It started with a phone call.
As Russian forces pummeled Kharkiv in March 2022, a month after the start of the full-scale invasion, Nadin Geisler was contacted by an acquaintance in the eastern Ukrainian city, asking for help in getting a friend’s mother out of the region, with only her documents and her dog.
At the time, Geisler, a 28-year-old photographer, was living a few hours’ drive from the Ukrainian border in the western Russian city of Belgorod.
“Naturally, I said that I can meet her at the border and she could live with me for as long as possible,” she said in an interview at an undisclosed location outside of Russia. RFE/RL agreed not to reveal Geisler’s current location for security reasons.
The woman wasn’t the only one, Geisler recalled. Calls from Ukraine continued all night. The next morning, she and her sister met the woman and another 14 refugees, plus pets, at the entrance to their apartment building. The sisters spread a blanket, pillows, sweaters, and jackets on the floor of their rented apartment as bedding for the refugees and slept on the balcony.
When I crossed the border with Belarus, it seemed to me like I wasn’t breathing at all.”-- Nadin Geisler
It was an impromptu act of compassion that launched a grassroots network of people helping facilitate the flight of people from Ukraine. Giesler estimates some 2,000 Ukrainian people fled to Russia with the help of her network, and the network also helped provide food, toilet paper, and medicine to thousands of others living in Russian-occupied territories inside Ukraine since the invasion.
Most refugees, for whom Russian is a first language, usually opted for Russia as a transit point, rather than as a final destination -- a place where they have friends or family and could earn money to travel on.
Most have since migrated to the European Union or returned to Kyiv-controlled territory inside Ukraine, Geisler said.
“[E]ither you get a grip and just do this work like a robot, or you lose your mind,” Geisler told RFE/RL’s North.Realities, a regional news outlet of RFE/RL's Russian Service.
A Network With 'Enormous Resources'
Not long after the start of the invasion in February 2022, Geisler and her sister joined an anti-war protest in Belgorod, dressing in the blue-and-yellow colors of the Ukrainian flag, and handing out flowers to passersby. They were briefly detained.
Giesler said she was released on an administrative misdemeanor charge.
She and her sister then began working to host Ukrainians crossing the border into Russia. She said they hosted around 100 in their apartment, and accommodated at least 1,000 in hostels, apartments, and humanitarian-aid warehouses.
Russian volunteers who help such people said they operate through a close-knit string of contacts, facilitated by social media.
Volunteers can burn out quickly, says Yegor Zakharov. “Every family has stories for a mini-Hague” trial on war crimes.
In the first two months after the invasion, volunteers were “like flies in a spider’s web,” Yegor Zakharov, a 48-year-old volunteer coordinator from St. Petersburg, said.
Then “the volunteer movement began to broaden and develop horizontal ties,” he said. “Now it’s an entire structure, accumulating enormous resources.”
Participants coordinate with Europe-based organizations to help get Ukrainians out of Russian-occupied territories and into the European Union or elsewhere abroad.
In one case, volunteers helped a woman with terminal cancer travel from the Russian-occupied port of Mariupol in southeastern Ukraine to Norway, Zakharov recalled. She died in a hospice, with her son by her side.
The outlay of “3,000 or 4,000 euros” ($3,330 or $4,400) on a dying person may not make economic sense, he said, “[b]ut we’re not doing economics here. We’re saving people.”
Volunteers, however, can burn out quickly: “Every family has stories for a mini-Hague” trial on war crimes, Zakharov said.
Some volunteers who burn out opt to help financially instead.
Don’t f*** around where you’re not wanted,” Geisler said she was told.
Geisler said that general donations enabled her to pay 300,000 rubles (about $4,300) per month to accommodate refugees in Belgorod.
It’s unclear exactly where the donations come from; volunteer coordinators did not provide details about who donors are.
With these funds, however, she eventually purchased on a classified-ads site an armored vehicle, later confiscated by the Russian military, for humanitarian-aid deliveries to occupied areas. Russian border guards, she said, only requested that she paint the light beige vehicle green to avoid Ukrainian shelling.
She also set up three warehouses in the Belgorod region to store needed goods. The parcels, intended for specific recipients, include nonperishable foods, cleaning supplies, toilet paper, and medicine.
Both Geisler and Zakharov conceded that they initially used convoys labeled with the Latin letter Z --- a symbol of Russia’s invasion -- to deliver aid packages to the occupied regions.
Now, they say, such delivery assistance rarely occurs, if ever.
In the spring of 2022, two of the group’s deliveries that had been left at a village council building in Kozacha Lopan, a Kharkiv-region hamlet that was recaptured by Ukrainian forces in September 2022, disappeared. Geisler, using a government-issued pass, decided to deliver the packages herself.
“We found out that they were stealing humanitarian aid,” she recounted, suggesting local occupation officials were to blame. Some families reported that they received only two packets of macaroni and some tea out of a 50-kilogram bag of food and supplies.
Geisler also gathered information about people wanting to leave Russian-occupied areas; her predominantly female team of volunteers organized evacuations from the Kharkiv, Donetsk, and Luhansk regions, she said.
Repercussions
It’s unclear to what degree authorities have monitored the work the volunteers are doing -- or for that matter whether they quietly allowed it.
Russian authorities have harshly cracked down on any dissent or opposition to the war, jailing people under a vaguely worded crime that criminalizes anyone who “discredits the armed forces.” People have also been jailed for “spreading fake information” about the invasion, which includes posting information about the casualty toll.
But Russians who’ve helped refugees or provided shelter or humanitarian assistance have been allowed to work to a large degree.
Like other similarly minded volunteers facing potential prosecution or harassment, Geisler and Zakharov now live outside Russia.
The Geisler sisters say they’ve encountered problems: the state-run Sberbank, where the volunteer donations have been deposited, eventually deactivated the two sisters’ bank cards. Giesler did not respond to follow-up questions asking if they were later able to obtain the funds.
During one visit to a Belgorod warehouse where supplies were being stored, an unknown man told Geisler that the deactivation of the bank cards was a “hello from the Lubyanka” -- a reference to the Moscow headquarters of Russia’s main domestic intelligence agency.
“Don’t f*** around where you’re not wanted,” she said the man remarked.
In one of her last trips to Kozacha Lopan before it was recaptured by Ukraine, another man warned her that “they” would kill her if she continued, she said.
She said that prompted her to leave instructions with her relatives “about what to do and who to contact if I disappeared.”
In November, a 61-year-old volunteer from Belgorod was charged with treason and illegal arms trading after he helped an elderly woman cross into Ukraine from Russia, according to multiple news reports.
Flight To Safety
Like other similarly minded volunteers facing potential prosecution or harassment, Geisler and Zakharov now live outside the country.
In May 2023, Geisler said she decided to leave, a decision prompted by the detention at an airport's passport control of a woman who had donated 300 rubles ($3.30) for Ukrainian refugees. She was interrogated about her help for a “terrorist and extremist” who supports the Ukrainian armed forces, Geisler said.
Neither Zakharov nor Geisler plan to return to Russia, where they see no future under Putin.
Fearing detention, Geisler tried to disguise herself by cutting her hair, and then opted to travel by car to the border with Belarus, switching cars repeatedly over the 11-hour journey.
“When I crossed the border with Belarus, it seemed to me like I wasn’t breathing at all,” she said.
Her volunteer efforts continue from abroad. On a poster board in her apartment, a series of sticky notes list upcoming tasks: “Evacuation”; “Parents + five cats and a sheepdog”; “Children in occupation. Medicine, cereals, formula, diapers.”
Donations have dwindled, said Geisler, who is currently unemployed.
“With each day of the war, there are fewer and fewer people wishing to help Ukrainians,” she said. Those who do help “absolutely go through a political-military meat-grinder,” she added, referring to Russia’s repression of war critics.
For Zakharov’s part, he said he fled after threatening anonymous phone calls on September 25, 2022, three days after President Vladimir Putin announced the mobilization of tens of thousands of fighting-age men.
He also said unconfirmed reports already had emerged about Russian security agents pressuring families of volunteers leaving the country in order to identify their “coordinator.”
Zakharov said he drove with his cat and three suitcases across the border into Finland, a European Union member, where he has requested political asylum.
“Basically, I decided not to risk it,” he said, speaking from Helsinki via Telegram.
Neither Zakharov nor Geisler plan to return to Russia, where they see no future under Putin.
Giesler said the requests to help Ukrainians alone delayed her departure from Russia.
“I had to hang in there somehow to help them,” she said. “And I hung on as long as I could.”