As the situation in Ukraine worsens, more celebrities are coming out to urge people to help the citizens of the country. Mila Kunis and her husband, Ashton Kutcher, were amongst the first few stars to help raise funds for the Ukrainian people. She also opened up about her Ukrainian roots and expressed how her heart aches to see her birth country blow up in ashes.
While Kunis has lived in LA forever, she was born in the then Soviet Union state. She and her family had to shift base to the US because of antisemitism. Her family included her father Mark, a mechanical engineer, her mother Elvira, a physics teacher, and her brother Michael. Her parents had to give up their ‘good jobs and degrees, which were not transferable’ when they arrived in America. ‘We arrived in New York on a Wednesday and by Friday morning my brother and I were at school in LA,’ Mia told the Daily Telegraph in 2011.
With just $250 in their pockets, the family came to America. Her father took up multiple jobs including painting houses, installing toilets and delivering pizza. Her mother worked in the back room of a drugstore. Kunis says she doesn’t remember her time in school as she used to “cried every day. I didn’t understand the culture. I didn’t understand the people. I didn’t understand the language.”
“My first sentence of my essay to get into college was like, ‘Imagine being blind and deaf at age seven.’ And that’s kind of what it felt like moving to the States. But I got over it pretty fast,” she added.
Her dark past often has made her even distance herself from her Ukrainian background. In several interviews, she often was seen saying that while she lived there as a child, she doesn’t identify with her home country.
However, seeing the bad conditions in Ukraine, Mila Kunis and Asthon Kutcher vowed to match up to $3,000,000 in donations to help provide humanitarian aid to Ukrainian refugees. In a video shared on Kutcher’s Instagram account, Mila said that she’s never been more proud to be a Ukrainian.
(Featured Image Credits: Instagram @asthonkutcher)