She said most of the men were ordered to stay behind, including the disabled. Only those few men who had to take care of large families with small children could leave. Soldiers took a group of about 90 people to a local school, some of the walls of which are still intact, and the next morning put them all on buses heading to an unknown destination.
The young woman and her family were among several thousand residents of Mariupol who Ukrainian officials estimated were forcibly transferred to Russia through the separatist-controlled republics of eastern Ukraine.
She described being taken to what the Russian military called a “purification camp” – a spacious military tent with rows of men in uniform calling civilians one by one. Each “temporarily displaced”, as the soldiers referred to them, were photographed from all sides and took their fingerprints. The Ukrainians were then asked to hand over their phones and passwords to another officer, who entered their data into his computer, including their contacts. The next step was the interrogation.
Satellite images and videos verified by The Washington Post show that in recent weeks, Russian-backed forces have begun building a camp in Bezimin in separatist-held eastern Ukraine.
“Throughout the journey, we were treated like captives or some criminal. You have no will,” said the woman, who spoke on condition of anonymity due to safety concerns about a relative in Russia. How can you resist this? Even if you have a chance to escape, everything around you has been destroyed, and there is nowhere to hide.”
After the Russians began bombing the suburb of Mariupol in the early days of the invasion, the young woman and her family took refuge in an underground shelter. She said that when she first came to light two weeks later, she could barely recognize the landscape in her hometown.
“There were fallen trees, bricks and rubble,” she said in an interview. “I watched a woman from my condo die in front of me shortly after because her heart couldn’t take it.”
Everyone in her group was determined to stay until the fighting ended or they were evacuated by Ukrainian forces towards the inner city of Zaporizhia or elsewhere in the country. But with Russian forces besieging the strategic port of Mariupol, food and water were quickly running out, and the bombing was getting more intense, limiting humanitarian access to the area.
Her family remembers her grandfather, a former physician, for supplies. They cooked any produce he found over an open fire and brought it to them at the shelter by bicycle.
As the days passed, more and more homes were destroyed. Russian soldiers gradually occupied the remaining buildings, until the Russians finally reached the shelter and delivered what aid workers say has become a recurring alarm.
said one of the volunteers with the Departure Assistance Fund, which addresses the needs of people who have moved to Russia from Ukraine.
“People agree because they have nothing, no electricity, no food, no heating,” said the volunteer, who was not mentioned by The Post for his safety. “So people who are hungry have to evacuate somewhere.”
“You should be grateful”
She said that when the young woman and others were bussed away from her hometown, the drivers appeared disoriented, repeatedly faced with damaged roads and forced to change lanes. Finally, after a long and complicated journey, they arrived at the “filter camp” near the Russian border town of Novoazovsk, which in quiet times is less than an hour’s drive from Mariupol.
When soldiers questioned her, she said, they were interested to know if she had any relatives in the Ukrainian army or family who had remained in Ukraine. They also wanted to know her opinion of Mariupol’s powers.
“Then they add you to three different databases and take you further, but they don’t tell you exactly where they lead you,” she recounted.
“At every stage of the way, they tell you that you should be grateful that you were given a sandwich or evacuated somewhere else, and that you were freed,” she said, adding, “You were freed from what?”
Ukrainian officials first accused Russia of forcibly displacing people from Mariupol more than a week ago.
“What the occupiers are doing today is familiar to the older generation, who witnessed the horrific events of World War II, when the Nazis forcibly captured people,” Mariupol Mayor Vadim Boychenko said earlier this month. according to To the official Telegram channel of the Mariupol City Council.
“It is difficult to imagine that in the twenty-first century people will be forcibly deported to another country. Not only did the Russian forces destroy our peaceful Mariupol, they went even further and began to deport the inhabitants of Mariupol.
Russia denies forcibly removing anyone from Ukraine. “Such reports are lies,” the Kremlin said Monday. Russian government officials, as well as state television journalists, claim that Ukrainian “nationalist battalions” are using Mariupol residents as “human shields” and refusing to let them leave, and that Russian forces rescue them and take them to safety outside Ukraine. .
The Russian Defense Ministry said last week that nearly 420,000 people had been evacuated to Russia “from dangerous areas of Ukraine, the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics” since the start of the war. It is unclear how many were forcibly removed.
Officials from the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic, which Russia recently recognized as an independent country, have been providing daily updates on evacuees via Bezymin. On Monday, the regional defense headquarters said that 272 civilians, including 66 children, were evacuated from Mariupol.
A week ago, Russia’s state newspaper Rossiiskaya Gazeta reported that 5,000 people had been treated at the camp in Bizymin. The report said the people underwent comprehensive security checks to prevent “Ukrainian nationalists from infiltrating Russia disguised as refugees in order to escape and avoid punishment”.
Separation from the group
Shortly after being treated with several hundred people from other convoys that joined them, they were escorted across the border into Russia, where the woman was identified and questioned again, this time by officers from the FSB, Russia’s Federal Security Service. She said the interrogation was much harsher, And that officers pressured her about accessing her social media accounts and whether she knew anything about the movements of the Ukrainian military.
The convoy was eventually taken to Taganrog, a Russian port city on the Sea of Azov. There were only people from Mariupol who were told that their final destination would be Vladimir, a town more than 600 miles to the east.
However, the woman managed to break away from the group in Taganrog by convincing the Russian soldiers that she had a friend close to her who was ready to shelter her family. She said she refused to sign any documents that would help grant her family official refugee status in Russia. She said many of the others in her motorcade stayed behind.
“In many cases, people have the opportunity to go further, but they can only take advantage of this opportunity if they have relatives in Russia, since Ukrainian bank cards do not work and people do not have money,” said a second volunteer from Helping. to leave the fund. “If people are unlucky and don’t have rubles or dollars – few of them – and refuse to help the Russian authorities, they are in a very difficult situation.”
Many people displaced from Mariupol were given only a few minutes to collect their belongings and often forgot to take vital documents, making it difficult to leave Russia afterwards. Some were too emotionally exhausted to plan escape routes and pressured Russia to go to temporary housing, where they could become stranded.
The woman said that shortly after leaving alone with her family, she saw a local TV report about one of the An elderly woman from her Mariupol shelter bound for Vladimir by train was given an intravenous injection. The report stated that the Russian authorities are providing her with medical care.
“But she needed an IV because her house was bombed, and she and everyone else was denied the right to speak about it directly,” she said.
The young woman said she was surprised to find out that ordinary Russians, like those she met while traveling to Moscow, believed these kinds of lies about the war and repeated Kremlin propaganda.
“It is horrible to find yourself in some kind of collective dream of people in Russia,” she said. I was quite sure that most people in Russia did not support the war. But [once I got there]I felt like there was some kind of 100 percent support, and I got sick of walking around and seeing “Z” stickers on the cars,” she added, referring to the “Z” symbol that had become a domestic display of support for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The woman, along with her mother, brother, and grandmother eventually managed to leave Russia by crossing into the European Union on foot.
But her grandfather, who brought them food in the shelter, remained in Mariupol, despite her efforts to save him.
“He thinks it’s his land,” she said. “They don’t see themselves living anywhere else.”
Robin Dixon in Riga, Latvia, and Joyce Soohyun Lee in Washington contributed to this report.
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