By LORI HINNANT, ANNA’S FACE, VASILISA STEPANENKO and SARAH EL DEEB
July 20, 2022 GMT
https://apnews.com/article/Ukraine-Russia-refugees-Mariupol-war-investigation-31880d51ae29818b6c3b04156aae38d5
NARVA, Estonia (AP) – For weeks, Natalya Zadoyanova had lost contact with her younger brother Dmitriy, who was trapped in the besieged Ukrainian port city of Mariupol.
Russian forces had bombed the orphanage where he worked, and he crowded dozens of others into the icy basement of a building with no doors or windows. The next time she heard about him, he was crying.
“I’m alive,” he told her. “I’m in Russia.”
Dmitriy Zadoyanov faced the next chapter of devastation for the people of Mariupol and other occupied cities: the relocations by force to Russia, the same nation that killed its neighbors and bombed their hometowns almost to the point of oblit.
Nearly 2 million Ukrainian refugees have been sent to Russia, according to both Ukrainian and Russian officials. Ukraine describes these trips as forced transfers to enemy soil, which is considered a war crime. Russia calls them humanitarian evacuations of war victims who already speak Russian and are grateful for a new home.
An Associated Press investigation based on dozens of interviews has found that while the picture is more nuanced than the Ukrainian government suggests, many refugees are forced to embark on a surreal trip to Russia, subject to abuse. of human rights, without documents. and they were confused and lost about where they are.
Abuses do not start with a gun to the head, but with a poisoned choice: to die in Ukraine or to live in Russia. Those who leave go through a series of filtration points, where the treatment goes from interrogations and searches to being dragged and never seen again. The refugees told the AP of an elderly woman who died from the cold, her body swollen and an evacuee hit so severely that her back was covered in bruises.
Those who “pass” the leaks are invited to live in Russia, and often promised a payment of about 10,000 rubles ($ 170) that they may or may not receive. Sometimes the Ukrainian passport is taken away from them, and instead the possibility of Russian citizenship is offered. And sometimes, they are pressured to sign documents denouncing the government and the army of Ukraine.
Those who have no money or contacts in Russia — most, according to most accounts — can only go where they are sent, to the east, even to the subarctic. More than 1,000 are as far away as Khabarovsk and Vladivostok, a 10-day train journey along the Pacific Ocean, according to people the AP spoke to who saw several trains arrive during the weeks of the war.
However, the PA investigation also found signs of a clear dissent in Russia with the government’s narrative that Ukrainians are being rescued from the Nazis. Almost all the refugees interviewed by AP spoke gratefully of the Russians who silently helped them escape through a clandestine network, retrieving documents, finding refuge, buying train and bus tickets, exchanging Ukrainian hryvnia for Russian rubles and even while carrying makeshift luggage that holds everything left. of their pre-war lives.
The investigation is the most extensive to date on transfers, based on interviews with 36 Ukrainians, mostly from Mariupol, who left for Russia, including 11 who are still there and others in Estonia, Lithuania, Poland, Georgia, Ireland, Germany. and Norway. The AP also relied on interviews with Russian clandestine volunteers, videos, Russian legal documents and Russian state media.
The story of Zadoyanov, 32, is typical. Exhausted and hungry in the basement of Mariupol, he finally accepted the idea of evacuation. The Russians told him he could get on a bus in Zaporizhzhia in Ukraine or in Rostov-on-Don in Russia.
They lied. The buses went only to Russia.
Along the way, Russian authorities searched his phone and questioned him about why he was baptized and whether he had sexual feelings towards a boy in the camp. A man on Russian state television wanted to take him to Moscow and pay him to denigrate the Ukrainians, an offer he declined. People with video cameras also asked the arriving children to talk about how Ukraine was bombing its own citizens.
“It was 100 percent a tactical pressure,” Zadoyanov said. “Why children? Because it’s much easier to manipulate them. “
He, then, five children and four women were taken to the train station and told that their destination would be Nizhny Novgorod, further inland in Russia, 1,300 kilometers (800 miles) from the border with Ukraine. From the train, Zadoyanov called his sister Natalya in Poland. His panic increased.
Get off the train, he told her. See.
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A DELIBERATED STRATEGY
The relocation of hundreds of thousands of people from Ukraine is part of a deliberate and systemic strategy, set out in Russian government documents.
A “massive emergency order” describes the “distribution” of 100,000 Ukrainians in some of the most remote and impoverished regions of Russia. It was not to be sent to the capital, Moscow.
The AP verified through interviews with refugees, media reports and official statements that the Ukrainians have received temporary accommodation in more than two dozen Russian cities and towns, and were even transferred to an unused chemical plant in the Bashkortistan region, 150 kilometers (100 miles) from the nearest major city. A refugee, Bohdan Khoncharov, told the AP that about 50 Ukrainians he was traveling with were sent to Siberia, so far away that they effectively disappeared with little chance of escape.
A Ukrainian woman also said her elderly parents in Mariupol were sent to Russia and told to move to Vladivostok, at the other end of the country. Russian border authorities did not let his father out of Russia because he still had Soviet citizenship in the old days, along with Ukrainian residence documents.
Many Ukrainians stay in Russia because, although they are technically free to leave, they have nowhere to go, no money, no documents, and no way to cross distances in a country twice the size of the United States. Some fear that if they return, Ukraine will process them to go to the enemy, a fear encouraged by Russian officials.
Others speak Russian, with family there and ties they believe are even stronger than their ties to Ukraine. A woman told the AP that her husband was Russian and that she felt more welcome in Russia.
Lyudmila Bolbad’s family left Mariupol and ended up in Taganrog in Russia. The family speaks Russian, and the city of Khabarovsk, about 10,000 kilometers from Ukraine, offered work, special payments to move to the Far East and eventually Russian citizenship. With nothing to lose, they made the 9-day train journey through some of the most deserted territories in the world to a city much closer to Japan than Ukraine.
Bolbad and her husband found work at a local factory, just as she did at the Azovstal steel factory in Mariupol. Little else has gone as expected.
They handed over their Ukrainian passports in exchange for promises of Russian citizenship without hesitation, only to discover that the owners would not rent the Ukrainians without a valid ID. Payments promised to buy a house are slow to arrive, and they are stuck with hundreds of others in Mariupol in a run-down hotel with almost edible food. But Bolbad plans to stay in Russia and believes Ukraine would call her a traitor if she returned.
“We’re here now … we’re trying to get back to a normal life somehow, to encourage ourselves to start our lives from scratch,” he said. “If you survived (the war), you deserve it and you have to move on, not stop.”
Russia’s reasons for deporting Ukrainians are not entirely clear, according to Oleksandra Matviichuk, head of the Center for Civil Liberties of Ukraine. One goal seems to be to use refugees in propaganda to sell Russians about the war in Ukraine by pressuring them to testify against Ukraine.
“Ukrainians in the Russian Federation are extremely vulnerable,” he said. “Russia is trying to use these people in an almost legal war against Ukraine to gather some testimonies from people who have no right to say no because they are afraid for their safety.”
The deportation of local civilians from the occupied territories also paves the way for the Russians to replace them with loyalists, as was the case in Crimea, Matviichuk said. And Russia may want Russian-speaking Ukrainians to populate their own isolated regions with depressed economies.
Ivan Zavrazhnov describes the terror of being in Russia and not knowing where he would end up. A producer of a pro-Ukrainian TV channel in Mariupol, did so by leaking only because officials never bothered to connect his dead cell phone. He managed to escape and ended up on the Isabelle berthed ferry in the Estonian city of Narva with about 2,000 more Ukrainians, almost all of whom left Russia.
“This is a kind of incomprehensible lottery: who decides where and what,” he said. “You understand that you are going to say, in the mouth of a bear … an aggressor state, and you end up in this territory. … I didn’t feel safe in Russia. “
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STOPPED BY FILTRATION
Refugees heading to Russia are interrogated at multiple stops, in what both Russians and Ukrainians call “leakage.” Each time, some are removed.
Fingerprints are taken and photographed, which the Ukrainian government calls collection of biological information. Some are stripped of their clothes, and those with tattoos, wounds, or ammunition bruises are subject to special scrutiny. Phones are confiscated and sometimes connected to computers, which scares the installation of tracking software.
The Kovalevskiy family left Mariupol after eating cold pieces of food in an unlit basement and seeing the sores infect their skin without washing. In their first filtration, they maintained …