KRASNOPILLYA, Ukraine -- Their paths crossed at a volunteer center a short drive from the Russian border: Bohdan, an athletic, shaven-headed 17-year-old with a wide smile; Natalya, an exhausted middle-aged woman barely holding back tears; and Valeriy, a spry, smartly dressed pensioner.
A few hours earlier, they had all been on the other side.
Bohdan came a long way, from Khanty-Mansiisk in western Siberia, where he had gone with his mother to join relatives after the war forced them out of Kostyantynivka, their hometown in Ukraine's east. Natalya had been in Enerhodar, home to Europe's largest nuclear power plant, now occupied by Russia, just two days earlier. Valeriy had left Donetsk, the largest city in the Donbas seized by Moscow-backed forces in 2014, just that morning.
The Shortest Way In
The small Kolotilovka-Pokrovka border crossing, between Russia's Belgorod region and Ukraine's Sumy region, is the only place where Ukrainians can enter government-controlled Ukrainian territory from Russia. Travel in the opposite direction is not possible.
After Moscow launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022, Ukraine officially closed all its border crossings with Russia and Belarus. For several months, displaced people were able to cross the front line from Russian-occupied territory inside Ukraine in a few places, often risking detention or death from shellfire, but the last of such routes, in the southern Zaporizhzhya region, was closed last autumn.
Since then, the only formal options left for Ukrainians who wanted to return from Russia or Russian-held territory have been long and costly detours through Europe by sea from occupied Crimea or by land via Russia and then Belarus, the Baltic countries, or Georgia. Nearly 20 months after the invasion, steady streams of people use those routes and travel companies offer bus services for the trips.
But the most direct route into Ukraine, through the Kolotilovka-Pokrovka crossing, has gained popularity in recent months. More than 100 people pass through daily and over 10,000 people have used it since August, according to Ukrainian officials.
The journey is not easy. People arriving at the Russian checkpoints, often after lengthy travels, go through hourslong "filtration" procedures; they are searched by Russian border guards and questioned by Federal Security Service (FSB) officers. Their phones are screened, fingerprints taken, and sometimes they are ordered to strip.
Once let out, they must walk down a gravel road in no-man's land, carrying all their personal belongings because Russia prohibited passage by car in retaliation for cross-border incursions into Belgorod in May. The elderly and those with limited mobility struggle to get through.
The crossing is considered relatively safe, but people walking into Ukraine have sometimes had to scramble to take cover in ditches due to artillery shelling along the border.
Travelers making the crossing almost always reach the Ukrainian side late in the evening. They are then picked up by an evacuation bus, driven to the nearby village of Krasnopillya, and subjected to another round of checks -- this time carried out by Ukrainian border guards and security officers.
There is no official agreement between Kyiv and Moscow in place, and from the point of view of international law the passage is not a border crossing but a humanitarian corridor, Kateryna Rashevska, a legal expert at the Regional Center for Human Rights, an NGO, told RFE/RL.
Border guard spokesman Andriy Demchenko recently announced other similar crossings will be available soon. On the other hand, according to Ukrainian sources in contact with the Russian side, the passage in the Sumy region may be soon closed, at least temporarily, as it has already been twice.
Walks Of Life
Many of the travelers have no passport or other documents recognized by Ukraine, which is in many cases the crucial reason to choose this route rather than a detour through Europe.
Most come from Ukrainian territories that Russian forces have seized during the large-scale invasion -- including many from occupied areas of the southern Kherson region, which was hit by a devastating flood after the breach of the Kakhovka dam in June -- but some have made their way from Crimea or parts of the Donbas that have been outside of government control since 2014, or from Russia itself.
According to Alyona Lunova, director of the Kyiv-based Zmina human rights center, there are at least 5 million Ukrainians living in Russian-occupied territories. Moreover, between 2.8 to 5 million Ukrainians, including from 260,000 to 700,000 children, have been deported to Russia or otherwise ended up there since the full-scale invasion, she told RFE/RL.
Tired and often anxious, the people entering Ukraine through the crossing in the Sumy region spend hours on the first floor of a large public building transformed into an improvised border inspection point. On the second floor, volunteers offer them hot drinks, food, and temporary shelter.
They also provide them with the contacts of organizations or state agencies helping internally displaced persons (IDPs) and collect reports of alleged human rights violations, which they provide to the UN Human Rights Office (OHCHR).
As they rested, drinking hot tea and waiting for immigration clerks to process their documents, Bohdan, Natalya, and Valeriy were in very different frames of mind. They did not want their surnames published due to personal security and privacy concerns.
Bohdan was happy to be in Ukraine. "Wherever I am, I will not forget home," he said, quoting a hip-hop homecoming song that became a hit after the Russian invasion. He explained that throughout the long months in Siberia, he felt he was not in the "right place." The Russian border guards were hostile to him, he said, and as they let him go, they wished him "good luck driving a Nazi Leopard" -- a reference to German tanks provided to Kyiv and to the Kremlin's false claims that Ukraine is run by neo-Nazis.
In about a year, at age 18, he will be subject to compulsory service. He said he is willing to join the army.
Natalya was worried that she would have problems with her documents. She told RFE/RL that she had traveled to Russian-occupied Enerhodar two months ago to help her daughter, who had been injured in a severe car accident.
"There is shelling every day, and most people are stuck in stupor, fear, and depression," she said, adding that her daughter's family cannot leave the city for reasons connected with employment. While there, she applied for a Russian passport to "be able to get help from doctors," she said.
Valeriy, meanwhile, was angry because he had not wanted to leave Donetsk. But his neighborhood was being shelled frequently, he said, and he decided not to spend the fall and winter in his apartment without heating or reliable supplies of water and electricity. He repeated Kremlin narratives, blaming the "regime in Kyiv" and the "American-orchestrated war" for these problems. "An army that is fighting with civilians won't be welcomed," he said.
'De-occupation Of The Consciousness'
According to Kateryna Arisoy, head of an organization called Pluriton that has more than 30 volunteers and helps IDPs at the site, a majority of the people who cross into Ukraine from its Russian-held areas or Russia do so because of acutely worsened economic and social conditions or because they fear for their lives.
"Most need help, both immediately and in the long term," Arisoy told RFE/RL. "But what is crucial is to reestablish the trust between us and them after they spent months or years on the other side."
Arisoy is an internal exile herself. She was forced to leave her native Bakhmut, a Donetsk region city that was razed by months of intense fighting before it was taken by Russian forces in May. A volunteer by vocation, she ran an animal shelter there long before the full-scale invasion turned her life upside down. In April 2022, she and a group of like-minded people started delivering aid to frontline towns, evacuating people willing to leave, and bringing animals to safety.
At one point, she said, three colleagues were arrested by Russian soldiers in the Luhansk region when they were stranded close to Russian positions due to a flat tire. After two months of imprisonment, they were released and wanted to go home -- but with their documents confiscated, they couldn't travel via Europe. When they heard in January about the informal border crossing in the Sumy region, which was being used for prisoner exchanges and the repatriation of soldiers' bodies, they decided to try to give it a try.
Arisoy told RFE/RL that she moved to Sumy in March because she realized more needs to be done for Ukrainians who want to return from Russian-held territory or from Russia. They need help with money, logistics, and legal issues, she said, but they also need to see through the propaganda they are surrounded by and believe a better life awaits them in the government-held areas of Ukraine.
"Our ultimate goal is what I call 'de-occupation of the consciousness,'" she said.
Volunteers supervised by Arisoy, who is always accompanied by her little white dog, run another support center in Sumy where many of those who crossed the border stay for some time before they can make plans and are ready to leave. After months or years in an "informational void," they need some time to adapt, she said.
Under Pressure
Most eventually take a train to Kyiv, free of charge. Children and people with disabilities are entitled to 3,000 hryvnyas ($82) in financial assistance, and others to 2,000 hryvnyas ($55).
On the train, as the landscapes outside the window change and the places they left recede into the distance, the people who have crossed the border are more willing to talk about what made them leave.
Anna, a 27-year-old woman from a village close to the city of Skadovsk in the occupied part of the Kherson region, decided to leave with her children only when problems mounted. The shelling was not intense enough to drive her from her home, she said, and the searches by Russian soldiers did not make her panic. Water and power outages after the flooding in June were tolerable while the weather was good, and when armed soldiers forced her to vote in village council elections, she simply cast an invalid vote.
But it was too much when her sons, 10-year-old Andriy, and 9-year-old Tymofiy, went to school. They were taught according to the Russian curriculum and had to sing the Russian national anthem, Anna said, and some fellow pupils swore a public oath to serve the Russian Federation.
A few days before the family fled, classmates of Andriy's who had met at a summer camp in Crimea bullied him. They pointed fingers at a rocket in the air and cheered it, saying, "It will kill traitors in Ukraine," the boy said.
A couple from a small town near Donetsk, who spoke on condition of anonymity out of fear for the safety of relatives remaining under occupation, had left along with their teenage daughter after over nine years there. They saw abductions, killings, and rapes already in 2014, the mother said, when the war between Kyiv and Russian-backed forces in the Donbas began, but carried on living "without being able to breathe" in what she described as "a gloomy version of the Soviet Union stripped of illusions of better tomorrow."
Russian flags were everywhere in their town, they said, and portraits of Russian President Vladimir Putin and the leader of the anti-Kyiv forces who claimed power in the Donetsk region, Denis Pushilin, hung on the walls of offices and schools.
The couple said they would have stayed if not for efforts by the de-facto authorities to force residents to accept Russian passports and renounce their Ukrainian citizenship.
In April, Putin signed an order that set a deadline for applying for Russian citizenship in the occupied areas of Ukraine. Those who refuse to acquire a Russian passport risk losing access to state services and social benefits, including schooling and health care, and, in some cases, losing jobs and property rights.
Before the full-scale invasion, Russia had distributed passports to more than 3 million Ukrainians in occupied Crimea and the Donbas.
In September 2022, Putin claimed that the Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhya regions were now part of Russia -- as Moscow claimed of Crimea in 2014. Residents of Russian-occupied territories who choose to stick with Ukrainian passports after July 1, 2024, will eventually be considered foreigners and may be deported.
"Without leaving home, we became foreigners," the father told RFE/RL.
