Ashton Kutcher — whose wife, Mila Kunis, grew up in Ukraine — has issued a statement amid the recent unrest.
“I stand with Ukraine,” the Iowa native, 44, tweeted on Thursday, February 24.
The Valentine’s Day actor’s 38-year-old wife, whom he wed in July 2015, was born in Chernivtsi, Ukraine. At the time, Ukraine was a member of the Soviet Union, which later became Russia. Kunis and her family immigrated to the United States when she was 7 years old.
“My parents both had amazing jobs, and I was very lucky. We were not poor when we lived in Russia, whereas most people were very unfortunate,” the Spy Who Dumped Me actress recalled to the Daily Telegraph in September 2011. “My parents had given up good jobs and degrees, which were not transferable. We arrived in New York on a Wednesday and by Friday morning my brother [Michael Kunis] and I were at school in LA.”
After the Black Swan star’s parents — Mark and Elvira Kunis — sought to make a new life for their children, the Family Guy alum initially struggled to adapt.
“Ultimately, I adjusted fairly quickly and fairly well, but it must have been hard because I blocked out second grade completely,” she told the Los Angeles Times in October 2008. “I have no recollection of it. I always talk to my mom and my grandma about it. It was because I 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.”
The Bad Moms star visited her native country for the first time many years later alongside the Jobs actor, with whom she shares daughter Wyatt, 7, and son Dimitri, 5.
“[I went to Ukraine] two months ago, for the first time. … It was trippy,” Kunis told Net-a-porter.com in a November 2017 interview, per the U.K.’s Metro. “There’s a part of you that wants to feel something towards [the place]. I had nothing. We landed and Ashton was like, ‘No?’ [and I was like], ‘Yeah, nothing. I got nothing for you, babe.’”
She continued at the time: “We went to our house and I knocked on the door because we really wanted to look inside. And [the new owner] was like, ‘No!’ She did not care. I said, ‘I used to live here when I was little, my parents are here [with me].’ She wouldn’t even open the door. The whole experience was very humbling.”
The former That 70s Show costars have since moved into a renovated farmhouse in Los Angeles with their children.
“We wanted the house to look like an old barn, something that had been here for decades, that was then converted into a house,” the Thorn cofounder told Architectural Digest in June 2021. “But it also had to feel modern and relevant. … To feel tranquility in a space, everything needs to be in order. If the world around you isn’t in order, it’s hard to get your brain in order. When we’re in our home, the world just makes sense.”
