Deported into Russia, Oleksandr and Bogdan traveled hundreds of miles to escape to Norway.
On March 17, the International Criminal Court announced an arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin and Children’s Rights Commissioner Maria Alekseyevna Lvova-Belova. The court deemed that Putin and Lvova-Belova are “allegedly responsible for the war crime of unlawful deportation of population (children) and that of unlawful transfer of population (children) from occupied areas of Ukraine to the Russian Federation (under articles 8(2)(a)(vii) and 8(2)(b)(viii) of the Rome Statute),” and urged countries to enforce the warrant should either of the Russian officials attempt to visit other nations. On April 5, Edith M. Lederer of the Associated Press reported, “Russia’s commissioner for children’s rights, who is being sought for war crimes for deporting children from Ukraine, told a U.N. meeting Wednesday that the children were taken for their safety and Moscow is coordinating with international organizations to return them to their families.”
Ukrainian children are not the only vulnerable group to have been forcibly relocated to Russia since Russian troops invaded Ukraine in February 2022; 200 residents of a nursing home in the Kherson region, for instance, were also sent to Russia in November 2022.
Ukrainian children are not the only vulnerable group to have been forcibly relocated to Russia since Russian troops invaded Ukraine in February 2022; 200 residents of a nursing home in the Kherson region, for instance, were also sent to Russia in November 2022. Many of them were long-time residents of the nursing home, and most had disabilities. Two of those residents recently escaped Russia and spoke with The Real News about their experiences living in occupied Kakhovka and being forced to transfer to Russian nursing homes.
In the days following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, the Kherson region became a brutal fighting ground. Russian soldiers advanced swiftly and had the region under control by mid-March. The occupation of Kherson marked the first major offensive victory for the Russian military during the early days of the war. After the city fell, the towns surrounding Kherson were immediately occupied, including Kakhovka, a port city on the Dnieper River in the northeastern part of the region. On June 6, Kakhovka gained global attention after Russia’s alleged bombing of the city’s dam which is one of the biggest industrial and ecological disasters in Europe in decades, according to CNN.
In response to Russian aggression, many residents in Kherson held protests in the streets, screaming that Kherson was part of Ukraine. However, their cries were no match for Russian military might, and many who could not fight or flee were subjected to the filtration facilities and forced deportations that Russia has used throughout the war to push Ukranians out of occupied areas and to absorb them as would-be Russian citizens. According to a July 13, 2022 press release from US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Ukrainians who have been deported claim they have been subject to “…threats, harassment, and incidents of torture by Russian security forces. During this process, Russian authorities also reportedly capture and store biometric and personal data, subject civilians to invasive searches and interrogations and coerce Ukrainian citizens into signing agreements to stay in Russia, hindering their ability to freely return home.”
Since then, the United Nations Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine (HRMMU) has been actively working to document instances involving such deportations. “The HRMMU is following allegations of forced transfers and deportations of civilians, both adults, and children, including those residing in institutionalized care facilities, to the territory occupied by the Russian Federation and to the Russian Federation,” wrote an HRMMU spokesperson in an email to The Real News.
“HRMMU is trying to corroborate information about the fate of 143 children and 803 adults from nine social care institutions in the occupied territory of Kherson region in 2022. These are mostly children and adults with disabilities and older people,” they said.
Bogdan, 35, was born in Kyiv but was placed in an orphanage in Oleshky, in Kherson Oblast, when he was four years old. When Bogdan aged out of the orphanage system at 17, he was moved into a home for the elderly in Oleshky, until he moved again to Kakhovka in 2013. “In our country, we were like outcasts who had to be shut up in a nursing home and not shown to anyone, not to people, and not to be seen either,” he said.
“We had already sit [sic] there, played, and thought, ‘Let’s go to bed.’ Just turned off the lights, lay down, and [then we] heard it—the first three rockets flew by, and there was a bang in the distance. We realized it was no joke, no exercise, the war had begun,” he said.
In 2016, 25-year-old Oleksandr moved into the Kakhovka nursing home as well. His room was on the same floor as Bogdan’s, and the pair became friends. Oleksandr has limited mobility in his limbs, and although he can do things like eat and operate his wheelchair by himself, he relies on nurses for day-to-day needs, like bathing and changing his clothes. Though he was born with this condition, Oleksander is still unsure of his diagnosis.
Recalling the beginning of the war, Bogdan said that he and friends were awake playing video games at the nursing home one night: “We had already sit [sic] there, played, and thought, ‘Let’s go to bed.’ Just turned off the lights, lay down, and [then we] heard it—the first three rockets flew by, and there was a bang in the distance. We realized it was no joke, no exercise, the war had begun,” he said.
“After those three rocket explosions, everything seemed to calm down. We went to bed, another couple of hours passed, and [then] they started hitting regularly. We dozed off, and when I woke up, I was already in the hallway, looking at everybody. Many had fear in their eyes. Many had no understanding of what was going on. And then we realized that there was no way back. This was war,” he added.
In the days that followed, Kakhovka was plunged into chaos. “I didn’t go into town much and the administration kept us inside,” Bogdan said. “They were afraid to let us out into the city. We started having problems with medicines and food because, to be honest, we didn’t have an honest director at the time.” According to Bogdan and Oleksandr, the director was stealing humanitarian aid and pension funds sent to the home.
Life under the Russian occupation led to food and medication shortages in Kakhovka. One resident at the nursing home began to buy critically needed supplies for his peers with the money he received from his sponsors in Kyiv. “When something was very necessary, for example, tablets for a toothache, or for the head, or something else, they sent money,” said Bogdan.
“Mostly [the elderly residents] needed medication, [for high blood] pressure [and] headaches. We had guys who needed very serious pills for epilepsy. There were such complications. Mostly we [helped] because our bosses weren’t nice, and they didn’t pay much attention to them. We felt very sorry for them,” he added.
As the war raged on, conditions in the nursing home began to deteriorate. According to Oleksander, the staff employed to care for the residents began to ally with Russian soldiers, who walked around the grounds of the home. Inside the building, the staff allegedly took down anything resembling Ukraine’s national colors, yellow and blue, and played Russian songs from their phones.
On Sept. 6, 2022, Ukraine launched a counteroffensive that enabled them to recapture nearly 3,500 square miles of land. In response to the defeat, on Sept. 30, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced a referendum vote that would lead to the annexation of four occupied territories—Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhiza, and Kherson. However, the West deemed the referendum a “sham,” with US President Joe Biden asserting that “The United States will never recognize Ukrainian territory as anything other than part of Ukraine.”
We dozed off, and when I woke up, I was already in the hallway, looking at everybody. Many had fear in their eyes. Many had no understanding of what was going on. And then we realized that there was no way back. This was war,” he added.
In the weeks that followed the referendum, a new director took over the nursing home. According to Bogdan, she too worked alongside Russian soldiers, this time to prepare the residents to be deported over the border. She allegedly told the residents, “Let’s go to Sochi for the winter, have a rest, take a minimum of things,” meaning a few necessary items such as medication and clothing. The rest would have to be left behind.
Once part of Georgia, Sochi’s winter temperatures are far warmer than Ukraine’s. The men claim the director said moving to Sochi would be a vacation, that residents did not have to take many belongings, and that they would return to Kakhovka in the spring. However, the men knew they would not be able to return if they left the nursing home.
Located on a hill overlooking the Dnieper River, Russian soldiers wanted to turn the nursing home into a military base, believing that, if they were stationed at the nursing home, they could stop Ukrainian advances before they began. At the time, Ukraine’s military was making rapid advances that eventually led to them retaking Kherson city.
As the fighting reached a turning point in Kherson, Oleksander claimed Russian soldiers were evicting people from their houses. “Everything that was on the bank, they occupied by themselves, including our boarding house,” he said.
Meanwhile, the two men claim that the director worked behind closed doors to prepare for the deportation of the nursing home residents to Russia. “In general, [the staff] were running to the passport office, signing some paperwork, all the time. They did not tell us anything. But three days before our deportation, we were very often visited by the director. She could come late at night. For three days, she went,” said Bogdan.
The deportation occurred on Nov. 5, 2022, six days before Ukraine’s military recaptured Kherson city. The day they were forced to leave, Bogdan said, “The director warned us that you should not run anywhere, and if we [tried to escape, she told us,] ‘We will find any, we will punish them, and you will be punished severely.”
Following her warning, Bogdan claims four buses and 20 ambulances were driven up to the nursing home. The ambulances were to transport residents who could not walk on their own to the trains that would take them to Russia.
“I was depressed,” recalls Oleksander. “I understood they were taking us to Russia and thought that we will [sic] stay there and [Ukraine] wouldn’t remember us. We lived like this for eight months, and the authorities didn’t care to give us back to [Ukraine]. I thought we were screwed.”
“The director warned us that you should not run anywhere, and if we [tried to escape, she told us,] ‘We will find any, we will punish them, and you will be punished severely.”
“I understood we would be treated very differently, that the attitude would be bad towards us, because we’re Ukrainians. I understood that this was the end, that we were never going back,” he added.
The 200 residents were transported by bus for over six hours to Dzhankoy, a town in annexed Crimea. From there, Bogdan and Oleksander claim they were placed on a train that took them to Voronezh, a Russian town nearly 600 miles from Kakhovka and approximately 155 miles away from the Ukrainian border. The volunteers traveling with them, allegedly, were partially made up of medical specialists who provided round-the-clock care to those most in need of assistance. However, despite the bouts of kindness shown to the residents, Bogdan and Oleksander say these same specialists pushed the false narrative that Russian soldiers had saved the residents from living in a terrible country.
“They [volunteers] were told we were supposedly taken out from under fire. They were trying to calm us down. All the way, they were telling us [that] wherever they are taking us now, we would be better off than we were,” said Bogdan.
“I tried to explain that I understood that we were going to some unknown place, and I understood that we were going to people who had been turned against us for a long time. But then again, they kept on saying, ‘Stop it, we’re treating everybody well, everything will be fine,’” he added.
After exiting the train, Oleksander said he and the other residents were approached by Russian journalists and asked if they were glad to be out of Ukraine. From the station, the men said they were taken to two separate nursing homes, where they claimed there were two Ukrainian children under the age of four living with them.
According to Bogdan, the nursing home staff “tried to treat us nicely, but you could see the anger on their faces, like we owed them something. And that’s in my boarding house. And even the locals, who are [older]—some treated [us] with understanding [sic] of what happened, and some were like, ‘You came, why do we need you here?’”
Once in Russia, Ukrainians can technically leave the country, but few understand that the option exists due to a lack of accessible information about the process. As a result, many Ukrainians have reportedly remained in Russia because they believe they have no other choice.
To make matters worse, Ukrainians who have been illegally deported have to navigate their way through a shroud of confusing misinformation from Russian officials. Once in Russia, Ukrainians can technically leave the country, but few understand that the option exists due to a lack of accessible information about the process. As a result, many Ukrainians have reportedly remained in Russia because they believe they have no other choice.
“People can leave. They are afraid to go somewhere else. They don’t have money. They don’t have the knowledge to go somewhere else,” said Nelli Isaieva, a volunteer with Helping to Leave, the NGO that helped Oleksander and Bogdan get out of Russia.
“Many times people are texting us, ‘Which is the closest country in Europe? I need to go back to Ukraine.’ They don’t even need to go to Europe to go back to Ukraine, but they don’t know it. There’s so many times we are telling people, ‘You can use this border,’ and they say, ‘But Google says it’s closed, it’s not working.’”
“We say it is working, it’s not an official border that you can cross whenever you want, but you can use it, and you can safely go back home. But it’s war, and nothing is safe, but it still is more safe than staying in Russia,” said Isaieva.
Helping To Leave has helped evacuate 53,100 Ukrainians fleeing Russian-occupied territories and the Russian Federation since the beginning of the full-scale invasion last year. The NGO began with volunteers on a Telegram messaging channel working to help evacuate Ukrainians, and has grown significantly since. They now have over 350 volunteers who work without pay to help as many people as they can.
“Right now, the way [for people to get] out of temporarily occupied territories [back] to Ukraine has been blocked since December 2022. We cannot suggest [people] go to Russia, but many people approach us via our [Telegram] bot, and they ask, ‘If I go to Russia, will you help me?” said Isaieva.
“We say, ‘Yes, we can do this,’ but we cannot [recommend they] go to Russia. In some cases, people think it’s easy… but there are many cases where people were detained by the Russian military simply because they found something on their phones, or maybe they didn’t find anything, they just think, ‘We want to detain this person,’” she added.
Not long after arriving in the Voronezh region, Oleksander and Bogdan began to look for a way out. The same resident who had provided funds for critically needed supplies for the home in Ukraine was one of the five who, along with Oleksander and Bodan, planned to escape. In late December, that resident was able to get in touch with Helping To Leave, which agreed to help the men.
“I was thinking, ‘Oh God. How can we do this?” said Isaieva. “Because it’s not the first case where there were disabled people [who needed to be evacuated], but then I asked how many people in total were deported [and] when they said the number I thought, ‘How can we help them?’” she added.
Sometimes funding evacuations from Russia is as simple as buying a train ticket to a neighboring country, then helping people navigate their way to areas in the European Union. However, in more complex cases, such as that of Bogdan and Oleksander, more help is required. To get the five men out of Russia, Helping to Leave hired a local driver to transport them from their nursing homes to the Norwegian border, 1,705 miles away. The planning took nearly three weeks and $1,982, far more than the average costs, between $55 and $165 per person, the NGO pays.
“We are treated as people here. They don’t look at us and see the disabled, but look at us first of all as people. Everything we need, they help us, they hear us, they perceive us,” said Oleksander.
Helping To Leave recommended the men go to Norway because of the country’s system of social support for people with physical disabilities. When asked if any other nursing home residents wanted to leave Russia, Isaieva said, “Some people—they’re kind of okay staying there. I know some of them [are] in the situation where they are afraid to do something. These guys were brave. Of course, they were afraid it wouldn’t work, but they tried. Others are [too afraid to leave].”
On the morning of Jan. 27, 2023, the monthslong nightmare came to an end: Oleksander, Bogdan, and the three other men successfully crossed into Norway. Volunteers were ready to take the men to Bergen, far away from the Russian border, where they now live in a hotel with other Ukrainian refugees.
Speaking about the conditions of their lives in Bergen, the two men say they are treated far better than they were treated in Ukraine or Russia. “We are treated as people here. They don’t look at us and see the disabled, but look at us first of all as people. Everything we need, they help us, they hear us, they perceive us,” said Oleksander. “You see, in our country, we were like outcasts who had to be shut up in a nursing home and not shown to anyone, not to people, and not to be seen either.”
In Norway, Oleksandr explains, he has been encouraged to learn English and Norwegian and plans to eventually enroll in a university, something he said was not possible in Ukraine. Bogdan is now learning English and is currently in treatment to learn how to walk on his own without his cane.
But for those fortunate enough to find refuge, the people left behind are always on their mind. “This history repeats itself. And what about the deported people? We have to deal with that and not forget it,” Bogdan said. “Little by little, little by little, at least in small groups, we have to pull these people out, not to leave them, even if it’s a home for the elderly… The main thing is not to forget about [them].”