Leopards Ate My Face

Same with me. I had lived 2 months in Ukraine in 2015 when I hitchhiked several thousand kilometres in the Russia. And every driver I talked anything about Ukraine was telling me how the roads are full of bandits now and how I was lucky to make it out of Ukraine alive. And then all these same stories about Russian-speakers being in danger there. I told them that I ws living together with a Russian-speaking Ukrainian, that in the capital 70 % of people speak Russian as their main everyday language, that almost all of my friends in Ukraine speak Russian as their mother tongue, and that none of my friends had never encountered what I was now being told about.

And their reaction: "They only showed you in Ukraine what they wanted you to see". No amount of "hey, I've been walking the streets completely alone, going to various parts of the city. Plus, my girlfriend would have no reason to lie to me about something like this."
The reply was always some form of "still, they clearly did not show you everything." And then to my "How did they manage to hide that stuff from me?" they said "I don't know."

Again, zero percent of drivers I talked with said anything deviating from the above. I soon learned to avoid talking about Ukraine, and instead made haste to get the hell out of the Russia, as there was nothing I could do to help those people, and speaking up agitated them in a manner that did not feel very safe as a hitchhiker. Kazakhstan was much better.