Mila Kunis shared how she is having conversations with her children about their Ukrainian heritage, while learning how to embrace her own Ukrainian roots too.
In a conversation with Maria Shriver for The Sunday Paper, the Bad Moms actor revealed that she sat her children down and had a conversation with them about their Ukrainian background amid Russia’s invasion of her native country.
“I turned to my kids and I was like, ‘You are half-Ukrainian, half-American!’” she said to Shriver in a clip that was released on 11 March. “I literally was like, ‘Look, you!’ And my kids were like, ‘Yeah, mom. I get it.’” Kunis shares two children with her husband Ashton Kutcher — daughter Wyatt, 7, and son Dimitri, 5.
“I was like, ‘You’re half-Iowa, half-Ukraine,’” the actress said, referencing Kutcher’s home state of Iowa. “And they were like, ‘Okay, I get it.’”
The couple, who have been married since 2015, have raised over $20m to aid victims of the Russia-Ukraine conflict, they said in an Instagram post on Thursday. Last week, Kunis and Kutcher announced that they will match donations of up to $3m to help supply humanitarian aid to Ukrainian refugees.
“But we’re not done,” the former Punk’d host said in the Instagram video. “Our goal is 30 [million] and we’re going to get there.” The couple thanked the 56,000 people who have donated to their GoFundMe and provided an update on the work their fund has done on the ground in Ukraine.
Kunis was born in 1983 in Chernivtsi, a city in southwestern Ukraine. She and her family moved to the US when she was seven, even though her native language was Russian and she didn’t speak English when her family emigrated.
During her interview with Maria Shriver, the 38-year-old mom shared that she didn’t embrace her Ukrainian heritage when she was younger and would tell people she was from Russia instead.
“It’s been irrelevant to me that I come from Ukraine, it never mattered,” she revealed. “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. One of them being when I came to the states and I would tell people I’m from Ukraine, the first question I would get is, ‘Where is Ukraine?’”
“But if I was like, ‘I’m from Russia,’ people are like, ‘Oh, we know that country,’” Kunis explained. “And so I was like, “Great, I’ll just tell people I’m from Russia.’”
Now, Kunis is proud to inform people of her Ukrainian background. “Hell no! I am from Ukraine,” she said. “I mean, everything’s changed.”
