War crime or humanitarian evacuation? The plight of Ukrainian refugees in Russia

Natalya Zadoyanova lost contact for weeks with her little brother, Dmitriy, who was trapped in the besieged Ukrainian port city of Mariupol.

The Russian forces had bombed orphanage where he worked, and was holed up with dozens of people in the cold basement of a building with no doors or windows. The next time he spoke to him, Dmitriy was crying.

“I’m alive”, he told her, “I’m in Russia”.

Zadoyanov faced the next chapter of devastation for the people of Mariupol and other occupied cities: forced transfers to Russiathe country that had killed its neighbors and bombed their cities until they were nearly wiped off the map.

Nearly two million Ukrainian refugees have been sent to Russia, according to Ukrainian and Russian officials. Ukraine describes such transfers as forced travel into enemy territory, which is considered a war crime. Russia calls them “humanitarian evacuations”.

An investigation by Associated Press found that although the situation is more nuanced than the Ukrainian government suggests, many refugees are actually forced to travel to Russia, they are abused, they are stripped of their documentation and they face uncertainty about their future and sometimes even where they are.

Die in Ukraine or live in Russia

It all starts with a poisoned decision: to die in Ukraine or to live in Russia. They go through what are known as filtration points, where they can be interrogated and searched or pushed aside and disappear.

Refugees described an elderly woman who froze to death, her body swelled and another displaced person was beaten, leaving his back covered in bruises.

Those who “pass” subsequent filters are invited to stay and are often promised a payment of around 10,000 rubles ($ 170), which they may or may not receive.

Sometimes their Ukrainian passports are taken away and they are offered the chance to obtain Russian citizenship. And sometimes forced to sign documents who incriminate the Ukrainian government and army.

Those with no money or contacts in Russia – the majority, according to almost all accounts – can only go where they are sent. AP verified that Ukrainian citizens had been temporarily housed in more than two dozen Russian cities and towns.

However, the PA’s investigation also found signs of dissent in Russia over the government’s message that Ukrainians were “saved by the Nazis”.

Almost all the refugees AP interviewed spoke with appreciation for the Russians who silently helped them survive a clandestine network to retrieve their documents, find shelter, buy train and bus tickets, exchange Ukrainian currency for Russian rubles and even load their suitcases where they take what is left of their pre-war life.

The survey, the largest to date on such transfers, was based on interviews with 36 Ukrainians, mostly from Mariupol, who had left for Russia.

Eleven of them were still there, while others were in Estonia, Lithuania, Poland, Georgia, Ireland, Germany and Norway. The PA also collected interviews with underground Russian volunteers, videos, Russian legal documentation and posts in Russian state media.

stories

Exhausted and hungry in the Mariupol cellar, Zadoyanov finally accepted the idea of ​​evacuating. There were only buses to Russia.

Along the way, Russian authorities searched his cell phone and interrogated him. They asked him what it meant to be baptized and if he had sexual desires for a boy in the camp.

He and others were taken to the train station and told they would go to Nizhny Novgorod, 1,300 kilometers from the Ukrainian border. From the train, Zadoyanov called Natalya to Poland. The panic invaded his sister.

“Get off the train,” he told her. “Now”.

It is part of the relocation of hundreds of thousands of people from Ukraine deliberate and systematic governance strategyas is clear from the official documents.

Some Ukrainians remain in Russia because while they are technically free to leave, They have nowhere to go no money, no documents, no way to cross the distances of a country twice the size of the United States.

Others may have family and strong ties to Russia, or prefer to start over in a country where at least they know the language. And some mistakenly fear that if they return, Ukraine will pursue them for turning to the enemy.

Lyudmila Bolbad’s family left Mariupol on foot and ended up making the 9-day train journey to the city of Khabarovsk near the Chinese border and nearly 10,000 kilometers (6,200 miles) from Ukraine.

Bolbad and her husband found work in a factory. Few other things went as planned.

Broken promises

They handed over their Ukrainian passports in exchange for the promise of Russian citizenship, only to find that the owners did not rent their homes to Ukrainians without valid identity documents.

Promised payments come slowly and get stuck with hundreds of other Mariupol people in a rundown hotel where the food is barely edible. But Bolbad believes that if she returns to Ukraine she will see her as a traitor and she intends to stay in Russia.

“We try to get back to a normal life in some way, to encourage us to start our life from scratch,” he said.

For Ukrainians trying to escape, help often comes from an unexpected place: the Russians.

On a recent day in Estonia, a Russian tattoo artist accompanied a Mariupol family across the border to a shelter.

The tattoo artist, who asked that his name not be published because he still lives in Russia, was the last link in a chain of volunteers that stretched 1,900 kilometers, from Taganrog and Rostov to the Estonian border town of Narva. He sleeps in St. Petersburg a couple of times a week, travels to Finland and occasionally to Estonia.

The Russians who help, he noted, only know each other through Telegram and almost all remain anonymous “because everyone is afraid of some persecution. ”

“I can’t stop it,” he said of the war and the deportation of Ukrainians to Russia, “what I can do is this.”

In May, volunteers in Penza, Russia abandoned their efforts to help Ukrainian refugees due to anonymous threats.

The intimidations included slashed tires, the white Russian Z symbol on a dashboard and graffiti on doors and gates accusing them of collaborating with “Ukrainian Nazis”.

For Zadoyanov and many others, his lifeline was the Russians.

When Zadoyanov got off the train to Nizhny Novgorod with the other Ukrainian passengers, contacts in the local church offered them refuge and were the first steps in finding a way out of Russia and to Georgia.

“He was emotionally devastated,” said his sister, Natalya. “They all were.”

Sarah El Deeb, The Associated Press, also contributed

CB