Authors

Discussion

For Russian-speaking migrants living in Finland, Russia's aggressive state policies, most recently the war in Ukraine, have had multiple consequences for their everyday lives. This paper explores how the transnational media sphere and the discussion of issues related to 'politics' affect the formation and maintenance of social relations with peers, in this case other Russian speakers. Based on interviews (N=22) and observations with older Russian-speaking migrant men, most of whom have migrated to Finland as older adults and do not speak Finnish fluently, we ask how this segment of Russian speakers renegotiates their social relations under the influence of the conflicting media sphere. We find that their sense of belonging to particularly close, but also more casual, social ties becomes more conditional in nature, which makes their ‘belonging work’ more laborious. This is the case both in the public sphere, where people who come from countries of aggression (or are identified as such because of a shared language), and in the private sphere, where their belonging is conditioned by political crises and reinforced by the transnational media sphere.