“We had no choice”: Ukrainians who left Mariupol, a strategic port taken by the Russians after weeks of siege, told AFP how they were forced to go to Russia rather than to another region of Ukraine, a policy that Kyiv does not hesitate to compare to “deportations”.
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After weeks spent in a cellar in central Mariupol, and the death of her father, killed in a missile strike, Tetiana, a 38-year-old accountant, told AFP how she decided to leave the city to ” save his nine-year-old daughter.
In the absence of a mobile network and any possibility of communication, she took advantage of a respite from the bombardments to go to a gathering place designated by the authorities, and find out about the possibilities of departures. Evacuation officials, appointed by the pro-Russian authorities, then told him that it would only be possible to go to Russia.
“We were in shock, we didn’t want to go to Russia,” she says by phone from Riga, Latvia, where she is now a refugee with her family. “How do you go to a country that wants to kill you? »
For several weeks, the Ukrainian authorities have accused Moscow of having “illegally transferred” more than a million Ukrainians to Russia or to the eastern part of Ukraine controlled by pro-Russian separatists, even using the term “deportations”.
A Russian Defense Ministry official, Mikhail Mizintsev, confirmed the figure of one million. But Moscow assures that its only purpose is to allow civilians to “evacuate” from “dangerous areas”.
Some civilians are in fact sometimes forced to evacuate to Russia, as the fighting prevents them from crossing the front line. Yelyzaveta, originally from Izium – a city in the Russian-occupied Kharkiv region – thus arrived in Estonia via Russia, because “it was impossible to go to Ukraine”, she told the AFP.
« Filtration »
But for Tetiana and two other families from Mariupol – where nearly three months of bombardments have claimed at least 20,000 lives according to Kyiv – the Russian forces have clearly chosen for them.
An employee of a large industrial company, Svitlana was also hiding in a cellar with her husband and her in-laws in an eastern district of Mariupol when Russian soldiers ordered them to leave for an area controlled by Russian forces. .
“When an armed man tells you, you can’t say no to him,” says this 46-year-old Ukrainian, who has since been able to return to Ukraine – in Lviv, not far from the Polish border – but asked that her first name be changed. changed to protect his family.
After crossing a roadblock, his family was first transported to Novoazovsk, a small town in the hands of pro-Russian separatists about forty kilometers east of Mariupol, where they stayed for four days in a school, then in Starobechevé, 80 kilometers to the north in the separatist zone.
They landed in a crowded cultural center “where people slept on the floor, on sorts of tea towels”, says Svitlana. “The worst was the smell of dirty feet, dirty bodies, it stayed on our things after several washes.”
Three days later, the family was interviewed as part of a mandatory “screening” stage.
In a pro-Russian separatist police building, they had to answer written questions to find out if they had relatives in the Ukrainian army, give their fingerprints and smartphone for verification.
In a separate room, the men had to undress to prove the absence of patriotic tattoos or battle wounds.
“My husband had to take everything off except his underpants and his socks,” says Svitlana. “We also deleted all photos and social media from our phones” for fear of reprisals for his “pro-Ukrainian position”, she adds.
“Can’t Say No”
Ivan Drouz, who left Mariupol with his half-brother in April, also went through this “filtration” at Starobechevé.
He hoped to then be able to return to the territory controlled by Kyiv, but after five days of chaotic travel in pro-Russian separatist territory, when “we asked how to evacuate to the Ukrainian side, we were told: ‘Not possible'”, tells the AFP this young man of 23 years, who has also since taken refuge in Riga.
“First they exhaust you, and then they tell you that you can only go in one direction,” he protests.
Arrived at the Russian border, he had to undress and answer questions about his Ukrainian exchanges with his aunt: “they asked why she wrote to me in Ukrainian” and “wanted to check that I was not a Nazi”, says -he.
“We understood very well that everything they were doing was illegal,” adds Svitlana. “But you can’t say, ‘No, I don’t want to’”.
Once in Russia, the families of Tetiana and Ivan were sent to Taganrog, a hundred kilometers from Mariupol. As soon as they arrived, Russian officials told them to go by train to Vladimir, more than 1,000 kilometers to the north.
From there, Ivan and his brother had to set off again, this time to Murom, 130 kilometers to the southeast, to finally arrive at a hotel for refugees.
“This whole path is a series of choices we’ve already made for you,” he said. If no one has been locked up or threatened, “everything is organized so that people stay in Russia, as if they were trying to populate cities where no one wants to live”, he adds.
According to him, the hotel was full of Ukrainians – especially elderly people – who, for lack of money or knowledge in Russia, had no other choice but to stay in Murom.
“They wanted to send us to the depths of their country so that we could not tell the truth” about the “genocide” organized by Russia in Mariupol, accuses Tetiana.
Thanks to Russian friends, the families of Ivan, Tetiana and Svitlana were finally able to travel to Moscow. And from there take buses to Latvia or Estonia, where they knew Ukrainian refugees were welcome.
“Once in Latvia, we finally felt free,” says Tetiana.
