine for fifteen years, he doesn’t speak Ukrainian but it wasn’t a problem,” she said.

After the promise of “rescue,” Temirbekova said she deleted all her cousins and family group chats. “Now they’re not my relatives,” she said. “They’ve been reading propaganda for twenty years and are now like this.”