Anna did not want to reveal her surname or the name of her town © Wojtek RADWANSKI / AFP
“In the outside world, you agree with everything. And when you get home you can talk about how bad it is.”
While Russian soldiers have come with cash, their arrival also brought a level of lawlessness.
At some point, she said, shopkeepers in her town were told not to sell alcohol to soldiers because of recurring “incidents”.
At Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport, Anna was asked to fill in a questionnaire that asked: “Do you support the special military operation?”, the name the Kremlin uses to describe its invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
She said she put “no” and argued that this was because she was in favour of peace.
Russia makes Ukrainians go through a special checkpoint at Moscow’s Sheremyetev airport © Wojtek RADWANSKI / AFP
Then she said she played the “dumb little girl” and, several hours later, was let through.
Ukrainians AFP spoke to at Warsaw bus station said checks at Sheremetyevo could take anything from several hours to a whole day.
In the year since it opened the Sheremetyevo checkpoint in October 2023, Moscow has let 83,000 Ukrainians pass through, according to Russian state media.
‘Anything can happen’
But social media networks are full of Ukrainians saying they were rejected at Sheremetyevo, as well as advice on how to get through.
Pavlo Lysianskyi, a Ukrainian activist and journalist documenting Russia’s takeover of the east of his country, said “anything can happen”.
He estimated that only around a fifth of people were let through the Sheremetyevo screening process.
Another Anna boarding a bus to Minsk to travel on to Moscow told AFP she was undeterred by the obstacles.
The 50-year-old’s adult children live in Ukraine’s northeastern city of Kharkiv. But her elderly mother is in occupied Lugansk, and she has struggled to take care of both.
It was her second time going through Sheremyetevo, she said, describing the process as a “lottery”. It depended on the individual Russian interrogator — the “human factor” — as to whether people were let through, she added.
Thousands travel to occupied Ukraine to visit family, check property or, occasionally, to return home © Wojtek RADWANSKI / AFP
She worried this could be her last visit because she has refused the offer of a Russian passport.
“The transitional period is over. Now they are forcing people,” she said of the pressure on Ukrainians in occupied regions to obtain Russian identity documents.
“I am at a loss as to what to do,” she added, saying she wanted to maintain access to her ageing mother.
Even before the Sheremetyevo checks, Anna said she had needed to “morally prepare” for questioning by Belarusian border guards, which can also take hours.
‘Home is home’
For first-timers, the journey to Russia is particularly nerve-wracking.
Lyudmila, a silver-haired 72-year-old, spent more than two years of war living on her own in Kharkiv, as it came increasingly under attack.
But when one of her windows was blown out and shrapnel fell in her toilet, she decided it was no longer bearable to live through the war on her own.
“You sit there alone without electricity,” she said.
‘You want to go home whether it’s Ukraine, Russia or China,’ says Svetlana © Wojtek RADWANSKI / AFP
Her only family left is a son living between Moscow and occupied Donetsk, and she now wants to join him.
Lyudmila travelled 24 hours by bus to reach Warsaw and from there had a similar journey to Minsk, before she could fly to Moscow.
While acknowledging it would “of course” be morally difficult to be surrounded by people who applaud the attacks on Kharkiv, she said it would still be easier than living alone.
She worried about the Russian checks, though.
“I don’t understand how I will come back (to Poland) if they don’t let me through,” she said.
While some are prepared to brave the journey into the unknown, other Ukrainians whose towns are now under Russian occupation say going back is unthinkable.
“I’m not on a suicide mission,” she said.
But she understood the longing for home.
“You want to go home whether it’s Ukraine, Russia or China,” she said. “Home is home.”
© 2024 AFP
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Publish date : 2024-11-19 18:09:00
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