'The mouth of a bear': Ukrainian refugees sent to Russia, some try helping them escape
NARVA, Estonia — For weeks Natalya Zadoyanova had lost contact with her younger brother Dmitriy, who was trapped in the besieged Ukrainian port city of Mariupol.
The abuses start not with a gun to the head, but with a poisoned choice: Die in Ukraine or live in Russia. Those who leave go through a series of what are known as filtration points, where treatment ranges from interrogation and strip searches to being yanked aside and never seen again. Refugees told the AP of an old woman who died in the cold, her body swollen, and an evacuee beaten so severely that her back was covered in bruises.
The investigation is the most extensive to date on the transfers, based on interviews with 36 Ukrainians mostly from Mariupol who left for Russia, including 11 still there and others in Estonia, Lithuania, Poland, Georgia, Ireland, Germany and Norway. The AP also drew on interviews with Russian underground volunteers, video footage, Russian legal documents and Russian state media.
An"emergency mass order" describes the"distribution" of 100,000 Ukrainians to some of the most remote and impoverished regions of Russia. None was to be sent to the capital, Moscow. Others speak Russian, with family there and ties that they feel are stronger even than their links to Ukraine. One woman told the AP that her husband was Russian and she felt more welcome in Russia.
"Now we are here ... we're trying to return to a normal life somehow, to encourage ourselves to start our life from scratch," she said."If you survived , you deserve it and need to move forward, not stop." Ivan Zavrazhnov describes the terror of being in Russia and not knowing where he would wind up. A producer for a pro-Ukrainian television network in Mariupol, he made it through filtration only because officials never bothered to plug in his dead cell phone. He managed to escape, and ended up on the docked ferry Isabelle in the city of Tallinn in Estonia with about 2,000 other Ukrainians.
It never crossed her mind to delete her contacts. When a Russian soldier searched her phone, he stopped at the one listed as"Commander" and pulled her aside. Finally, the family reached the Russian city of Taganrog. When questioned by Russian officials about why they had left their hometown, the mother could no longer restrain herself.
She was blindfolded again, handcuffed and taken to the Rostov region in Russia. She asked where they were going."Somewhere," they said, and ordered her to be silent. Along with giving up their own documents, Ukrainian refugees are sometimes pressured to sign papers holding the Ukrainian government or military responsible for the war.
She called her adult children still in Ukraine, coughing every few minutes. They were frantic. Increasingly distraught, Bondarenko asked migration officials how she could get out. Many evacuees don't realize they have the right to refuse to sign documents and the right to leave Russia, according to Tanya Lokshina, author of an upcoming Human Rights Watch report on forced deportations. HRW and the Ukrainian Center for Civil Liberties documented multiple cases where Ukrainians like Bondarenko were pressured into signing paperwork, including documents accusing Ukraine's military of war crimes.
"They are disoriented. ... You need to meet them at one station and take them to another station, because otherwise people get lost," he said."It's clear they're not psychologically equipped." Another Russian volunteer, who also communicated with The Associated Press on condition of anonymity, said they faced logistical and bureaucratic hurdles thrown up by the Russian government, such as travel documents lost or taken by administrators.
In St. Petersburg, another volunteer met her at the train, took her to his apartment for the night and helped her get to the bus station.
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