For weeks Natalya Zadoyanova had lost contact with her younger brother Dmitriy, who was trapped in the besieged Ukrainian port city of Mariupol.
Russian forces had bombed the orphanage where he worked, and he was huddling with dozens of others in the freezing basement of a building without doors and windows. When she next heard from him, he was in tears. “I'm alive,” he told her. “I'm in Russia.”
Zadoyanov was facing the next chapter of devastation for the people of Mariupol and other occupied cities: Forcible transfers to Russia, the nation that killed their neighbors and shelled their hometowns almost into oblivion.
Nearly 2 million Ukrainians refugees have been sent to Russia, according to both Ukrainian and Russian officials. Ukraine portrays these transfers as forced journeys to enemy soil, which is considered a war crime. Russia calls them humanitarian evacuations.
An Associated Press investigation has found that while the picture is more nuanced than the Ukrainian government suggests, many refugees are indeed forced into Russia, subjected to abuse, stripped of documents and unclear about their futures — or even locations. It starts with a poisoned choice: Die in Ukraine or live in Russia. They are taken through a series of what are known as filtration points, where treatment ranges from interrogation and strip searches to being yanked aside and never seen again. Refugees described an old woman who died of the cold, her body swollen, and an evacuee beaten so severely that her back was covered in bruises.
Those who “pass” the filtrations are invited to stay and often promised a payment of about 10,000 rubles ($170) that they may or may not get. Sometimes their Ukrainian passports are taken away, and the chance of Russian citizenship is offered instead. And sometimes, they are pressured to sign documents incriminating the Ukrainian government and military.
Those with no money or contacts in Russia — the majority, by most accounts — can only go where they are sent. The AP verified that Ukrainians have received temporary accommodation in more than two dozen Russian cities and localities.
However, the AP investigation also found signs of dissent within Russia to the government narrative that Ukrainians are being rescued from Nazis.