"It was a complete nightmare": actress Anastasia Karpenko recalls how Russians behaved on movie sets in Ukraine before the war

Actress Anastasia Karpenko (Yak Tam Katya (How is Katya), Pereviznytsia (Carrier), Dim Nadiyi (House of Hope), Doctor Kovalchuk, Servant of the People), like many other colleagues, once worked on the same set with Russian actors who came to Ukraine. According to the actress, it was "a very unpleasant experience."

Anastasia Karpenko spoke about this in an interview with OBOZ.UA. After the full-scale invasion, only one colleague from Russia called the actress.

"Until 2014, it was a complete nightmare even though I wasn't filming that much at the time," Karpenko recalls working with Russian actors, "but I saw how they behaved. I can literally count the people with whom I had a normal relationship on one hand. And only because these people were adequate on the set. In general, I have nothing to talk about because it was a very unpleasant experience."

Anastasia Karpenko admits that at the beginning of the full-scale invasion, she received a call from a famous Russian actress, "She offered to help. Now we are not in touch on my initiative. As a person, I am grateful to her for being concerned about my fate, but I don't want to keep in touch with anyone from Russia at all. This is how I have decided this issue for myself."

For the first six months after the Russian invasion, the actress and her young daughter were abroad, "We went to visit friends in Bulgaria and settled by the sea. This, of course, was a huge plus because, in any case, water helps to overcome stress. Plus the positive thoughts that the child was safe. But morally, I was dying there. I was eating myself up with reproaches that I was not there, not helping, not useful. I think everyone who left has such thoughts. When it seemed to become a little quieter in Kyiv, I began to consult with my husband about whether we could return. He was already at the front by then. All our conversations ended with his categorical "no". However, at the end of the summer, we managed to reach an agreement on this issue."

Anastasia says that very soon after she arrived in Kyiv, the capital was hit by massive missile attacks from the Russian Federation, "We play Russian roulette every day. During the next shelling, you sit and wait: will it hit your house or not... When the full-scale invasion started, I had thoughts like all other creative people: that's it, it's over. We lived our beautiful life, it's over, we will never be able to act or play in the theater again."

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