Photo/Illutration Kateryna Chaplynska speaks outside the Atomic Bomb Dome in Hiroshima. (A screenshot from YouTube)

TAGAWA, Fukuoka Prefecture—A Ukrainian evacuee here has uploaded a Russian-language video about the atomic bombing of Hiroshima to send a message to supporters of Russian leader Vladimir Putin.

“Please think of Hiroshima when a nuclear attack looks like a good idea to you,” Kateryna Chaplynska, 31, says in the video, which features exhibits at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum.

Putin has threatened to use nuclear weapons in the war against Ukraine. And Chaplynska wants Russians who have supported the invasion to understand the horrors of nuclear warfare.

Chaplynska taught at a beauty school and raised her daughter, now 4, in the midwestern Ukrainian city of Zhytomyr.

With the help of her older sister, who lives in Tagawa, Chaplynska fled to Japan with her daughter in March 2022, immediately after Russia’s invasion started. Her husband has remained in Ukraine.

Chaplynska now works at a strawberry farm in Tagawa.

She visited Hiroshima in autumn last year with her sister and her family. She said she knew about the 1945 atomic bombings against Japan and had always wanted to see Hiroshima.

Chaplynska said she thought she understood the extent of the suffering of the nuclear attacks through history textbooks in Ukraine.

But she said she was so overwhelmed with emotion by the sight of the victims’ mementos at the museum that she had difficulty looking at them.

The mementos included “Shin’s tricycle,” owned by a 3-year-old boy who was killed in the blast. Shin’s father later dug up the tricycle from the family yard.

After her home country was invaded, Chaplynska contacted a childhood friend who lives in Russia. She was taken aback when she learned the friend believed in Putin.

Chaplynska said she made the video to encourage Russian supporters of the war to recover their humane feelings by learning about Hiroshima’s suffering.

She enlisted the help of the museum to work out the approximately 15-minute video.

The footage includes a pair of gloves worn by a 12-year-old boy who was seriously burned and died after the blast, a picture showing how victims drank “black rain” to quench their thirst, and a lump of tiles, glass and metal melted together.

Chaplynska’s video also explains how heat rays and radiation from the blast killed so many people instantly, and how survivors continued to suffer from health problems, psychological trauma and discrimination later in their lives.

Toward the end of the video, she addresses “those who support” Russia’s invasion about the possibility of a nuclear war: “You should understand that ... a burnt bicycle would be the only thing that remains of your (own) child.”

Chaplynska said she thought of nuclear warfare as a “thing of a fantasy” until the invasion began.

Her acquaintances in Ukraine continue to join the military as drone pilots and nurses.

She now asks herself if the United States would guarantee a nuclear counterattack if Russia launched a nuclear strike on Ukraine, and if Russia would perhaps rather die in nuclear ash than accept defeat.

“I know it is not easy to change the thoughts of those steeped in propaganda, but I still hope to send them alternative information to the extent I can,” she said.

Chaplynska lit a candle at her home to pray for atomic bomb victims on Aug. 6, the 78th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima.

“I believe forgetting is the beginning of a tragedy,” she said.

The video, “Nikogda snova Khirosima” (No more Hiroshimas), is available for free public viewing on YouTube at (https://youtu.be/FBHeImCfHxk).

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