Mila Kunis Talks To Maria Shriver About Invasion Of Ukraine: ‘I Feel Like A Part Of My Heart Just Got Ripped Out’

Mila Kunis’s heart has been broken by the crisis in Ukraine.

The actress, whose family fled from Soviet Ukraine in the 1980s when she was a child, has partnered with her husband Ashton Kutcher in an attempt to raise $30 million to support Ukrainians fleeing from Russia’s invasion.

In an interview premiering this Sunday, Kunis sits down with Maria Shriver on her show “Conversations Above the Noise” to talk about her Ukrainian heritage, her fundraising effort, and more.

“I very much have always felt like an American… People were like, ‘Oh, you’re so Eastern European.’ I was like, ‘I’m so L.A.!'” Kunis says in a preview of the interview. “This happens and I can’t express or explain what came over me, but all of a sudden I was like, ‘Oh my God, I feel like a part of my heart just got ripped out.’ It was the weirdest feeling.”

Kunis also talks about why she has often said publicly that she is Russian, rather than Ukrainian.

“I turned to my kids and I was like, ‘You are half-Ukrainian, half-American!’ I literally was like, ‘Look, you!’ And my kids were like, ‘Yeah mom, I get it.’ And I was like, ‘No! You are Ukrainian and American.’ I was like, ‘You are half-Iowa, half-Ukraine.’ And they’re like, ‘Okay, I get it,'” she says. “It’s been irrelevant to me that I come from Ukraine. It never mattered. So much so that I’ve always said I’m Russian, right? Like I’ve always been, ‘I’m from Russia’ for a multitude of reasons…”

Talking about the current crisis, Kunis says, “I don’t think that we need to consider the people of Russia an enemy. I do really want to emphasize that. I don’t think that that’s being said enough in the press. I think that there’s now ‘If you’re not with us, you’re against us’ mentality. And I don’t want people to conflate the two problems that are happening. I don’t think it’s the people of Russia… I do encourage people to look at it from the perspective of, ‘It’s the people in power, not the people themselves’.

“And I also don’t want people to get discouraged and conflate different issues in the world, and I don’t want people to compare. I think that one thing that’s happening a little bit that I’ve noticed is people are like, ‘Why is everybody paying attention to this problem, but nobody paid attention to all these other issues that have been happening?’ And I don’t want people to conflate. Like everyone, people just to focus on what is at hand right now and right now this issue can get incredibly catastrophic for the rest of the world – not just for that part of the world, and I don’t want people to lose sight of that.”

The full interview with Mila Kunis will premiere this Sunday, March 13.