The transfer of hundreds of thousands of people from Ukraine to Russian territory is part of a deliberate and systemic strategy by Putin's government according to Kremlin documents.
Papers of an “emergency mass order” describe the “distribution” of 100,000 Ukrainians to some of the most remote and impoverished regions of Russia.
None was to be sent to the capital, Moscow.
READ MORE: 'The mouth of a bear' - Ukrainian refugees sent to Russia
Interviews with refugees, media reports and official statements verify that Ukrainians have received temporary accommodation in more than two dozen Russian cities and localities, and were even taken to an unused chemical plant 150 kilometres from the nearest major town.
One refugee, Bohdan Honcharov, said that about 50 Ukrainians he travelled 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, at the other end of the country. Russian border authorities did not let her father out of Russia because he still had Soviet citizenship from the old times, along with Ukrainian residency documents.
Many Ukrainians stay in Russia because while they are technically free to leave, they have nowhere to go, no money, no documents or no way to cross the distances in a sprawling country twice the size of the United States.
Some fear that if they return, Ukraine will prosecute them for going to the enemy — a fear encouraged by Russian officials.
Others speak Russian, with family there and ties that they feel are stronger even than their links to Ukraine.
One woman said that her husband was Russian and she felt more welcome in Russia.
Lyudmila Bolbad’s family walked out of Mariupol and ended up in Taganrog in Russia. The family speaks Russian, and the city of Khabarovsk, nearly 10,000 kilometres from Ukraine, was offering jobs, special payments for moving to the Far East and eventual Russian citizenship.
With nothing left to lose, they took the 9-day train trip across some of the world’s most deserted territory to a city far closer to Japan than Ukraine.
Bolbad and her husband found work in a local factory, much as she was doing in the Azovstal steel mill back in Mariupol. Little else has gone as they’d hoped.
They handed over their Ukrainian passports in exchange for promises of Russian citizenship without hesitation, only to discover that landlords would not rent to Ukrainians without a valid identity document.
The promised payments to buy a home are slow to come, and they are stranded with hundreds of others from Mariupol in a rundown hotel with barely edible food. But Bolbad plans to stay in Russia and thinks Ukraine would label her a traitor if she went back.
“Now we are here ... we’re trying to return to a normal life somehow, to encourage ourselves to start our life from scratch,” she said.
“If you survived (the war), you deserve it and need to move forward, not stop.”
Russia’s reasons for deporting Ukrainians are not entirely clear, according to Oleksandra Matviichuk, the head of the Center for Civil Liberties in Ukraine. One goal appears to be to use the 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,” she said. “Russia tries to use these people in a quasi-legal war against Ukraine to collect some testimonies from people who have no right to say no because they are afraid for their safety.”
The deportation of local civilians from occupied territories also clears the way for Russians to replace them with loyalists, as was the case in Crimea, Matviichuk said. And Russia may want Russian-speaking Ukrainians to populate its isolated regions with depressed economies.
Ivan Zavrazhnov describes the terror of being in Russia and not knowing where he would wind up.
A producer for a pro-Ukrainian television network in Mariupol, he made it through filtration only because officials never bothered to plug in his dead cell phone. He managed to escape, and ended up on the docked ferry Isabelle in the city of Narva in Estonia with about 2,000 other Ukrainians, nearly all of whom left Russia.
“This is some 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 ... an aggressor state, and you end up on this territory. ... I did not have the feeling that I was safe in Russia.”
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