Some Ukrainians take different view of Russia: As haven from war

It took nearly 100 days of subsistence in a dank basement while mechanized armies clashed back-and-forth in the streets above them before Alyona Lyashova fled the devastated city of Mariupol with her husband and two children.

For them, the final straw was news, in early June, that the bodies of over 200 of their neighbors had been pulled from the ruins of a nearby building. “Our city smelled of death, and all around were the graves of our neighbors,” she says. “The buildings were blackened and ruined. There was no water, electricity, or phone service. Nothing for us. Even though the fighting seemed to be over, it was impossible to even think of staying there.”

Ms. Lyashova and her family left for the nearby Russian city of Rostov, using an evacuation service organized by the Russians, where they joined thousands of other Mariupol residents who were promised accommodation, food, temporary documents, and distribution to more permanent places around the country that would grant jobs, homes, and, if they wished, a fast-track to Russian citizenship.

While precise figures are difficult to come by, about 12 million Ukrainians are thought to have been displaced by the war, and as many as 5 million have left the country. Most have headed west, to European countries that have flung open their doors to take them in.

But about 2.3 million Ukrainians, mostly from the war-torn and Russian-speaking east, have arrived in Russia since late February, according to the Russian Ministry of Emergency Situations. Though the Ukrainian government, backed by the United States, alleges that many Ukrainians have been “forcibly deported” to Russia and subjected to various kinds of abuse, several war refugees, including Ms. Lyashova, and the volunteers who work with them, offered different accounts at an aid center run by the Russian Orthodox Church in Moscow in mid-July.

Although most of those who seek refuge in Russia hail from the Russian-speaking parts of eastern Ukraine, it would probably be a mistake to view their choice as “voting with their feet” in some neo-Cold War sense, experts say. For many, Russia is just an enduring fact, familiar and relatively safe, and it’s possible for them to blend in easily.

“Almost every family in Ukraine has close friends or relatives in Russia. So many come to Russia because they have people here who can help,” says Mikhail Chernysh, an expert with the official Institute of Sociology in Moscow. “It’s not ideological. There can be political disagreements within families, even quite bitter ones, but they still help each other. ... Russia is big, it has demographic problems, and many regions have serious labor shortages. I know the logic sounds strange, but an influx of friendly population is welcome in many parts of the country. Russia has the capacity to receive them, offer opportunities, and it’s nothing to do with politics.”

“It’s just where they perceive safety lies”

Ms. Lyashova and her family actually wanted to go to Germany, where her godmother lives, and they heard conditions for Ukrainian refugees are optimal. But they headed east, not west, for one simple reason.

“My husband, Eduard, is of military age. Under present Ukrainian laws, he would not have been allowed to leave the country, and might have been drafted,” she says. “Our top priority is to stay together as a family, no matter what. So, we came to Russia. We still hope, maybe, to go to Europe, but for now we’ve found good conditions. We’re swimming with the current.”

But it was rough to start. Arriving at the border, Ms. Lyashova and her husband were aggressively questioned by Russian FSB security police for about 20 minutes, she says, before being allowed to proceed.

“Everyone was getting interrogated. It was 2 a.m. My children couldn’t sleep. We were met by volunteers who were helpful, but it was not a pleasant experience,” says Ms. Lyashova. “I think the FSB were trying to find out my attitude toward Ukrainian nationalism. But I’m not political. I’m a mother. I’m against the war. I want peace, and I told them so. My husband, Eduard, was a railway worker for 15 years and never had anything to do with the military. So, they let us go.”

The family stayed with distant relatives in Rostov for several days before heading on to Moscow, where church volunteers helped them to get temporary documents, and Eduard found a job in his profession as a mechanic. Ms. Lyashova says she has seen no help from Russian state institutions, but that most people they’ve met along the way have been very kind.

The Russian Orthodox Church is one of many organizations, public and private, that have recruited volunteers, collected donations, and set up facilities to aid the new flood of refugees. The Russian Red Cross says it has set up 130 reception points in 57 regions, and mobilized hundreds of volunteers to help refugees with everything from immediate needs to long-term settlement. As for the latter problem, the Kremlin appears to have turned implementation over to regional governments, who are obliged to take in a certain quota of refugees and put them up in hotels, sanitariums, and summer camps, until more permanent arrangements can be made.

Danil Makhnitsky, a political activist associated with the liberal-nationalist New People party whose mother’s family lives in Ukraine, has set up a volunteer organization that now works in 16 Russian regions and claims to have helped 15,000 new arrivals with food, clothing, temporary accommodation, and transportation.

“We have no connection with government, it’s all person to person. And we are just one of many groups doing this,” he says. “There are so many people coming from the war zone, and they all need help of every possible kind. Once they get past the border process, it’s mainly volunteer groups like ours who are there to help them. The federal government still doesn’t have a single central agency to coordinate this work.”

(Experts and volunteers do note that many of the problems encountered by more than a million refugees from the troubled Donbas who poured into Russia when the conflict first erupted eight years ago, including difficulties obtaining documents and legal status, have since been addressed by the Russian government.)

Mr. Makhnitsky says it’s not a mystery that many, especially in eastern Ukraine, would choose to flee to Russia. Three decades of independent Ukraine did little to instill a Ukrainian identity among people who had lived in Russian-led states for three centuries, he says. Of course large numbers of Ukrainian-minded people have headed westward to escape the danger, but lots of others opt for Russia, which is nearby and – he insists – welcoming.

“These are basically Russian people,” he says of the refugees he works with. “They may carry Ukrainian passports and even be ethnically Ukrainian, but they are culturally and linguistically indistinguishable from Russians. It’s not a political choice, it’s just where they perceive safety lies.”

“People with broken destinies”

Nina Milovidova, the head of the church-run Moscow refugee center, says that when they started in early March they were seeing about 15 people per day, mostly from the separatist republics of Luhansk and Donetsk, many of whom already had Russian passports. Now the flow has swollen to around 250 daily, and they are mostly people with Ukrainian passports from places like Kharkiv, Kherson, and the Donbas war zone.

She says the center has about 500 volunteers working with Moscow-area arrivals, and since March they have raised over 200 million rubles ($3.6 million) to cover costs of everything they provide, including translation, legal assistance, psychological support, job-seeking, and other services.

“We try to greet each person with warmth. It’s very painful. These people are in trouble. They don’t seem angry – at least I have not encountered aggression – but they are people with broken destinies, who are in distress. We try our best to help,” she says.

Ms. Milovidova believes the majority would prefer to return to their homes one day. But some, especially those with close relatives, are planning to stay in Russia. Mr. Makhnitsky says his impression is that about half the refugees he meets would rather remain in Russia, while a quarter – mainly older people – hope to return to their native places if there is a prospect for peaceful life, while another quarter want to move to Europe or beyond.

For those who plan to remain in Russia, President Vladimir Putin made things much simpler in early July by issuing a decree that entitles any Ukrainian to apply for Russian citizenship and receive it within three months.

“It’s becoming really easy,” says Rimma Mulkidzhanyan, a Moscow lawyer who works pro bono with refugees. “A Ukrainian citizen need only obtain temporary residence in Russia, which is a fairly simple procedure, then apply for citizenship. ... The government seems quite serious about expediting this, and it looks like it can work quickly in most cases.”

Several of the refugees interviewed for this story said prospects for returning depend upon whether the Russians will rebuild the shattered towns and cities they have fled from, and create prospects for a decent life. Few seem to care whether the government will be Russian or Ukrainian.

“Who am I? Well, I was born in Ukraine, so I am Ukrainian. But I am from the Donbas, and we’ve always been something different, not Russian, not Ukrainian,” says Ms. Lyashova. “I don’t know. I want to live in peace, with my family, to see my children grow up. If Mariupol is restored, of course we’ll go back there. It’s so hard to say anything right now. We just want to survive.”