Busloads of people from the other side of the internationally recognized Ukrainian border started arriving in Russian cities a few days before the full-scale invasion began. As Russia occupied more of Ukraine, more buses came. The Russians called the process “evacuation” and the people “refugees.” Most of the world was aware of Ukrainians fleeing the war for Western Europe, but millions travelled east. Some were forced to go. Others went because they have family in Russia, or see it as a familiar environment. But even these choices were often made because the Russian occupation effectively leaves Ukrainians with no alternative. Many stories of Ukrainians who have gone to Russia involve coercion, confusion, or doublethink. What happened to some of them may be a war crime, though most don’t seem to see it that way. And these Ukrainians have also encountered, almost without exception, unlikely, sometimes uncomfortable acts of solidarity from ordinary Russians.
On March 9, 2022, Viktoria Shishkina, nine months pregnant, was under observation in Mariupol’s Maternity Ward No. 3 when a bomb hit the building. Shrapnel lodged in her legs, arms, and stomach. Rescue workers rushed Viktoria by ambulance to a different maternity ward, where three people operated on her in a basement using their phone flashlights. The baby died. Viktoria spent the next five weeks in the basement, alongside dozens of pregnant women and, as time went on, a growing number of newborns.
There was no cell reception, and Viktoria had no way to know if her husband, Volodymyr, was safe. Russian troops were levelling Mariupol neighborhood by neighborhood. As they advanced, they started bringing food and water to the basement. On April 15th, the troops told everyone inside to evacuate: their hiding place would soon become scorched earth. Buses were taking people to Russia. If anyone wanted to stay in Mariupol, they could do so at their own risk. If they wanted to go west, they’d have to cross the front line.
Viktoria didn’t want to leave Mariupol—she thought that Volodymyr might still be alive and in the city. A hospital worker who had been sheltering in the basement had a car and an apartment on the ninth floor of a building in a Russian-occupied part of town. The building was still standing, but there was no electricity, running water, or gas. Residents cooked over a fire outside. Viktoria’s leg was still healing from the surgery to remove the shrapnel, which made going up and down the many flights of stairs especially difficult. But there was no shelling in the neighborhood, and there was, occasionally, cell reception on a nearby hilltop.
Viktoria, who is thirty-eight, with dark hair that she often wears in a chignon, had nothing but the clothes that she had been wearing in the ward. The belongings she had taken to the hospital—including her cell phone and her identity documents—were lost in the bombing. She borrowed a phone to try the few numbers she remembered, and reached her best friend, who told her that, the day after the maternity ward was bombed, Volodymyr had been on his way to see her when a mortar shell hit nearby. Now he was in a hospital in Donetsk, a Russian-controlled city in eastern Ukraine. His left leg had been amputated above the knee.
It took Viktoria a couple of weeks to get the necessary documents to be “evacuated” to Donetsk. By the time she reached Volodymyr, she had learned that her father and sister were in Russia, in the town of Tikhvin, outside St. Petersburg. She also learned that there were people who could help get her and Volodymyr to Russia, too.
These people—all volunteers—communicated with Viktoria online. “Once Volodymyr and I were together, and we realized that we had survived, we just wanted to live,” Viktoria told me. “We would do anything to live.” By the end of May, Volodymyr’s doctor agreed to discharge him. A car arranged by the volunteers took them to the Russian border, and another to the city of Rostov-on-Don, where they boarded a train to St. Petersburg. Volodymyr, limping along on crutches, had to be lifted into the train car. Along the way, he developed a fever. The volunteers arranged for an ambulance to pick them up at the station. He spent two weeks in intensive care.
Viktoria visited her sister, who was staying with other Ukrainians at a disused resort in Tikhvin. The state supplied the space; volunteers provided almost everything else, including clothes, blankets, and medical supplies. It was then that I was introduced to Viktoria by Galina Artemenko, a journalist who had been helping Ukrainians in the region. Artemenko had interviewed Viktoria and Volodymyr, recording their experiences of the war.
The bombing of the Mariupol maternity ward was one of the most egregious early instances of Russian attacks on Ukrainian civilians. In Russia, telling the story of the bombing is dangerous. Earlier this year, a Moscow court heard the case of Dmitry Ivanov, a twenty-three-year-old math student facing up to ten years in prison for a series of Telegram posts on the war, including one about the maternity ward. Artemenko testified in Ivanov’s defense, telling the story of Viktoria and Volodymyr. I asked her what gave her the courage to speak up and to help Ukrainians. “What are the authorities going to do?” she replied. “We don’t have a law against buying a saucepan, or underwear, or meeting a person at a train station.” Still, in July, the state-owned Sberbank froze Artemenko’s and other volunteers’ online accounts, which they had been using to raise funds to help the displaced.
The people in Russia helping Ukrainians escape the war operate in a political gray zone. The Russian government uses the “refugees” for propaganda purposes, parading ostensible victims of Ukrainian aggression—and grateful recipients of Russian aid—on television. Russian volunteers can be both symbolically and practically useful: for the most part, they, not the Russian state, take care of the Ukrainians.
While Volodymyr was in the hospital in St. Petersburg, Viktoria realized that she couldn’t stay in Russia. Every time an airplane flew overhead, she remembered that it was a Russian plane; the one that had dropped the bomb that killed her baby had been, too. The Russian government does not prevent Ukrainians from leaving Russia—in fact, some volunteers suspect that their efforts assisting those hoping to flee are tolerated because they help get rid of potentially troublesome new citizens. But, with Russia increasingly isolated from the European Union, leaving is complicated. Rules apparently vary from one border crossing to another and among the few commercial bus companies that maintain service between Russia and the E.U. Volunteers drove Viktoria and Volodymyr to the border with Estonia, which welcomes Ukrainian refugees but has sealed its border against most Russian citizens. Viktoria and Volodymyr crossed on foot. In June, 2022, they boarded a bus to Germany, where a bed in a rehabilitation center was waiting for Volodymyr. On July 1st, he had surgery to be fitted with a prosthesis.
There is no hierarchy, no chain of command, and no single formal organization that unifies the perhaps thousands of people who help Ukrainians in Russia. I interviewed about twenty volunteers, most of them by video chat. I promised not to disclose key details of their work, including how people find them and stay in contact with them. Among the people I talked to are artists, journalists, bankers, I.T. professionals, academics, schoolteachers, and one Orthodox clergyman. Some live in Russia. Some emigrated many years ago. Some have left in the past year. One was volunteering while living in a refugee camp in Europe. Some of the volunteers meet with the people they are helping, but mostly they stay connected online. Working from Paris, Los Angeles, and Moscow, volunteers are on call twenty-four hours a day, to virtually walk a refugee from one train station in Warsaw to another, navigating terrain that they have never physically experienced but have learned by heart.
Volunteers in Latvia maintain an apartment near the Russian border, where many refugees spend a night before getting a ride to a bus station in Riga. Iryna Glazova, who was thirteen when I met her last year, escaped Odesa with her parents on the first day of the war. She was now a volunteer at an information booth at the bus station. I spent a day with her there in December, watching her help a steady stream of people, most of whom had travelled from eastern Ukraine by way of Russia. Her first clients, a little after 8:40 a.m., were an elderly couple from the Kherson region. They had just come from the border and needed to continue on to Germany, where their daughter lived. Glazova dialled the office of the International Organization for Migration, which sometimes paid for bus tickets for refugees. (Now the volunteers generally cover the costs.) “I have a couple here,” she said, speaking Russian. “The man has limited mobility, and I need to get them on the next bus to Berlin. Can you get to their tickets first?”
She put the receiver down and addressed the couple: “Food for the road? Coffee? Chocolate bars? Instant noodles? Please take something.” For the next several hours, Glazova repeated this process again and again, writing down passport details and insisting that people take food for their journey. Once her shift was over, she went to school, where she was attending eighth grade.
The volunteers are not united by their political views. Several told me that this work is their form of protest. But some have working relationships with the Russian military; these people are often called Z-volunteers, and, among other things, they help feed and clothe soldiers. Z-volunteers have worked to get severely ill civilians from occupied territories to Russian cities, where they can receive medical care. Staunchly antiwar volunteers who have participated in such extractions told me that they’ve faced criticism from friends for engaging with pro-war Russians.
Many Ukrainians don’t want to leave Russia once they arrive—some because they are afraid, disoriented, or depressed, others because they want to live among Russian speakers, have family in Russia, or just find the idea of being there appealing.
Svetlana Gannushkina, a matriarch of Moscow’s human-rights community, has been helping displaced people since the late nineteen-eighties, when the first interethnic conflicts broke out in what was then the Soviet Union. Gannushkina has been branded a “foreign agent” by the Russian government. She spent her eightieth birthday, last year, in jail for protesting the invasion. On the eve of the war, her N.G.O., the Civic Assistance Committee, was evicted from its offices in Moscow. Prosecutors have accused it of “discrediting” the armed forces. Yet government officials continue to refer displaced Ukrainians to the organization. Many people come to the Committee proclaiming their love for Russia and their support for the “special military operation.” When I asked Gannushkina how she, as someone who has been persecuted by the regime, felt helping its supporters, she explained that she thought people from eastern Ukraine were more susceptible to government propaganda than Russians were. “They’ve been watching our television, seeing what a wonderful President we have and how much he cares about the people,” she said.
Russia’s President, Vladimir Putin, has streamlined the process by which Ukrainians can obtain Russian citizenship and has promised each “refugee” a monthly stipend of ten thousand rubles (about a hundred dollars). In March, Tatyana Moskalkova, Putin’s human-rights ombudswoman, boasted that more than five million Ukrainians had come to Russia “seeking safety from Ukrainian shelling and bombing.”
The actual number of people is impossible to determine: even if Moskalkova happened to state the actual number of border crossings, no one knows how many Ukrainians have stayed in Russia. Last October, the government said that Ukrainians were living in at least eight hundred “temporary residence centers.” I obtained an updated list of more than thirteen hundred such centers, situated all over Russia, including in the Arctic and the Far East. But there is no information on how many people are staying in each, and how many more are living with relatives, with volunteers, or in rented apartments.
Nikolai and Nina (as I’ll call them) met on a dating app in the winter of 2022, when he was twenty-three and she was twenty-one. They knew almost immediately that the relationship could be serious. Nikolai was working for a large I.T. company in Mariupol. Nina was studying acting in Kharkiv. Days after they first connected, they spent a week and a half together in Kyiv. Near the end of the trip, Nikolai proposed. Nina said yes. Nine days later, Russia launched its full-scale invasion.
Nina took a train east, toward Mariupol, and met Nikolai at her parents’ house, near Illich Iron and Steel Works, one of Mariupol’s two giant industrial plants. Nikolai, Nina, and Nina’s parents and sister stayed in the house together. They began sleeping on the floor in the kitchen, which they decided was safer than the bedrooms. All around them, the city was burning. The ash in the air looked like rain. A house next door was destroyed by a direct hit. Nikolai surmised that Russian troops were firing on them from three directions and Ukrainians from another. Their water supplies were dwindling. For twenty-three days, they didn’t bathe or brush their teeth.
Russian troops took control of the neighborhood in mid-April. By then, Nikolai, who is six feet four inches tall, weighed only a hundred and fifty pounds. He had lost much of his hair. Across the river, the battle for Azovstal, the other metals plant, continued, but Nikolai and Nina started venturing out. The city around them looked like a moonscape. In some areas, they could hardly get their bearings because everything—the houses, the stores, the signposts—was gone. They saw teams exhuming bodies from yards and parks, and bodies that had simply been left on the streets for feral dogs to feed on. One day, they found a candle that someone must have dropped, and they regarded it as a treasure. Another time, they made it to the office building where Nikolai had worked. There they collected batteries, which he rigged up so that Nina’s parents’ house could have electricity for the first time in more than two months.
The Russians started distributing basic foodstuffs and hygiene supplies at what had been a big-box store called Metro, which now doubled as an office of the United Russia Party. When it opened, at ten in the morning, the soldiers played the Russian national anthem. Nikolai and Nina went there to get a sim card that connected to a working network. They talked with a friend who told them that she was in St. Petersburg. On June 5th, they boarded a bus provided by the occupying authorities to Taganrog, a city just across the border in Russia.
That night, they slept on cots in a gym, shocked to be in an intact building with working electricity. Staff told Nikolai and Nina that refugees, as they were now called, were assigned to cities. Posters on the walls advertised remote places. Nina’s friend in St. Petersburg told them about volunteers who could arrange transportation to wherever they wanted to go. Soon, they had tickets to St. Petersburg. Most of the people who aided them in Russia were opposed to the war, but a woman who helped set them up with an apartment turned out to believe that Russian troops were “liberating Ukraine.”
Nina’s parents belong to a minority of Ukrainian citizens who loom large in the Russian imagination: staunch supporters of Putin. Nina grew up watching Russian television. During Putin’s annual New Year’s address, her mother would say to the screen, “Vovochka, when will you come and get us?” Nina was nine when she realized that she didn’t live in Russia. As Russian troops entered Mariupol, her mother, who had spent weeks cowering in her home while bombs fell, went outside to welcome them. “We have been waiting for you for thirty years,” she said.
Nikolai never challenged Nina’s parents—he didn’t want to be impolite. Once he and Nina got to Russia, though, he told her that he thought both countries are corrupt, run by clans of men driven by economic self-interest. But Russia, he said, is more corrupt, and ruled by a single clan, while Ukraine is run by several competing ones. It’s a cynical position—not as cynical as the claim that both sides of the war are equally culpable, as I heard some displaced Ukrainians say, but cynical enough to enable Nikolai and Nina to choose a place to live without regard for national loyalties.
Nikolai and Nina received temporary refugee status in Russia. Authorities often pressure Ukrainians to apply for Russian citizenship, but Nikolai worried that doing so would subject him to conscription. Russian officials frequently tell Ukrainians that they can’t get medical care without citizenship. After Nikolai and Nina’s spring in besieged Mariupol, their teeth were rotting. Nina had chronic tonsillitis. Nikolai developed acid-reflux disease so severe that it required surgery. As they neared the first anniversary of living in Russia, they started considering seeking psychological help. “What if we turn out to have P.T.S.D.?” Nikolai said.
Ksusha Reitsen, a forty-two-year-old psychologist, left Moscow during the first week of the war and is now living in Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia. She counsels displaced Ukrainians in Russia. Many of the people she sees ask why they can’t stop crying. They didn’t cry when they feared for their lives, or when they saw people maimed and killed. They had acted decisively amid carnage and terror, but now, relatively safe from harm, they tell Reitsen that they don’t know what to do next, and that they weep constantly. None of this is unusual, Reitsen tells them. But she rarely uses the term “post-traumatic stress disorder,” because there is nothing “post” about it: their trauma is ongoing.
Over time, Reitsen also began providing support for the volunteers. Some of them fear that displaced people will blame them, as Russians, for what has happened to them. More often, they face the opposite problem—an inability to process inordinate gratitude. Then, there is the difficulty of speaking to Ukrainians who want to stay in Russia. One woman had fled her town in eastern Ukraine after it had been occupied. At first, she headed to the western part of the country. Once there, she faced disrespect and outright insults for being a Russian speaker. After a few months, she moved to Moscow, where she intends to remain.
A volunteer in St. Petersburg told me that she thinks of her work as paying reparations, and that the political stances of the refugees she helps are none of her business. “There is a part of their brain that stores factual information: their house was bombed out of existence,” she said. “And here we are, going to a charity shop to pick up some clothes because they have none, and we are walking back to a place that some kind people have opened to them so that they have a roof over their heads, and suddenly they say, ‘Look at how great Putin is. He is going to build us a new city. He is a strong leader. I’ll have a new apartment.’ ” But the volunteer was also aware that some people may be saying what they think will keep them safe, rather than what they really think, if they are in any condition to think at all.
Another volunteer in St. Petersburg told me she was struck that Russia was the preferred destination of so many people escaping the war zone. She called what she’d observed in them “Mariupol syndrome,” a combination of trauma, despair, and an understandable desire to rationalize their decisions. “Even people with staunchly pro-Ukrainian views say that neither side had mercy for civilians,” the volunteer said. Several people from Mariupol told me, by way of justification, that Russian soldiers had been misled into thinking that civilians had left the city, so they didn’t realize that they were killing noncombatants. Nikolai said that the Russian forces were using maps published in 1968, which didn’t reflect subsequent residential construction. People often told me these kinds of things alongside stories that seemed to contradict them—most of them, for example, recalled Russian or pro-Russian troops coming to the cellars where they sheltered during the shelling.
Olga, who is forty, worked as a nurse at a dialysis clinic in Mariupol. Four days after the war began, she and her husband, their sons, who were seven and ten, and Olga’s mother, who was seventy, started living in the clinic. About fifty patients and a half-dozen other medical personnel moved in, too. Water from a nearby pool allowed them to continue providing dialysis for a month; after that, a nurse guided some of the patients out of the clinic. Those who were sickest died. The morgue was overflowing, so Olga and her colleagues put the bodies in an empty ward. On March 28th, the day after the dialysis stopped, Olga’s husband went to deliver some water to family friends, who were expecting a baby. He didn’t come back. Olga’s elder son started having trouble sleeping; he kept crying. When a building in the hospital complex was struck by a bomb, the people who remained in the clinic moved into the basement.
Less than two weeks later, Olga told me, pro-Russian forces “evacuated us, for which we are very grateful.” Somewhere around Donetsk, Olga got cell reception. Her godmother had found a photograph of Olga’s husband on a local Telegram channel: he had been shot in the back. Olga turned around and headed toward Mariupol with her sons, while her mother continued on to St. Petersburg, where Olga’s sister lives. Olga wasn’t allowed back into the city, but she managed to arrange for her husband’s body to be brought to a suburb. She showed the body to her children, so that they would know their father hadn’t abandoned them. They buried him and left for St. Petersburg.
Olga has since received Russian citizenship. Volunteers helped her get an apartment and a job at a private clinic. She has fallen out of touch with some of her closest friends, who are in Western Europe. “They are all under the spell of this war,” she told me. “That’s all they talk about.” Olga doesn’t speak with her children about the war. She told them that a “bad man” had killed their father. As we talked, she kept repeating, “I’ve lived this war.” I understood: if Olga went to Western Europe, or back to Mariupol, she’d still feel like she was in the middle of the war. All she wanted was to be done with it. The only place on the planet where there was no Russian-Ukrainian war was Russia.
What the Russian government touts as humanitarian work human-rights defenders call a war crime. Many Ukrainians I spoke to described situations in which it seemed that the only way to escape death was to board buses provided by Russian authorities, bound for Russia or Russian-occupied areas. In a report from September, 2022, Human Rights Watch described such incidents as “illegal forcible transfers.” Under international law, a forcible transfer or a deportation—the former defines movement of people within national borders and the latter across them—is a war crime. (The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia convicted at least three people of the crime of forcible transfer of Bosnian Muslims.) The report underscored that this war crime “includes a transfer in circumstances where a person consents to move only because they fear consequences such as violence, duress, or detention if they remain, and the occupying power is taking advantage of a coercive environment to transfer them.” Displacing or moving civilians cannot be justified on humanitarian grounds, the report went on, “if the humanitarian crisis triggering the displacement is itself the result of unlawful activity by the occupying power.”
Some Ukrainians who spoke to Human Rights Watch said that they voluntarily made the decision to leave for Russia. They wanted to evade Ukrainian travel restrictions, which require most men under the age of sixty to stay in the country; to be with relatives; or to find work and safety in a Russian-speaking country. Many of the volunteers’ current cases involve people who have come from areas that were flooded after the destruction of the Kakhovka Dam, in June, and ill and elderly people who need to travel to Russia for medical care that they cannot obtain in Russian-occupied Ukraine. Some of them are going to Russia to die. In a narrow sense, their decision to leave is voluntary, but only if one doesn’t take into account the reasons for the conditions they are escaping.
Oleksandra Matviichuk, the head of the Ukrainian Center for Civil Liberties, which shared the Nobel Peace Prize last year, believes that Russia’s fundamental crime predates the displacement of civilians. From the earliest days of the war, Matviichuk said, Russia systematically violated international law by failing to provide humanitarian corridors for evacuation. To her and other Ukrainian human-rights defenders, Russia’s refusal to allow safe passage is part of a larger crime of genocide. The indiscriminate shelling and bombardment, the “evacuation” of people to Russian territory, and even the pressure on Ukrainians to accept Russian citizenship stem from an intention to erase Ukraine as a nation.
In March, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Putin and Maria Lvova-Belova, Russia’s ombudswoman for children’s rights, charging them in connection with the deportation and forcible transfer of Ukrainian children. Ukrainian authorities have said that hundreds of thousands of children may have been illegally transferred to Russia. I first heard about such mass transfers late last year, from two separate Russian activists working in exile. Both told me that Russian authorities had moved entire children’s residential institutions from occupied Ukrainian territories to Russia.
No one knows how many children have been affected. Before the war, according to Human Rights Watch, about thirty-two thousand children were institutionalized in parts of Ukraine that have been occupied by Russia. Some of those children were evacuated to western Ukraine. When I asked Daria Herasymchuk, the Ukrainian President’s commissioner for children’s rights, for the number of institutionalized children who were deported, she responded in general terms that Ukraine has been working to reduce the number of children in institutions—a hint, perhaps, that Ukrainian authorities would prefer not to disclose an embarrassing statistic. A February, 2023, study conducted under the auspices of the Yale School of Public Health concluded that at least forty-three facilities in Russia held about six thousand children transferred from Ukraine, though some of those children have gone back to Ukraine. In June, iStories, a Russian investigative outlet that operates in exile, reported that more than a thousand Ukrainian children had been placed with temporary guardians in Russia. It’s unclear how many of those guardians are related to the children.
Unlike with prisoners of war, there are no direct, formal government-to-government deals to negotiate the return of the missing children. (Responding to a query from this magazine, the Ukrainian government called the situation unprecedented and said that there is no mechanism to facilitate such negotiations.) Dunja Mijatović, the Council of Europe’s commissioner for human rights, told me that leaving this effort largely to civil society is risky. “Time is running out, and the danger is that these children will disappear,” she said. One complication is that the children fall into several distinct categories, of which one of the largest—children who were institutionalized in Ukraine—has relatively few advocates. Another category includes children who lived in places such as Kherson and some suburbs of Kharkiv, which were under occupation last summer, when Russian authorities offered families the opportunity to send children to recreational camps in Russia, occupied Crimea, or Belarus. When the Ukrainian military subsequently liberated these towns and villages, parents were separated from their children by the front line. Herasymchuk said that this was “the most common scenario for the abduction of Ukrainian children.” Groups of activists on both sides have worked to help mothers travel east to Russia, usually by first travelling west to Poland. (In most cases, fathers cannot legally leave Ukraine.) In a six-month period, hundreds of such trips took place, each organized separately and each hindered not only by the legal and logistical hurdles but by the particular social and economic vulnerabilities that made families prone to handing their children over to strangers in the first place. Rachel Denber, the deputy director of the Europe and Central Asia division of Human Rights Watch, said that the “nearly insurmountable” obstacles parents have faced trying to retrieve their children are additional evidence that what Russia has called “recreation” is likely forced transfer or deportation.
Grigory Mikhnov-Vaytenko, an Orthodox clergyman in St. Petersburg who coördinated a number of these rescue operations—he was forced out of the Moscow Patriarchate in 2014, for expressing his opposition to the first invasion of Ukraine—told me he believed that nearly all the children in this category had been returned to Ukraine, some after they had been separated from their families for nine months. Herasymchuk, the children’s-rights commissioner, said that this was not true. It’s possible that neither of them has complete information. Denber noted that, even if all the children in this category have been returned, their initial transfer to Russian-occupied territories or Russia, in at least some instances, still likely constituted a war crime.
The International Criminal Court’s decision to focus on cases of deported Ukrainian children makes sense. The Russian state’s apparently concerted effort to “Russify” Ukrainian children by placing them in a Russian-speaking environment, giving them Russian citizenship, and putting them up for adoption by Russian families bolsters the case for framing Russia’s war as genocidal. And no one would argue that children can voluntarily decide to move to Russia. Many cases appear clear-cut. Three siblings from Mariupol, for example, were taken to Moscow while their father, who had been raising them alone, was held for screening.
The number of missing children cited by the Ukrainian authorities likely includes cases that do not constitute war crimes. A teen-ager who went to spend winter vacation with his grandfather in Russian-occupied Donetsk fell ill with pneumonia and was hospitalized. By the time he was discharged, the war had begun, and he couldn’t leave Donetsk to reunite with his mother. A woman, originally from Russia, separated from her Ukrainian husband and moved back to Russia with their two children. She died of cancer just as Russia launched its invasion. The father faced a custody fight with the kids’ grandmother, who supported Russia’s war and saw her former son-in-law as the enemy.
Other cases are harder to categorize. A woman I’ll call Rosa was undergoing surgery when Ukrainian forces retook her town from the Russians. When she returned home, several days later, her husband, Roman (not his real name), and their three sons—nine-year-old twins and a seven-year-old—were gone, forcibly “evacuated” to Russia. Rosa travelled west, to Poland, where she was hospitalized with complications from her surgery. In the meantime, Russian lawyers filed queries on her behalf, but all relevant agencies said that they had no records of Roman or the children. Finally, local volunteers from the Russian city of Voronezh read a description of Rosa’s family and recognized Roman, whom they’d met after he crossed the border weeks earlier. But the children were not with him; they were in a camp in Belgorod, another Russian region. Rosa’s lawyer, who works in exile, showed me a text message that Rosa had sent in November, 2022, more than two months after her ordeal began. “Hello,” she wrote from Russia. “I can tell you that I have found my family and I think I will stay here with them.” Her youngest son has epilepsy, she explained, and he was receiving treatment: “I hope I’m not breaking any laws about moving to another country given the war situation with Ukraine.” The lawyer assured Rosa that she wasn’t breaking any laws.
“Irealized that having principles is a privilege,” one of the Russian volunteers told me, as she described coming to terms with the decision, made by many of the Ukrainians she has helped, to remain in Russia. Not staying, or not going to Russia in the first place, can require nearly superhuman determination. Anton, then a twenty-year-old economics major, spent the first few months of the invasion in Izyum, a city outside Kharkiv. He tried to sign up for Territorial Defense but was turned away for lack of experience. The Russians occupied Izyum, but not before destroying much of it. Anton’s twelve-year-old sister lost her ability to eat; every time she tried, she gagged. Anton’s parents decided that they had to get out. The only direction available was east. On March 13th, they headed for St. Petersburg, where Anton’s aunt lives, but Anton stayed behind.
Izyum continued to experience both occupation and bombardment. Anton heard of Russian forces throwing people out of their houses and witnessed them robbing stores, and he saw a car full of dead bodies. Trucks with loudspeakers blared a message that Kharkiv and Kyiv were already under Russian control and that resistance was futile. In March, a bomb hit his house, destroying the bathroom. Anton was in the cellar, and survived.
He hitched a ride, then another, heading toward Kharkiv. Russian soldiers at checkpoints kept telling him to turn around. “Go to Russia,” he recalled one of them saying. “You’ll be better off there. Here, everyone is a Nazi.” At one checkpoint, soldiers put a bag over his head and shoved him into a vehicle. “We’re taking you to be killed,” someone said. Anton was roughed up. A soldier put out a cigarette on his skin. He was left alone and instructed not to make a sound. Confined to a small space, with his hands tied, Anton soiled himself. His only thought was “Please don’t let them kill me.” After a couple of days, he was driven a few miles away and dumped on the side of the road. Eventually, he made his way home.
In May, Anton went to pick up what the Russians called “humanitarian aid.” He was approaching a queue when a rocket hit. He saw body parts flying through the air.
He felt that he couldn’t stay in Izyum, so he took his car—he had hidden it deep in the family’s yard, away from the Russian occupiers—and drove toward St. Petersburg. When he stopped at a gas station, a cashier who saw his Ukrainian license plates offered him free coffee and a cookie and said that the Russian Army was defending Ukrainians against the Americans. Anton felt sick.
The day after Anton arrived at his aunt’s house, F.S.B. agents came to the door and took him for “processing.” He didn’t want to ask for temporary refuge or Russian citizenship, though he was pressured to apply. Throughout the next few weeks, the F.S.B. dragged him in for interrogations more than a dozen times.
Anton got a job as a janitor at a bank, which, for an economics major, felt particularly humiliating. One day, a female staff member made a derogatory comment about the quality of his work. Anton tossed a wet rag across the room and screamed insults at the other bank employees. He drove to the Russian-Estonian border, but his only identity document was a birth certificate: he had lost his passport in the preceding months. Russian border guards made him wait for nine hours in a tiny room, and then told him that he couldn’t cross.
“How can you not let me out?” he asked. “I’m a citizen of a different country.”
“What country?” an officer asked, then answered his own question: “An enemy country.”
Anton returned to St. Petersburg and found the people who could help him. Someone got him a bus ticket to a city near another Russian border. A woman picked him up in a car, which was already carrying two passengers, a couple from Mariupol. Anton started talking about what he had experienced in Izyum. The driver responded that Ukrainian Nazis were to blame. Now Anton felt like a hostage, and thought, This time I’ll definitely be killed. Instead, she drove him to a place where he could safely cross the border. His journey included a train, a car, a dinghy, and a bus.
Anton made his way to France, where a friend had immigrated before the war. By the time we spoke, he had been living in Toulon for several months and had resumed his studies, remotely. But he still had no documents. At the Ukrainian consulate, he was told that he should return to Ukraine: he was, after all, an able-bodied young man, and his country needed more of those. “He hasn’t seen war,” Anton said of his interlocutor. While we were in touch, he travelled to Berlin, where he could apply for a Ukrainian passport. The journey by plane takes hours, but Anton, without any documents, was forced to use a bus and a train, which took days. After submitting his application, he went back to Toulon, where he completed his final exams and graduated from his university in Kharkiv.
Like others who have escaped the occupation, Anton just wants to be someplace where there is no war. Most of all, he wants that place to be Ukraine. “I just want victory to come as soon as possible so that I can return to Ukraine and work in my chosen field, to rebuild the economy,” he said. His parents, who are still in St. Petersburg, want the same thing. He is worried, though, that if Russia loses the war they may never be allowed to leave. ♦
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