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 she worked and she was huddled with dozens of others in the freezing basement of a building with no doors or windows. When she found out about him next, she burst into tears. “I’m alive,” he told her. “I’m in Russia.” Dmitri Zadoyanov faced the next chapter of disaster for the residents of Mariupol and other occupied cities: Forcible deportations to Russia, the very nation that killed its neighbors and bombed their homelands almost into oblivion. Nearly 2 million Ukrainian refugees have been sent to Russia, according to Ukrainian and Russian officials. Ukraine portrays these trips as forced transports into enemy territory, 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 found that while the picture is thinner than the Ukrainian government suggests, many refugees are indeed forced to embark on a surreal journey to Russia, subjected to human rights abuses along the way, without documents and left confused and lost as to their whereabouts. Abuses begin 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 filtering points, where treatment ranges from interrogation and strip search to being cast aside and never seen again. Refugees told the AP of an elderly woman who died in the cold, her body swollen, and an displaced person who was beaten so badly that her back was covered in bruises. Those who “pass” the filters are required to live in Russia 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 the possibility of Russian citizenship is offered instead. And sometimes, they are pressured to sign documents denouncing the Ukrainian government and military. Those without money or contacts in Russia—the majority, by most accounts—can only go where they are sent, eastward, even to the subarctic. More than 1,000 are as far away as Khabarovsk and Vladivostok, a 10-day train journey to the edge of the Pacific Ocean, according to people the AP spoke to who saw many trains arrive during the weeks of the war. But the AP investigation also found signs of clear disagreement within Russia over the government narrative that Ukrainians are being rescued from the Nazis. Almost all refugees interviewed by the AP spoke gratefully of Russians who quietly helped them escape through a hidden network, retrieving documents, finding shelter, buying train and bus tickets, exchanging Ukrainian hryvnia for Russian rubles and even carrying the improvised baggage holding what remains of their pre-war lives. The research is the most extensive to date on transport, based on interviews with 36 Ukrainians mostly from Mariupol who left for Russia, including 11 and others in Estonia, Lithuania, Poland, Georgia, Ireland, Germany and Norway. The AP also drew on interviews with Russian underground volunteers, videos, Russian legal documents and Russian state media. The story of Zadoyanov, 32, is typical. Exhausted and hungry in the underground of Mariupol, he finally accepted the idea of evacuation. The Russians told him he could board a bus to either Zaporizhia in Ukraine or Rostov-on-Don in Russia. They lied. Buses only went to Russia. Along the way, Russian authorities searched his phone and questioned him about why he was baptized and whether he had sexual feelings for a boy in the camp. A man from Russian state television wanted to bring him to Moscow and pay him to defame the Ukrainians, an offer he refused. People with video cameras also asked the children who arrived to talk about how Ukraine was bombing its own citizens. “It was 100 percent a tactical pressure,” Zadoyanov said. “Why guys? Because it’s much easier to handle them.” He, five children and four women were then taken to the train station and told their destination would be Nizhny Novgorod, even deeper in Russia, 1,300 kilometers (800 miles) from the Ukrainian border. From the train, Zadoyanov called his sister Natalya in Poland. Her panic rose. Get off the train, she told him. Now. A DELIBERATE STRATEGY The transfer of hundreds of thousands of people from Ukraine is part of a deliberate and systemic strategy, laid out in Russian government documents. A “mass emergency order” describes the “distribution” of 100,000 Ukrainians to some of Russia’s most remote and impoverished regions. None were to be sent to the capital, Moscow. The AP verified through interviews with refugees, media reports and official statements that the Ukrainians were given temporary housing in more than two dozen Russian cities and towns, and were even moved to a disused chemical plant in the Bashkortostan region, 150 kilometers (100 miles) from nearest big city. One refugee, Bohdan Honcharov, told the AP that about 50 Ukrainians he traveled 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 from Mariupol were sent to Russia and told to move to Vladivostok, on the other side of the country. Russian border authorities did not let her father leave Russia because he still had Soviet citizenship from the old days, along with Ukrainian residence papers. Many Ukrainians stay in Russia because, while they are technically free to leave, they have nowhere to go, no money, no documents or any way to cross the distances in a large country twice the size of the United States. Some fear that if they return, Ukraine will expel them for going over to the enemy – a fear encouraged by Russian officials. Others speak Russian, with family there and ties they see as stronger even than their ties to Ukraine. One woman told the AP that her husband was Russian and she felt more welcome in Russia. Lyudmila Bolbad’s family left Mariupol and ended up in Taganrog, Russia. The family speaks Russian and the city of Khabarovsk, nearly 10,000 kilometers from Ukraine, offered jobs, special payments for moving to the Far East and eventual Russian citizenship. With nothing to lose, they made the 9-day train journey through some of the most desolate areas in the world to a city much closer to Japan than Ukraine. Bolbad and her husband found work at a local factory, as did she at the Azovstal steelworks in Mariupol. Few others have gone as hoped. They handed over their Ukrainian passports in exchange for promises of Russian citizenship without hesitation, only to discover that the landlords would not rent to Ukrainians without valid ID. The promised payments to buy a house are slow to come and they are stranded with hundreds of others from Mariupol in a dilapidated hotel with barely edible food. But Bolbad plans to stay in Russia and believes Ukraine would label her a traitor if she returned. “Now we’re here … 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 should 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 in Ukraine. One goal appears to be to use refugees in propaganda to sell Russians on the Ukraine war 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 a quasi-legal war against Ukraine to get some testimony from people who don’t have the right to say no because they fear for their safety.” Deporting local civilians from occupied territories also opens the way for the Russians to replace them with loyalists, as happened in Crimea, Matviichuk said. And Russia may want Russian-speaking Ukrainians to populate its own isolated regions with ailing economies. Ivan Zavrazhnov describes the terror of being in Russia and not knowing where it will end up. A producer for a pro-Ukrainian television network in Mariupol, he only made it through filtering because employees never bothered to connect his dead cell phone. He managed to escape and ended up on the ship Isabelle docked in the city of Narva in Estonia along with about 2,000 other Ukrainians, almost all of whom fled Russia. “This is a kind of incomprehensible lottery – who decides where and what,” he said. “You understand that you are going, as it were, into the mouth of a bear … of an attacking state, and you end up on this ground. … I didn’t feel like I was safe in Russia.” STOP TO FILTER Refugees on their way to Russia are interrogated at several stops, in what both Russians and Ukrainians call “filtering.” Each time, some are uprooted. They are fingerprinted and photographed, which the Ukrainian government calls biological intelligence collection. Some have been stripped of their clothes and those with tattoos, wounds or bruises from ammunition are put under special scrutiny. Phones are seized and sometimes linked to computers, raising fears that surveillance software has been installed. The Kovalevskiy family fled Mariupol after eating cold leftovers in an unlit basement and seeing sores flare up on their unwashed skin. At their first filter, they held their breath and thought in horror of the photo and video the eldest daughter had transferred from her phone to a flash drive hidden…
