Risky evacuations from occupied areas continued through 2020 until crossing front line to Kyiv-controlled territory became impossible
An elderly Ukrainian is wheeled into Ukraine from Russia at the only open border crossing between the warring neighbours, in the Sumy region of northern Ukraine . Photograph: NGO Pluriton.As a teenager in the dying days of the Soviet Union, Timur Shutenko travelled from the port city of Mariupol to communist Cuba via an eye-opening stopover in Ireland, which gave him a first glimpse of the capitalist West.
“I searched online and found there was this one place to cross the border,” says Shutenko, who wrote a letter to the management of the refugee centre where he was staying in the Ryazan region south of Moscow, informing them of his decision to leave. As Shutenko walked away from the FSB checkpoint in the direction of Ukraine, he also left behind almost two years of life under Russian control.
This situation makes a barbarian out of you. You are, in a way, happy when a bomb hits a neighbouring building and not yours. Then you realise, of course, that there are people in that building too“People were trapped in their buildings and didn’t know what was going on or where to go. It was dangerous just to step outside to try to find food or water, because there was shooting and bombing literally right outside your door,” Shutenko says.
Ukrainian officials have estimated that more than 20,000 civilians died in Russia’s attack on Mariupol. Shutenko thinks the real figure could be much higher. Shutenko left Mariupol in September 2022 and chose, like many others, to head east into Russia rather than risk a journey through the front line to reach Kyiv-held territory. Russian friends helped find him accommodation in the southern Stavropol region, before he moved to refugee centres in the city of Taganrog and then in Ryazan.
Shutenko refused to take one, which excluded him from anything other than odd jobs in Russia and put him at loggerheads with officials and the “significant portion” of Ukrainians in the Ryazan refugee centre who were “nationalistically pro-Russian.” “I said if there’s somewhere you can use me , maybe using my education, then put me there,” he says. “If I was sent to the infantry, I know I’d be killed on the first or second day, but if there’s something else then I am ready. It’s up to them.”
Shutenko, who speaks fluent English, is too modest to volunteer details of his achievements in Cuba or the US, and acknowledges them only reluctantly: “That was all a long time ago, when I was young and had some brains and was very lucky,” he says. Valery Kshevskiy from Oleshky, a town on the occupied eastern bank of the Dnipro river in the southeastern Kherson region, is heading for the western city of Ternopil with the disabled mother of a friend who could not have made the difficult journey alone. The woman’s son escaped earlier to Ternopil, but until now she had refused to leave her home.
“When retook Kherson we waited and waited for them to reach us too, but we couldn’t wait any longer,” says Kshevskiy, who worked as a hospital porter.When they crossed the border the previous day, Russian FSB officers checked their phones and documents and asked them questions, including their opinion of an invasion that the Kremlin officially calls a “special military operation” or SVO.
I don’t feel that anywhere in Ukraine is fully safe or stable. And this corridor is like this. No one knows what could happenIn one year, Pluriton has helped more than 20,000 Ukrainians from occupied territory return home via Sumy region, and Arisoy understands their plight.
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