MOSCOW: Ukrainian Mariya Brovinska always tried to remain close to her Russian relatives but now bitter disagreements over the crisis in her homeland have led to a severing of ties.
Her aunts and cousins from northwestern Russia first sought to dissuade her from supporting pro-Western rallies in Ukraine.
Then they deleted her from their lists of friends on social networking sites.
"We've stopped communicating altogether," Brovinska, 28, told AFP.
She still tries to remain in touch with her grandmother who also lives in northwestern Russia but it has been a trying experience.
"She speaks in phrases borrowed from Russian television," she said. "You live under the junta," she quoted her grandmother as saying.
"My mother would say in return that they live under 'Russism-fascism'. Everyone would cry and fight."
Muscovite Pyotr Loznitsa says that over the past months tensions with his Ukrainian cousin have at times got so fierce that he stopped posting comments on his Facebook page.
"His position was, 'We are not you and this is none of your business'," the 49-year-old told AFP. "There were times when we practically did not communicate."
-'Putinoids versus Banderovtsy'-
Russians and Ukrainians have for years treated each other with a dose of irony and cracked jokes about one another, but the thought they would slaughter each other in a fratricidal war was unimaginable.
Now, with Russia accused of backing rebels and sending troops into Ukraine, a new lexicon of derogatory names has emerged, often with World War II connotations.
Ukrainians deride "Putinoids", "occupiers" or "the brother at the gates" -- a play on the phrase "enemy at the gates".
Russians have dubbed Ukrainians "fascists" or "Banderovtsy" -- after the name of Stepan Bandera, the ultra-nationalist wartime leader.
Some have faced the insults first-hand.
"I realised I would not be able to go back to Simferopol after my cousin told me that 'people like me should be fed to pigs alive'," said Olga Mosova, 29, who left the Crimean city after the Russian takeover.
"With relatives like that, who needs enemies?"
Natalya Lovchikova, a 46-year-old Russian from the western Ukrainian city of Lviv, nearly lost her pro-Putin sister to the raging propaganda.
She is married to a Ukrainian who volunteered to fight pro-Russian separatists in the east, triggering screaming matches within the family.
Lovchikova confronted her sister when her patience finally snapped: "I asked her whether Putin was dearer to her than us. Will Putin take care of her when she grows old?"
-'Collapse of human ties'-
The two countries were not long ago seen as inseparably tied by similar languages and innumerable human, cultural, economic and historic bonds. Some 1.9 million Ukrainians lived in Russia before the crisis, and many more Russians have Ukrainian roots.
A March 2013 poll found 40 percent of Ukrainians spoke Russian as their mother tongue.
But conflict has rapidly undone those bonds.
Friends and relatives began cutting ties when pro-Western protests broke out in Kiev in November, and grew ever more estranged as Russia annexed Crimea in March and brutal fighting started between Kremlin-backed separatists and Ukrainian troops the following month.
"Just one or two years ago Ukrainians were seen as the closest people," said Lev Gudkov, head of the respected Levada Centre pollster in Moscow.
Between January and July, the number of Russians with a positive view of Ukraine fell from 66 percent to 33 percent, according to Levada.
Gudkov chalked up the change in perceptions to "lengthy, aggressive and systemic" propaganda whipped up by Russian state television which peppers its reports with words like "the Kiev junta" and "ultra-nationalists".
Volodymyr Paniotto, head of the Kiev International Institute of Sociology, said the war and the massive support for Putin in Russia would affect ties for years to come.
"This is a huge problem," he told AFP. "All recent surveys showed a complete collapse of human relations, an incredible spike in negative emotions of Ukrainians towards Russians and of Russians towards Ukrainians."
One recent poll by Ukraine's Razumkov Centre found only 1.9 percent of respondents who felt ties with Russia were friendly.
Sociologists said it would take years for Russians and Ukrainians to stop hurting. Many agree Putin must go before wounds could heal.
"Freedom of speech should return to Russia for things to change," said Paniotto.
But some say they won't allow politics to ruin their relationships.
"People have not changed, however much someone wants to corrupt them," said Muscovite Yury Kraskov.
"They were always friends, drank vodka and traded together and visited each other -- and this is continuing."
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