Somewhat culpably, the Ukrainians miss Matthew Perry

It was the middle of the night in Ukraine and Natalia Sosnytska couldn’t sleep. So she opened the Instagram app on her phone – and saw that the actor Matthew Perry had died.

She burst into tears, she said, and immediately felt ashamed.

“We must remember every day the people who die here in Ukraine, but perhaps also those who inspire us,” she said, trying to process her layered emotions.

She was hardly alone. Mr. Perry’s death last Saturday resonated with many Ukrainians who had watched “Friends,” a program broadcast on television in the country that was particularly popular among young people.

On the day Mr. Perry’s death was reported by mainstream Ukrainian news outlets and discussed on social media, the news in Ukraine was difficult as usual: Russia had bombed the southern city of Kherson and nine Ukrainian citizens, including children, had been found shot dead in the occupied city of Volnovakha. Yet Ukrainians found room in their hearts for grief over the death of an actor who had touched their lives.

“It is almost the same age as Ukrainian independence,” Maryna Synhaivska, the deputy director of the Ukrinform news agency, said of “Friends,” which began in 1994, three years after Ukraine split from the Soviet Union.

“I grew up with him, as did many Ukrainians,” Ms. Synhaivska said of Mr. Perry and Chandler Bing, his character on the show. “I am senselessly saddened by this news, and I can say that tens of thousands of people are reading it.”

The success of the series in Ukraine was partly due to the high quality of the translation. It was dubbed in Ukrainian rather than Russian, and linguists have highlighted how well it captured American slang. Ukrainian viewers were also able to watch each new episode almost at the same time as viewers in the United States.

Ms Sosnytska, 32 years old, after the show mentioned a community center she opened in 2017 for young people in her hometown of Kostiantynivka, in eastern Ukraine.

The space was intended to be a place where like-minded people could come together and have fun, but they struggled to find a name they all liked. She had seen every season of “Friends” no less than 10 times, she said, and her friends liked it too. So they named the center Druzi – “friends” in Ukrainian – and the sign on the building mimicked the font of the show’s title.

Today the town is close to the front line, where life is extremely dangerous, and the community center stands empty, surrounded by bomb craters.

Ms. Sosnytska said that when she heard the news of Mr. Perry’s death, “I understood that I had to take another look.”

The series has been a source of comfort for some Ukrainian fans during the many months of war.

Anastasiya Nigmatulina, 28, a beautician in Vinnytsia, a city in central Ukraine, said she had watched the show again and again since the war began. “It helps me feel better,” she said.

Her husband is a soldier and she often worries about him. He is now home on leave with her and their five-year-old daughter, but will soon return to the front. There were many moments when Ms. Nigmatulina “felt scared and stressed, but this series supported me,” she said.

“And especially Chandler Bing, played by Matthew Perry,” she added. “I feel like I lost a good friend.”

“Friends” also helped some in the country learn Ukrainian, just as they did helped people around the world learn English.

“I talk and hear how I use the words from specific episodes, from that brilliant Ukrainian translation we had,” said Yulia Po, 38, a native of Crimea who grew up in a Russian-speaking environment and said she learned Ukrainian thanks to ” Friends.”

As a thirteen-year-old coming home from school, she recalled, she had just enough time to bake potatoes for herself and get comfortable with a plate in front of the television before the show aired.

She left Crimea after Russia occupied it in 2014, now refuses to speak Russian on principle and has not been home or seen her parents since she left, she said. “So I have a lot of emotions for this show,” Ms. Po said, adding: “When I fled Crimea then, I was depressed and I watched it and watched it, and it helped.”

When she heard that Mr. Perry had passed away last weekend, she felt a little sad.

“This is just a human emotion to be sad – there is always room for it,” Ms Po said. “He was with me for a long time and gave me many reasons to laugh.”