Asylum Seekers

Kazakh authorities have granted Russia’s request to extradite activist Yulia Yemelyanova, a former employee of the late Alexei Navalny’s Petersburg office. According to the Russian opposition-in-exile’s Anti-War Committee, Kazakhstan violated its own protocols in making the decision to extradite Yemelyanova, as the Russian activist’s application for asylum is still under review in the country.

This past October, Kazakhstan’s Prosecutor General’s Office had guaranteed that extradition requests would not be considered until all administrative procedures related to obtaining asylum were completed. Yemelyanova’s defense intends to appeal the extradition decision to the country’s Supreme Court.

Yemelyanova was detained on Aug. 31, 2025, at Almaty airport while in transit to a third country. She has been held in pretrial detention ever since. In Russia, she is being prosecuted for theft (Part 2, Article 158 of the Criminal Code) in connection with a 2021 incident in which she allegedly stole a mobile phone from a taxi driver. Yemelyanova’s defense calls the case fabricated. It was sent to court in July 2022, by which time the activist had already left Russia.

Yemelyanova is the fourth Russian asylum seeker since late January to be handed a deportation decision from Kazakh officials. The others are Chechen Mansur Movlaev, an open critic of Ramzan Kadyrov; Crimean resident Oleksandr Kachkurkin, who is facing treason charges in Russia; and Yevgeny Korobov, an officer who deserted from the Russian army.

Source: “Kazakhstan moves to extradite former employee of Navalny’s St. Petersburg office to Russia,” The Insider, 11 February 2026

Dmytro Kulyk with his wife Oksana and daughter Elina. Source: Daily Beast

A Ukrainian dad escaped Vladimir Putin’s drone and missile attacks back home only to be grabbed by a band of ICE stooges in a Walmart parking lot in Minneapolis.

“I hoped I would find peace in America. I’ve done everything the government required, I don’t understand why I am behind bars,” Dmytro Kulyk told the Daily Beast from the Kandiyohi County Jail in Willmar, Minnesota.

The 39-year-old father was getting a pickup order at a Walmart in Maple Grove when he found himself surrounded by immigration agents last month. He’d been working as a delivery driver to make ends meet, while also supporting his family by doing roofing work.

Kulyk legally entered the U.S. in late 2023 along with his wife, 38, and daughter, who’s now 5. The family was sponsored by U.S. citizens as part of the Uniting 4 Ukraine program, a humanitarian program set up in April 2022 to allow Ukrainians fleeing Russia’s war to live and work in the U.S. on “parole.”

Once the initial two-year parole period expires, entrants can file for re-parole to remain in the country longer. That’s exactly what Kulyk says he did. His wife and daughter’s applications were approved. But his remained pending.

He said he was putting groceries in his car on Jan. 1 when he was approached by three ICE agents.

“I explained to the ICE officers that the war was killing people, that my wife had a disability, that it was violence, terrorism which we had escaped from but one of them began to laugh,” Kulyk told The Daily Beast. “I asked why he was laughing and I was told that he was pro-Russian, wanted Russia to win the war.”

DHS and ICE did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

He can’t understand why he’s been treated like a criminal. He did everything by the book, he says–paying taxes and filing his immigration paperwork on time, working multiple jobs to take care of his family. He had no criminal record to speak of.

His immigration attorney, Julia Bikbova, suggested his re-parole application may have intentionally been stalled to provide immigration authorities with a pretext to deport him.

“Our government, our Homeland Security, promised Ukrainians to protect them during the war. There are approximately 280,000 Ukrainians on U4U, Uniting for Ukraine program in the United States, including the Kulyk family,” she told the Daily Beast.

“My client did everything the government required him to do: on June 5 he applied for the re-parole and his wife paid $2,040 of fees for her and child’s granted applications. His wife and daughter have recently received their re-paroles but he has not, his application is pending.

“ICE detained him as ‘illegal’ and began deportation proceedings: This is a sick way of forcing a man with a clean criminal record to become unlawful in the U.S. by delaying the review of his application, which the very same authority had requested to file.”

Kulyk is now terrified he’ll be sent to the frontlines to fight Vladimir Putin’s troops if he is deported back home. He and his family endured relentless Russian attacks before finally deciding to flee their home in the Odesa region in 2023. When they saw ruins on their own street in Chornomorsk, they called their friends in Texas and asked for help, leading to their enrollment in the U4U program thanks to having U.S. citizens as sponsors.

Kulyk now can’t stop worrying about his wife, Oksana, and daughter, Elina.

“I am worried they can drag my wife and kid out of our home,” he told The Daily Beast, adding that he wanted to appeal directly to American authorities to make them understand he’d done nothing wrong.

“Please hear me: I came to America to escape the war, to pray in church and work hard. But now my heartbroken and sick wife has lost over 10 pounds since ICE arrested me on January 1. She’s been panicking, and my little daughter has been crying without me every night – this is unjust,” he said.

Oksana says she’s been too “terrified and lost” to leave home while her husband is locked up, afraid that immigration agents might return for the rest of the family.

“I am too scared to drive my 5-year-old daughter to school in my husband’s car. I’m terrified ICE will detain me and our daughter will end up alone,” she told The Daily Beast. “This is just as scary as the war in Ukraine, except now we don’t have Dmytro with us. Our daughter Elina cries herself to sleep with her cat plushie. She says the toy is daddy.”

Most Ukrainian refugees are women and children but some men have also left the country for various reasons. Kulyk was granted a permit to leave in order to care for a family member with a medical condition.

But Kulyk is not the only Ukrainian refugee to be swept up in the Trump administration’s controversial immigration crackdown.

Nearly 1,000 miles away, in Philadelphia, Zhanna was poring over messages in a group chat of 349 other refugees called “Ukrainians in Detention.” She joined the group last month, when her friends Andrii and Yaroslav ended up in detention. Although Bartosh has legal Temporary Protected Status, she stopped going to the office and now works from home.

“ICE rounds up men who buy tools or work in construction, so every day I call my husband, a construction worker, to check if he is OK. Even when the war started in Ukraine and we had to escape abroad, the same morning I wasn’t as stressed as I am now,” she told the Daily Beast. “In our chat I read that all arrestees are men, that at least five of them have signed up for self-deportation… but where is there to go now? Europe is also deporting Ukrainians. Our TPS is good until October but we want to understand, are we really legal in the United States, or is it time to pack up our suitcases again?”

Immigration attorneys count about 300 cases of detained Ukrainians across the United States and up to 150 refugees deported to Ukraine, Bikbova said.

“Most of the arrested Ukrainians are men, the majority of them have a clean criminal record but as we see in Kulyk’s case, they are equated to people who jumped the border, broke the law,” attorney Bikbova told the Daily Beast. “Behind every deported man, there are crying women and children, left without support. For some mysterious reason, we see male Ukrainian refugees being arrested and put on airplanes. If he gets deported, my client Kulyk will most certainly go to the front.”

Trump’s administration has also been deporting Russian asylum seekers. According to a report by Current Times, more than 50,000 Russians have fled the war and political repression to the U.S. since February 2022. Journalist Ilya Azar has been covering the deportations for Novaya Gazeta.

“They send out 40-60 people on each plane. There have been five airplanes,” Azar told the Daily Beast on Tuesday. The deportation planes transit to Russia through Egypt, and Russian security services meet the deported citizens. Azar’s report noted that “all men received draft notices” upon their arrival in December.

Source: Anna Nemtsova, “Laughing ICE Goons Seize Dad Who Fled Ukraine War at Walmart,” Daily Beast, 12 February 2026. The emphasis, above, is mine. \\\\\TRR

German authorities last week denied asylum to 47-year-old engineer Georgy Avaliani, who deserted from the front line in 2022. His wife and two children were rejected alongside him.

“There is no reason to believe that, upon returning to the Russian Federation, they would face a high probability of persecution or serious harm,” wrote an official from the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF), despite Avaliani’s account of being tortured after fleeing the front.

Mediazona has reviewed BAMF decisions in Avaliani’s case and those of other deserters, discovering that officials are producing boilerplate documents that repeat one another almost word for word. In justifying the refusals, the German agency argues, for instance, that mobilisation in Russia was intended to “strengthen the armed forces” rather than repress dissent, and therefore cannot be considered political persecution. They further say that mobilisation has effectively ended because Vladimir Putin announced it—verbally.

When describing potential punishments for deserters, officials cite not the criminal code but an administrative article regarding failure to comply with military registration duties. They even specify that the maximum penalty is a fine of €302.

Most notably, in every decision examined, BAMF cites Mediazona’s own article from 2023, “Evading > refusing > fleeing. A year of mobilization in Russia through trials and verdicts”, as evidence that mobilised men face little more than a fine. That article noted that, at the time of publication, failing to respond to a summons did not yet carry a heavy penalty. While the situation has since changed—an eventuality the original article warned about—the original reference remains in the German files.

Relying on information from that article is also fundamentally flawed because BAMF applies it to people already wanted under serious criminal charges for desertion or abandoning their unit. In its rulings, the agency ignores the severity of these consequences, lumping deserters in with those who simply left Russia when mobilisation was first announced. This is exactly what happened to Georgy Avaliani.

A year in a refugee camp

Avaliani, an engineer, arrived in Germany with his wife, Oksana, and their two children on January 26, 2025. By then Georgy, who was drafted shortly after mobilisation began and later deserted, had been on a federal wanted list for over six months.

The family was granted asylum-seeker status without an initial investigation into the specifics of their escape. Like other applicants, they were placed in temporary housing: a small portacabin with two bunk beds at the former Tempelhof airport site. Their journey to Germany had been arduous. On January 18, Georgy, who had managed to leave Russia before his name appeared on the wanted list, met his wife and children in Bosnia. From there, they travelled to the Croatian border and requested asylum.

In Croatia, the asylum process is largely a formality; in practice, obtaining protection there is nearly impossible. Consequently, many migrants use it only as an entry point into the EU before heading to countries with functioning reception systems. The Avalianis did the same. After a preliminary registration in Croatia, they spent a week travelling to Berlin.

For nearly a year, the family was cramped in a camp with 2,000 other applicants. Finally, just before the start of 2026, they were moved to a hostel in western Berlin. But Georgy’s hopes of integration (he had been diligently learning German and hoped to return to engineering) were soon shuttered. On January 16, just two weeks after their move, BAMF rejected the entire family’s asylum claim.

Avaliani intends to appeal. If he fails, the family must leave Germany within 30 days or face deportation to Russia, where Georgy faces up to 10 years in prison for abandoning his unit during a period of mobilisation. Despite having clear evidence of persecution, the German authorities have ignored his claims.

The two escapes of Private Avaliani

Before the war, Georgy Avaliani was a well-paid engineer at the Moscow water utility, Mosvodokanal. He had no plans to leave Russia. Shortly before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, he even enrolled in a seminary to pursue a religious education.

Georgy had never served in the army due to a heart condition. However, following the “partial mobilisation” announcement, he received a summons on October 6, 2022. At the time, his three children were minors; by law, as the father of a large family, he should have been exempt. The couple tried to contest the draft through the military enlistment office and the prosecutor’s office but failed. Georgy chose not to go into hiding, unwilling to abandon his family.

After a medical commission in November, he was sent to a training camp in the Moscow region and then to the occupied Svatove district of the Luhansk region. His unit was stationed in the village of Novoselivske, 20 km from the front line. After a few days, noticing the chaos within the unit, Avaliani decided to slip away, gambling that no one would notice his absence. He reached a nearby road and hitched a ride to the village of Troitske, a gathering point for mobilised men.

Part of a local hospital had been turned into a shelter for soldiers with nowhere else to go—some had lost their units, others were waiting to withdraw their pay, and some were recovering from wounds.

While staying there, Georgy met another mobilised soldier. They shared the same grim impression of the front and a desperate desire to return home. They found three others who felt the same and hired a taxi driver to take them to a spot where they could cross the border on foot.

After the driver dropped them off, the group split up. Along the way, Avaliani and his companion heard a helicopter. Georgy later told journalists and BAMF officials that the second group had been gunned down from the air. While there is no independent confirmation of this, Avaliani and the other man survived only to be detained in an abandoned village.

There is little doubt Georgy made this journey on foot; “Goodbye to Arms”, a project that assists deserters, thoroughly verified his route. Alexei Alshansky, a coordinator for the organisation, says the helicopter story is the only detail rights activists have been unable to confirm.

Following his capture, Avaliani was thrown into “a basement” for 10 days. He says he was beaten repeatedly and subjected to mock executions. Mediazona has previously reported on this location, known as the Zaitsevo Centre for the Detention of Servicemen, based on the testimony of another deserter, Sergei Savchenko. Volunteers from “Goodbye to Arms” identified the site in the occupied village of Rassypne by comparing testimonies with video footage.

From the basement, Georgy was sent to an assault unit. Two days later, an ammunition dump near their position exploded. Avaliani suffered a concussion and a heart attack. He was sent to a distribution point where he befriended the doctor issuing referrals. The medic sent him to a hospital inside Russia, hinting that he could just as easily head straight for Moscow instead of the ward.

Avaliani did exactly that. After reuniting with his family, he hid at a dacha in the Tula region. Occasionally, he ventured to Lyubertsy for medical treatment. As time passed he grew less cautious, but in mid-February 2024 military police arrested him outside his home.

He was sent to Kaliningrad in western Russia, the permanent base of his unit, to await his fate. When a commander learned of Georgy’s engineering background, he set him to work renovating his private dacha. Meanwhile, Georgy pushed for a formal medical commission. When it finally took place, the results were surprising: he was not only declared fit for service but his category was upgraded from “partially fit” to “fit with minor restrictions”.

In May, he was told to report for questioning regarding a criminal case. Georgy fled again. On the way to the commander’s dacha, he got a taxi and flew to St Petersburg. His wife met him there to hand over his passport. From there he flew to Belarus, then Uzbekistan, Georgia and finally Montenegro, where he was taken in by a Swedish artist for whom he helped build a swimming pool.

Oksana remained in Lyubertsy with the children. Weeks after her husband left, an investigator began calling her. Georgy was placed on a federal wanted list.

In September 2024, security forces raided the family home. They confiscated phones from Oksana and the children, returning them only two weeks later. The stress caused Oksana to suffer a nervous breakdown, leading to a month-long stay in a psychiatric clinic. The visits from military police continued; the last raid occurred on January 7, 2025. After that, Oksana finally agreed to leave Russia.

Georgy has spoken openly to the press about his escape. In Montenegro, he was interviewed by Current Time TV. The family crossed the German border accompanied by a journalist from Die Welt, which later published a detailed account. A report for the Franco-German channel Arte was also filmed by Russian journalist in exile Masha Borzunova.

The first six months in Germany were particularly precarious. Under EU law, the migration service could have deported the family back to Croatia, their first point of entry. To prevent this, Georgy sought help from the church.

The tradition of Kirchenasyl, or church asylum, began in 1983 after Cemal Kemal Altun, a 23-year-old Turkish activist, took his own life in a West Berlin court while facing extradition. His death moved church communities to unite to protect refugees from deportation. Every year, hundreds of people receive a reprieve through this practice. The Avalianis were among them.

“It is a semi-legal, more like a cultural phenomenon that works differently in different states,” explains Alshansky. “The church gives the applicant a document stating they are under their care, and the authorities leave them alone.”

Thanks to this intervention, BAMF could not reject the family simply because they entered via Croatia. They were forced to consider the case on its merits. They rejected it anyway.

BAMF’s motivation

During his personal hearing, Georgy Avaliani detailed his service and desertion. When asked what he feared if returned to Russia, he replied: “I fear for my life. Legally, I could be imprisoned for up to 20 years. But more likely, I will be killed before trial or in prison… I know for certain that if they find me, a subhuman death awaits me.”

His wife, Oksana, tried to explain the psychological toll the military police raids had taken on her and the children. The family provided lots of evidence: the mobilisation order, the wanted notice from the interior ministry’s website, a letter from a German humanitarian organisation, medical records and Georgy’s military ID.

In its rejection, the agency claimed the Avalianis were “apolitical people”, making it unclear why they believed the Russian state would view them as opponents. BAMF argued that if they were truly targeted, Georgy would never have been able to leave Russia so easily.

Having erroneously stated that Avaliani faced only an administrative fine, the official added that it was “not evident that in the applicants’ case, due to specific circumstances, a different [punishment] should apply”.

The document also asserted that officials found no evidence that mobilisation continued after Putin’s verbal announcement. Even if it were to resume, BAMF argued, it was not certain Avaliani would be called up again, given Russia’s 25 million reservists.

“Even taking into account that the applicant evaded mobilisation, it is not to be expected that… he would be subjected to the inhuman or degrading treatment required to grant asylum,” the decision stated.

The agency concluded the family could lead a dignified life in Russia. Despite the economic crisis, the official noted that people in Russia are still provided with food, social benefits and pensions. “It is not seen that… they would find themselves in a completely hopeless situation,” the ruling said. Their physical and mental health was also deemed insufficient to require treatment specifically in Germany.

A template for rejection

Alshansky attributes the BAMF decision to the wave of draft evaders who fled to Europe after 2022.

“A crowd of people rushed to claim asylum over mobilisation, some without even a summons,” he says. “I think they have exhausted the Germans to the point where, as soon as they see a Russian applicant and the word ‘mobilisation’, they just churn out this rejection.” Artyom Klyga, from the rights organisation Connection E. V., confirms that around 1,000 Russians have requested asylum in Germany due to mobilisation.

Alshansky points out that the rejection text clearly treats Avaliani as a mere draft dodger rather than a man who fled the front and is now a fugitive. He believes BAMF compiled the document from fragments of other cases without truly studying Georgy’s story. “I have compared this rejection with others. It is a template; paragraph after paragraph is identical. They just changed the personal details in a Word file,” Klyga agrees.

Mediazona compared several BAMF decisions regarding Russians who fled mobilisation. The similarities are striking. In the case of a young man who left after an attempt to serve him a summons, the agency also cited Putin’s words on the end of mobilisation. The description of the economic situation in Russia—including the detail that 15% of Russians live below the poverty line—is identical in both his and Avaliani’s files.

In another case involving a reservist who left on a tourist visa, the agency used the same argument: that mobilisation is about military strength, not political vengeance. That document also cited the same €302 fine.

The same arguments were used against Anton Sh., a deserter from Ufa whose story was covered by Sever.Realii. He had been tortured in the same Zaitsevo cellar, where guards pulled out almost all of his teeth. Despite his ordeal and the fact he is wanted in Russia, BAMF ruled he faced no danger because he had been able to leave the country freely.

Georgy Avaliani is now consulting with lawyers to appeal. “From my interview, it is perfectly clear that my situation is different [from other cases BAMF cited in the rejection]. This rejection shows that these people either cannot read or didn’t bother to try,” he said.

Even if his appeal fails, Georgy has no intention of returning. “I didn’t come here for tastier sausage, but to avoid dying in prison,” he says. “I had a good job in Russia. I will never reach that standard of living here; I’m not 20 or even 30 years old anymore. I didn’t travel far for a better life. I left solely because of persecution. Pity they don’t understand that.”

“Goodbye to Arms” estimates there are currently about 100 Russian deserters in Germany. For others planning to follow Avaliani’s route through Croatia, Alshansky recommends heading to other countries, such as Spain, where he says the bureaucratic logic remains more straightforward than in Germany.

Source: “Rubber‑stamping rejections. Germany turns away Russian army deserters who refused to fight in Ukraine, claiming they face only a fine back home,” Mediazona, 5 February 2026. Thanks to News from Ukraine Bulletin for the heads-up. The emphasis, above, is mine. \\\\\TRR

Three Years Later: Standing with Ukraine Against International Fascism

How bad can it get? When we strip away US president Donald Trump’s insults and temper fits, what can he actually do?

First, he can withdraw US military aid to Ukraine – which he has been talking about doing since long before the US presidential election. If the European states got their act together, which is possible, the effects of this would be constrained.

*At the “Russian troops out” march in London, 22 February 2025*

US diplomats have reportedly threatened to block Ukraine’s access to the Starlink communication system on which its drones rely, potentially giving asymmetrical advantage to Russia.

Second, Trump can cancel sanctions. The latter would bring him into conflict with the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act of 2017, which was specifically designed to compel the president to lift sanctions only with Congress approval. Of course Trump could play fast and loose with the law, which he has done and is doing in other respects, and/or Congress could go along with him.

The cancellation of sanctions would be bad. But let’s not lose sight of the fact that the sanctions were never very effective, in large part because previous US governments, under both Trump and Biden, sought to limit their effect on the oil market and the world economy.

Third, Trump can shift narratives. I broadly agree with people who say we should judge Trump and his cohorts by their actions, not by the constant stream of often incoherent words. Yes, but. Nazi salutes normalise Nazism; speculation about expelling the Palestinian population from Gaza normalises ethnic cleansing; and slandering the Ukrainian president as a “dictator” who started the war in his country reinforces Russian propaganda.

On the third anniversary of Russia’s all-out invasion – and the eleventh year of its military attack on Ukraine, and the long chains of suffering it has caused – these are real dangers. It’s not clear how they will play out.

Continue reading →

Ukraine (The Betrayal)

Source: “The World in Brief,” The Economist, 15 February 2025

Today, there was one happy man in the Kremlin. Vladimir Putin banked his legacy on an all-out war that, at one point, looked all but lost for him. But he waited long enough to see the tides change in his favor.

Three years in and hundreds of thousands of deaths after, the U.S. president is calling Putin, offering peace talks on Russia’s terms.

Hi, my name is Oleksiy Sorokin, I’m the deputy chief editor of the Kyiv Independent, and this is the latest issue of our Russia-themed newsletter.

Today we will talk about how Russia is about to win the war.

It’s a topic of debate when authoritarian Russia began morphing into a totalitarian state, but Feb. 24, 2022, is a point that finalized this transformation. A point of no return.

The all-out war was supposed to be quick. It was supposed to be a victory of a new world order and of a new Russia, once again a force that would decide the fate of the world, a force that people would fear.

Taking Kyiv, installing a new Russian-controlled government, and forcing Ukraine to recognize Crimea, Donetsk, and Luhansk as Russian was to be achieved within months, if not days.

The country Putin attempted to subjugate, however, was fiercely resisting. Something that Russian political and military leadership didn’t expect and didn’t prepare for.

Yet, over and over, Russian President Putin was bailed out by the West.

In 2022, Russia was making fortunes on selling off its energy resources to the West. When Russian troops were murdering civilians of Mariupol and nearing Kyiv, Moscow’s war chest was being replenished by Europeans.

The slow phasing out of Russian energy resources in the West allowed Russia to iron out its pivot to the East, building a formidable shadow fleet to transport its energy resources to anyone willing to buy.

When Russia began to lose ground and prepare for a Ukrainian counteroffensive, the U.S. was slowing down military shipments, giving Moscow further breathing room.

Seeing that the West was unwilling to support Ukraine to the fullest and was willing to allow Russia to continue, Russia, well, continued.

Russian leadership doubled down, increasing attacks on Ukraine, making committing war crimes a state policy, and simultaneously choking all forms of dissent at home.

Ukrainian civilians and prisoners of war were tortured and often murdered, and children from occupied territories were abducted.

Domestically, Russia outlawed speaking against the war, with people receiving hefty prison terms for criticising the invasion.

For the majority, however, the state made sure their economic well-being and daily routines remained unchanged, allowing ignorance to flourish. The Russian economy was doing fine.

All this made Putin confident. He knew that time played in his favor. The U.S. would surrender, and Europe would be in no position to object. He was right.

While on the campaign trail, Donald Trump had made it clear that he has little interest in continuing to support Ukraine’s fight against Russia.

His comments of ending the war in “24 hours” were a figure of speech, but it was clear that some sort of peace plan would be presented by the incoming administration.

Russia listed its demands, Ukraine listed theirs. Both waited. The fighting went on along the front line.

Russia was in a better position to negotiate. The West’s unwillingness to truly stop Russia, especially if it meant causing any sort of inconvenience at home, allowed it to regroup and begin a major offensive, ongoing to this day.

What came next was too good to be true… for Russia.

On Feb. 11, U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth began his European tour. Off the bat, he made public the U.S. position concerning the upcoming peace talks.

Hegseth said, “Returning to Ukraine’s pre-2014 borders is an unrealistic objective,” and that NATO membership for Ukraine is not an option, effectively agreeing with Russia’s demands.

Then, Trump called Putin.

“We both reflected on the great history of our nations and the fact that we fought so successfully together in World War II, remembering that Russia lost tens of millions of people,” said Trump following the call, parroting the Kremlin’s favorite line of the huge sacrifice Russia undertook in a war that ended 80 years ago, and how it is for whatever reason relevant today.

“As we both agreed, we want to stop the millions of deaths taking place in the war with Russia/Ukraine. President Putin even used my very strong campaign motto of ‘common sense’,” Trump added.

“We agreed to work together, very closely, including visiting each other’s nations. We have also agreed to have our respective teams start negotiations immediately, and we will begin by calling President Zelensky of Ukraine, to inform him of the conversation,” he went on.

The next day, Trump proposed to return Russia to G7, the intergovernmental political forum of the most developed democratic countries from which Moscow was kicked out following the start of its war in 2014.

Russian officials and pro-war public figures were openly excited about Trump’s moves.

“The movement that has begun is the result of the heroic work of our fighters and the principled position of Vladimir Putin, who speaks of openness to negotiations but firmly defends Russia’s national interests,” said lawmaker Evgeniy Revenko, deputy head of Putin’s United Russia party.

“Zelensky’s days are numbered, and Trump’s arrival at the Victory Parade in Moscow no longer seems like a fantasy,” he added.

“The phone call between Putin and Trump will go down in the history of world politics and diplomacy. It is not a breakthrough yet, but perhaps the first step towards one. I am sure that in Kyiv, Brussels, Paris, and London, they read Trump’s lengthy commentary on his conversation with Putin with horror and cannot believe their eyes,” said Russian Senator Aleksey Pushkov.

I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I agree with Mr. Pushkov.

Following the call, the Kremlin said, “We, of course, understand that our main counterpart in this process is Washington.”

And here we are today. It took three years, but Russia is where it wanted to be from the start — at a table with the U.S. deciding the fate of the world without the world’s consent.

Putin will push for more, seeking to squeeze the most out of Washington, and give nothing in return.

Russia would demand to keep the territories it controls, and most likely try to take the ones it doesn’t. According to Russia’s new constitution, Russia sees Ukrainian Crimea, and four oblasts — Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson — as its own. Russia doesn’t have full control of any of the four.

With NATO off the table, other demands might be thrown at Trump, reducing Kyiv’s army or legalizing Russian language and influence in Ukraine.

Whether the U.S. will agree, and most importantly, whether Kyiv and the EU will go by the agreements that Moscow and Washington are set to achieve behind their backs, remains to be seen. There’s a strong chance that they won’t.

But overall, the sun is now much brighter for Putin than it was just a few days ago.

Eleven years of fighting against Ukraine, three years of all-out war and thousands of war crimes committed, Putin isn’t a pariah anymore. His worldview is on track to become mainstream, and it’s the leader of the free world who is leading him back to the table.

Source: Oleksiy Sorokin, “WTF is wrong with Russia” (newsletter), Kyiv Independent, 13 February 2025

In this week’s bulletin: Russia used US banks to dodge sanctions/ Private military companies at war/ Crimean 2024 human rights report/ Further evidence of Russian torture, execution of prisoners, fabrication of evidence and withholding of medical aid in occupied areas/ New wave of detentions in Crimea/

News from the territories occupied by Russia:

Young people who have quit the occupied areas: “It’s like being freed from a horrible stench” (Ukrainska Pravda, 9 February)

Stadiums under occupation: sports facilities in Donbas today (Ukrainska Pravda, 7 February)

Russia uses medical torture to fabricate its ‘trial’ of disabled 74-year-old Volodymyr Ananiev (Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, February 7^th)

Russians refuse to sell insulin and other vital medicines to Ukrainians without Russian passports, reports Ukrainian intelligence (Ukrainska Pravda, February 7th)

How can Ukraine solve the problem of documents from the occupied territories? Human rights defenders share their vision with international partners (Zmina, February 7th)

A janitor, a cook, an informer — who is being tried for collaborating with the enemy? (Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, February 6th)

Russian FSB carry out new terror raids and arrests by quota in occupied Crimea (Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, February 6th)

Human rights and humanitarian legal norms: 2024 review (Crimea Human Rights Group, 5 February)

Viktor Dzytsiuk was almost tortured to death in occupied Donbas. Now Russia is continuing his torment (Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, February 5th)

ZMINA took part in a discussion on the cultural decolonisation of Crimea (Zmina, February 4th)

Russian FSB uses shoddily faked video to charge 63-year-old woman abducted from occupied Ukraine with ‘terrorism’ (Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, February 3rd)

First prosecution in Crimea for “childfree propaganda” (Crimea Human Rights Group, 2 February)

The situation at the front:

Russian forces advance on Pokrovsk (Meduza, 5 February)

News from Ukraine – general:

Support for war victims: human rights defenders presented new roadmap of draft laws (Zmina, February 5th)

Defying Odds In Ukraine (They Said So, February 4^th)

Ukrainian Holocaust survivor: Hitler wanted to kill me as a Jew. Putin is trying to kill me because I’m Ukrainian (Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, February 3rd)

How Ukraine lost faith in the Red Cross and UN (Kyiv Independent, January 22^nd)

Ukraine: Bikis, our feminist year (Europe Solidaire Sans Frontières, January 20th)

Ukraine: And yet he remained a human (Europe Solidaire Sans Frontières, January 4th)

War-related news from Russia:

Draft exemptions as Russians know them are ending (Meduza, 6 February)

Rebranding private military companies for the war in Ukraine (Posle.media, 5 February)

Support fundraisers for Solidarity Zone’s recipients in court (Solidarity Zone, 5 February)

Russia used US banks to send billions to Turkey, dodging sanctions (Kyiv Independent, February 3rd)

The Russian far right: “an affinity for violence brings them together” (Posle.media, 29 January)

Analysis and comment:

US Aid, Russia and Ukraine (The Russian Reader, 4 February)

A girl from the burnt village: the story of Maria Nevmerzhytska (Commons.com.ua, 3 February)

Statement by human rights organisations: another wave of searches and detentions of Crimean Tatars (Crimean Human Rights Group, 2 February)

Research of human rights abuses:

Prison medicine: ways to humanize it (Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, February 7th)

UN monitors report sharp increase in executions of Ukrainian POWs, and point to Russian officials’ effective incitement to kill (Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, February 7th)

The Centre for Civil Liberties Participated in the First World Congress on Enforced Disappearances (Centre for Civil Liberties, February 6th)

“I Urge You to Make Every Effort to Release Ukrainian Prisoners of War And Unlawfully Detained Civilians ” Maksym Butkevych at the UN Security Council (Centre for Civil Liberties, February 6th)

“Crimes Against Peaceful Civilians Warrant Your Action” The Center for Civil Liberties Appealed to PACE Members (Centre for Civil Liberties, February 6th)

Upcoming events:

Saturday 15 February, 11.0 am — 4.0 pm, Conference: End the Russian invasion and occupation. National Education Union, Mabledon Place, London, WC1H 9BD. Register here.

Saturday 15 February, 11.0 am – Palestine solidarity demo. To join the Ukraine-Palestine solidarity contingent, with our banner, “From Ukraine to Palestine – Occupation is a crime”, meet outside Banqueting Hall, corner of Whitehall and Horseguard Avenue, London SW1A

Saturday 22 February, 12.00 , Demonstrate at the Russian embassy. Assemble 12 noon – St Volodymyr statue, W11 3QY Rally 1pm – Russian embassy, W8 4QP. Flyers are available for distribution – email info@ukrainesolidaritycampaign.org and ask for them.

This bulletin is put together by labour movement activists in solidarity with Ukrainian resistance. To receive it by email each Monday, email us at 2022ukrainesolidarity@gmail.com. To stop the bulletin, reply with the word “STOP” in the subject field. More information at https://ukraine-solidarity.org/. We are also on twitter, Bluesky, Facebook and Substack, and the bulletin is stored online here.

Source: News from Ukraine Bulletin 133 (10 February 2025)

Europeans still like cheap Russian LNG

France, Spain and Belgium are the biggest buyers

Source: FT

Source: Adam Tooze, “Why Europe and India are still buying Russian energy. Friedman and Schwartz disaggregated. Cuba in Africa and the decline of the all-nighter,” Chartbook, 15 February 2025

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 prompted a refugee crisis in Europe. News footage showed people piling onto trains and into cars, desperate to escape the threat of bombs and Russian occupation. In Kharkiv, a taxi driver named Sergii told me how in those chaotic early days of war, he had helped evacuate people as Russian missiles turned his bustling neighbourhood of Saltivka into a ghost town.

“I survived by praying to God,” Sergii said, pointing to the icon of the Virgin Mary dangling from his cab’s rearview mirror. “I helped people with no money get out of Saltivka, because people with money had already left.” He narrowly avoided death himself, he added, explaining a rocket had destroyed his apartment as he went out to his cab to retrieve the mobile phone he’d left on the front seat.

Nearly seven million people have now fled Ukraine. The majority have settled in European countries, many of which responded to the war by waiving visa requirements for Ukrainian refugees. Around 250,000 came to the UK, which decided not to fully lift restrictions but to instead introduce two emergency visas: the Ukraine Family Scheme and the Homes for Ukraine scheme.

At their outset, both visas granted Ukrainian nations the right to live, work and study in the UK for up to three years. Now, as the third anniversary of Russia’s invasion rolls around, anybody who arrived in the early days of the war is about to see their right to remain expire.

Yet this week, many Ukrainians faced the prospect that they may never be able to return to their homes. US President Trump announced he had spoken to his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, to begin peace negotiations that risk handing over occupied regions of Ukraine to Russian control.

Residents of Ukrainian towns and cities previously liberated from Russian control, such as Bucha and Izium, have spoken about the reign of terror and cruelty they endured under occupation, including torture, rape, summary executions and false imprisonment. Should the peace deal go ahead on Putin’s terms, Ukrainian refugees in the UK face an increasingly uncertain future, with those whose homes are in the occupied territories potentially unable to return.

But even before the announcements from the White House and the Kremlin, the UK’s visa schemes have long presented problems for the vulnerable Ukrainians they are supposed to support.

“Before the full-scale invasion, I had a normal life,” Nastya*, aged 24, told openDemocracy “I worked in a supermarket and a fabric factory. Everything was absolutely good. And then on 22 February 2022, the war started.”

At the time, Nastya lived in Uzhorod, a city near the Slovakian border. As missiles battered the country’s major cities and the Russian forces occupied cities such as Izium and Mariupol, committing war crimes in Bucha and Irpin, she decided to flee with her husband.

“It was a stressful time,” she admitted. “I did not know what the future would be and my family were scattered around the world, some in England, some in Germany and some in Ukraine.”

Nastya and her then-husband travelled to Germany, where her mother was living, before coming to the UK on the Ukraine Family Scheme in August 2022. “It was hard to get a job in Germany, especially as I don’t speak German,” she explained. “I didn’t want to live on benefits, I wanted to support myself and live independently. I had heard in the UK there were opportunities for work, so I relocated.”

Nastya and her husband’s visas took only a few days to be approved, and the pair moved in with her sister-in-law in Leeds, where Nastya found a job in a local factory. “The work was hard and physical with lots of heavy lifting but I was earning some money which is good,” she said.

After three months in the UK, Nastya discovered she was pregnant with her first child. It was happy news, but it came as her marriage was falling apart. “It was quite difficult,” she said. ‘My husband was very sad and there were a lot of horrible moments. I decided to separate from him and go to Germany to be with my mother to have the baby.”

Nastya gave birth to a beautiful baby girl, who shares her bright brown eyes and dark hair. While she had wanted to be with her own mother during the birth, as a newly single mum Nastya was keen to return to the UK, where her father and grandmother were living, to get a job, support her daughter, and start a new life.

She had assumed that as she had the right to live and work in the UK, her daughter would be able to join her on the same family visa scheme.

But what Nastya did not realise is that while she was caring for her newborn in Germany, the Conservative government had been quietly restricting Ukrainians’ right to enter the UK. The family visa scheme had been closed and Ukrainians were no longer allowed to sponsor fellow refugees to arrive on the Homes for Ukraine visa.

Now, if Nastya wanted to come to the UK, she would have to leave her daughter behind.

War in Europe

When the Homes for Ukraine scheme was launched in 2022, members of the British public could open their homes to Ukrainian refugees in exchange for an initial monthly payment of £350 from their local council, while Ukrainians who successfully applied for the scheme were granted the right to live, study and work in the UK for three years.

But in February 2024, the then-Tory government brought in a series of changes. It halved the length of time a new Ukrainian applicant would be able to stay in the UK to 18 months, and amended the rules so that only people with British citizenship can sign up to become hosts. At the same time, it cancelled the family visa scheme, meaning Ukrainian nationals living in the UK can no longer sponsor family members to join them.

These changes have effectively made it impossible for Ukrainian nationals in the UK to help loved ones to settle here to escape the war. Now, Ukrainians wanting to come to the UK are reliant on there being an available British citizen who will take them in. But this, too, has suffered changes that have made it a less appealing prospect for many hosts.

In November, the Labour government announced all British citizens signed up to the Homes for Ukraine scheme will be paid £350 a month, regardless of how long they have been hosting. Households who have been hosting for more than a year are currently paid £500 a month.

Even before this announcement, the number of hosts was in decline, according to openDemocracy’s analysis of government data. In the third quarter of 2023, 100,061 households in England received the monthly ‘thank you’ payment, but by the third quarter of Q3 2024, this had fallen to 48,533 households, the lowest number since the full-scale war began.

This decrease in hosts was also apparent in our review of Homes for Ukraine Facebook pages. While at the start of the war, posts from Ukrainians looking for sponsors received multiple comments from potential hosts, these days they often garner no responses or are met with ‘jokes’, with one commenter saying: “I’d rather be in Mykolaiv than London”. Others respond telling those who wish to relocate to the UK from another European country, like Nastya, that the scheme is not for them: “People in the UK would prefer to sponsor people who are in Ukraine and need to be saved from war.”

“Instead of putting more and more administrative barriers in front of people fleeing war, the UK government must show it can match the solidarity and empathy shown by the people of the UK,” said Alena Ivanova, committee member of the Ukraine Solidarity Campaign, which is organising a march to the Russian embassy in London to mark the third anniversary of the full-scale invasion.

“We know that the vast majority of Ukrainians in the UK are vulnerable women, small children and elderly people who carry significant trauma as a result of Russia’s brutal war. The least we as a country can do is not put them further at risk and increase their anxiety but help them settle and rebuild their lives,” Ivanova added.

Those who arrived in the UK through either the Homes for Ukraine or Ukraine Family Visa scheme in the early days of the war are about to see their right to remain expire. But with the conflict ongoing, they can extend their visas via the Ukraine Permission Extension Scheme.

While this extension is undoubtedly needed, the process for obtaining it is fraught – and may put vulnerable people at risk of falling out of the system.

People needing an extension can apply only when they have 28 days or less left on their right to remain, which may impact their ability to work or be housed, with landlords and employers nervous about accepting Ukrainians who may not have the legal right to be in the country. Those who miss the extension window are at risk of becoming undocumented and therefore will be considered to be in the UK illegally. Although the war means it is unlikely these people will be deported, they would be unable to work or access housing, and are at risk of being removed in the future.

And applications for extensions can only be made from within the UK – a problem for women like Nastya in Germany, or for anyone visiting family in Ukraine.

Polling by the Office for National Statistics found that while the majority of Ukrainians are aware of the visa changes and the need to apply for an extension, a small minority of mainly vulnerable refugees, such as the elderly or young, are not.

Uncertainty is also built into the extension scheme. People will be able to extend their right to stay in the UK by only 18 months, half the three years they were initially granted. If they stay for the full term, a Ukrainian refugee’s total residency in the UK will have been four and a half years – six months short of the five years that a person must have continuously lived here to be eligible for the right to settle permanently.

There is also uncertainty for those British nationals hosting Ukrainians. If their guest is granted an extension, their host will need to reapply for thank you payments.

openDemocracy asked the UK government how it plans to deal with the temporary nature of the visas should the conflict continue for another 18 months. We also asked what plans they have in place should a peace deal cede Ukrainian territory to Russia, with those fleeing the occupied regions unable to return home. They did not respond.

‘I feel loneliness’

Nastya had always planned to return from Germany to the UK with her daughter. Here, she could work and have her own home where she, her daughter and her new partner, who is also Ukrainian, could live as a family.

Now, the changes to the visa schemes have cut her and her daughter off, leaving her living in limbo. She and her daughter face a choice: living in Germany where she struggles to find work and faces eviction from her refugee accommodation in the coming year, or returning to Ukraine which endures daily bombardment by Russian bombs and drones.

“In Germany, I face going into a refugee camp, which is no place to raise a child,” Nastya warned. “My mother lives in a separate city and so we cannot see each other regularly.”

Worse, the heartbreak of being separated from her father and grandmother has been devastating.

“They have never had the chance to meet their granddaughter and great-granddaughter,” she said, the pain of separation clear in her voice. “I have not been in touch with them face to face, and they would really like to meet. I want to see my father and grandmother and it is impossible.”

The changes to the visa schemes have left women like Nastya experiencing a double displacement. First, the full-scale invasion forced them from their homes in Ukraine. Now, changing government policy has separated them from family members in the UK.

“I have cried a lot,” said Nastya. “I feel loneliness, it is so hard that I can’t put it into words. I am crying a lot but I don’t want to blame anyone. If I would receive a visa for my daughter it would be really nice and I would be able to meet my family.”

Nastya has some hope. Last month, the Labour government partially reversed the changes made by the previous administration, allowing Ukrainians to bring their children to join them in the UK, a change described as a “welcome step in the right direction,” by Mubeen Bhutta, British Red Cross director of policy, research and advocacy. The charity has supported Nastya and her family.

“Our teams have supported people who had been unable to reunite with young children,” she said. “We’ve seen their pain and suffering and know this will mean a lot to families who have been torn apart. However, even with these changes many family members will remain separated.

“It is still very difficult for displaced Ukrainians to help elderly parents or partners find safety in the UK. It is vital that the government addresses these obstacles and helps more Ukrainians reunite with their loved ones.”

Nastya, who has a legal right to be in the UK, can now apply for an extension and for her daughter to join her. Her partner, however, must find a British national to sponsor him.

“It is really hard to be a refugee,” she said. “It is impossible to see a future for Ukraine. It would be really nice to go to the UK to work, to rent a flat, to pay taxes. This is what I need, simple things to be satisfied. I want my daughter to be happy, to have a good education.”

*Names have been changed to protect identity

Source: Sian Norris, “Harsh UK visa schemes leave Ukrainian families in limbo and torn apart,” openDemocracy, 14 February 2025

Volunteers

The St. Petersburg Natural Resources Management Committee has stopped signing up volunteers willing to carry gray toads across the road at the Sestroretsk Wetlands Wildlife Preserve. The committee was able to recruit the number of volunteers it needed in a single day.

The committee itself reported the end of the volunteer enrollment, thanking all those who had responded to the call to help the amphibians.

“Registration has been temporarily suspended, as enough volunteers have been recruited for the coming weeks,” the committee stated in its message.

Delovoi Peterburg learned that officials received an unprecedented number of calls and appeals during the day. Six hundred volunteers signed up to save the gray toads.

The largest population of gray toads in St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Region lives in the Sestroretsk Wetlands. Annually in early spring, they migrate en masse to the eastern shore of the Sestroretsk Reservoir to lay their eggs before returning to the forest [sic]. They cross the highway during their migration and can be hit by passing cars.

The Sestroretsk Wetlands Wildlife Reserve announced on April 8 that it was recruiting volunteers to ferry the amphibians over the road. Volunteers are allowed to carry amphibians across the highway after special training. Passersby who have not been trained are asked not to touch the toads, as improper actions can traumatize the amphibians and even cause their death.

Specialists consider toads to be particularly useful amphibians. According to scientists, toads consume about three times more pests than do frogs.

Source: “Smolny’s call to save toads in Sestroretsk causes stir among Petersburgers,” Delovoi Peterburg, 8 April 2024. Translated by the Russian Reader. Photo, above, courtesy of Delovoi Peterburg via vk.com/infoeco_spb.

Russian volunteer Alexander Demidenko, who helped Ukrainian refugees [cross the border with Russia], has died in a pretrial detention center in the Belgorod Region, report Vot Tak and iStories, citing sources. It is claimed that Demidenko died on April 5, but news of his death was made public only today, after his lawyer had informed the deceased man’s wife and son.

The cause of death has not been reported, and there have been no official comments from the authorities yet.

Alexander Demidenko had been in custody since mid-October [2023] on charges of illegal arms trafficking. According to iStories, the authorities were planning to transfer Demidenko to St. Petersburg, where he was to have been charged with more serious crimes.

Since the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the 61-year-old Demidenko had attended anti-war pickets and helped Ukrainian refugees return to their homeland, driving them to the border and hosting them at his home. As many as 900 people who needed a place to sleep stayed in his home, as the border checkpoint was often closed due to shelling, Mediazona writes.

Demidenko disappeared at the Kolotilovka border checkpoint in the Belgorod Region on 17 October [2023]. According to volunteers, he had driven an elderly woman to the checkpoint, but in the parking lot he was stopped by two members of the the territorial defense forces. Subsequently, communication with Demidenko was lost.

Three days later, police officers brought Demidenko home and conducted a search, during which they allegedly found a grenade and detonator fuses from the 1940s. There were numerous bruises on Demidenko’s body.

On 20 October, Alexander Demidenko was jailed for ten days on administrative charges of drinking alcoholic beverages. He was released on 31 October, but the next day he was detained again and jailed for thirty days. During the second administrative arrest, he was arraigned on charges of illegal weapons trafficking and remanded in custody in the pretrial detention center.

In November, it was reported that Demidenko had also been charged with high treason. His lawyer, however, denied these reports. The volunteer’s stay at the pretrial detention center was extended several times on the original weapons charges.

Source: “Volunteer Demidenko, who helped Ukrainians, dies in pretrial detention center,” Radio Svoboda, 8 April 2024. Translated by the Russian Reader. Photo of Mr. Demidenko, above, courtesy of Radio Svoboda, via social media.

Just Business

Source: personal email, December 2022, This is the first time I’ve heard from Raffeisenbank in several years, especially since my account with them has been essentially dormant since well before I left Russia in 2019. ||| TRR

Foreign managers are quitting Petersburg hotels: they are resigning their positions amid the withdrawal of international hotel companies from the Russian market.

In particular, the post of general manager of the five-star Four Seasons Lion Palace has recently been filled by Ekaterina Saburova, who had worked as marketing director at the Four Seasons Moscow Hotel. In an interview with Kommersant-SPb, a spokesman for the Petersburg hotel noted that the previous general manager, Richard Raab, had gone on to work at another hotel in the chain.

Similar personnel changes have taken place at the Grand Moika 22 Hotel, which until recently was part of the Kempinski international chain. The hotel is now headed by Yevgenia Nagimova, and the operations director and Russian staff are responsible for day-to-day operations. The previous general manager, Oliver Kuhn, initially took a similar position at the Kempinski Hotel in Cairo, before running a hotel in the Seychelles. He explained that he had left Russia to transfer to another hotel in the chain. The general director has also been replaced at the Radisson Royal and Park Inn Nevsky: instead of Rune Nordstokke, the hotels are now headed by Mikhail Grobelny, who previously worked as the general manager of the Radisson Blu Belorusskaya Hotel in Moscow.

Experts note that, amidst the departure of international hotel chains [from Russia], industry players have basically lost the need for the position of a general manager responsible for liaising with company management. According to Andrei Petelin, general director of the Hotel Saint Petersburg, the personnel changes may be related to the desire of owners to reduce costs during the crisis [sic], since foreign managers earned more than their Russian counterparts, and also received compensation for housing rental and their children’s education.

Some foreigners still continue to work in Petersburg hotels: Eric Pere, general manager of the Corinthia Hotel St. Petersburg; Gerold Held, general director of the Hotel Astoria and the Angleterre Hotel; and Jaehyuk Yang, manager of Lotte Hotel St. Petersburg. Some industry reps have concerns that further resignations by foreign managers may have a negative impact on the level of service. Andrei Petelin, however, is confident that Petersburg-based managers are able to maintain high standards, because they not only have experience working abroad, but also better understand the needs of Russians coming to the Northern Capital to relax.

Speaking of which, since the beginning of 2022, seven million tourists have visited St. Petersburg. Vice-Governor Boris Piotrovsky noted that in November, bookings at the city’s hotels consistently exceeded the sixty-percent mark.

A few weeks ago, DP wrote about how the Smolny [Petersburg city hall] was again thinking about introducing a resort fee. Hoteliers stated that they considered this step reasonable, but only if the revenues generated were used properly.

Source: “Foreign managers quitting Petersburg hotels in droves,” Delovoi Peterburg, 29 November 2022. Translated by the Russian Reader

620,251 views • Dec 2, 2022 • President Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine is causing major changes back home. Hundreds of thousands of Russian men are being mobilized to fight and tens of thousands have already been killed or injured. Meanwhile, many Russians have left their country and millions of Ukrainians are thought to have arrived. What impact will these changes have on the Russian population? And could the public response lead to Putin’s downfall? We discuss these questions and more with UCLA’s Oleg Itskhoki in this DW Business Special.

Thanks to Tiina Pasanen for the heads-up. ||| TRR

exodos, from ex- ‘out of’ + hodos ‘way’

Since Putin’s announcement of the mobilization and other news, our efforts to help refugees in Russia have collapsed. Refugees, Ukrainian civilians, have been fleeing the war. Every day our foundation receives about fifty appeals for assistance, people asking to be clothed and fed. Who has been trying to solve these issues for all these past seven months? Volunteers and philanthropists. Where are those volunteers and benefactors now? In Kazakhstan, in Georgia. Or in Russia, but panicked or depressed and unable to do anything.

I (the foundation’s director and founder) have myself begun to handle applications from refugees as a curator. Today, I called a family — a woman with two small children. In Ukraine, she was a businesswoman, she had her own restaurant and two shops. The war came to her city, and now she has nothing, not even a bra or bed linen. She asked for a duvet cover, at least one. She said that she is renting a room in an apartment. There is one sofa, on which she and her two children sleep “like a jack in a deck of cards”; they have two pillows for three people and not a single duvet cover. We try to help refugees with underwear, so I asked whether she had a bra. She answered proudly, “No, but I’m not complaining, I don’t consider it an essential.” She asked for food and a duvet cover. We try to do something to cheer up children, so I asked whether her children wanted a scooter. She said they really want one: they envy the other children on the playground who have a scooter or a bicycle.

We were so proud that our foundation had 500 volunteer curators who managed refugee issues. Since the mobilization began, around 30% of those curators have dropped out, having left the country. I had a long list of philanthropists who were happy to help refugees in some way. Now about 50% of benefactors respond that they are no longer able to help.

Is there anyone left here [in Russia] who has the resources to help others? If you are here and willing to do something for people who have fled the war, the Refugee Relief Fund is in particular need of help now.

We really need curators — volunteers who are willing to spend an hour a day coordinating assistance to refugees. The application form is here: https://forms.gle/3WroeebLSz4m6guh8

We really need benefactors — people who are willing, starting from one thousand rubles, to donate once or regularly to pay for food, underpants, medicines, etc., for the refugees. If you can help out with money, write us a message in WhatsApp specifying the amount you are willing to donate, and whether you would like to donate on a one-time or monthly basis. We will send you a formal request from specific people whom you can pay online or to whom you can personally donate a pillowcase, chicken, or bottle of Nurofen. Write to Katya Chistyakova (our foundation’s fundraiser), at +7 966 140-8243 on WhatsApp.

If you do not want to help in a targeted manner and talk about specific families with curators, you can make a monthly donation to the foundation: https://mayak.fund/help-with-money

Source: Lidia Moniava, Facebook, 3 October 2022. Ms. Moniava is the co-founder of the Lighthouse Charity Foundation. I don’t think it is possible for people using non-Russian bank cards and western payment systems to make donations to Lighthouse at the moment, but you are welcome to try. Photo courtesy of Ms. Moniava’s Facebook page. Translated by the Russian Reader

As Russian forces laid siege to the Ukrainian city of Mariupol this spring, children fled bombed-out group homes and boarding schools. Separated from their families, they followed neighbors or strangers heading west, seeking the relative safety of central Ukraine.

Instead, at checkpoints around the city, pro-Russia forces intercepted them, according to interviews with the children, witnesses and family members. The authorities put them on buses headed deeper into Russian-held territory.

“I didn’t want to go,” said Anya, 14, who escaped a home for tuberculosis patients in Mariupol and is now with a foster family near Moscow. “But nobody asked me.”

In the rush to flee, she said, she left behind a sketchbook containing her mother’s phone number. All she could remember were the first three digits.

Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine began in February, Russian authorities have announced with patriotic fanfare the transfer of thousands of Ukrainian children to Russia to be adopted and become citizens. On state-run television, officials offer teddy bears to new arrivals, who are portrayed as abandoned children being rescued from war.

In fact, this mass transfer of children is a potential war crime, regardless of whether they were orphans. And while many of the children did come from orphanages and group homes, the authorities also took children whose relatives or guardians want them back, according to interviews with children and families on both sides of the border.

As Russian troops pushed into Ukraine, children like Anya who were fleeing newly occupied territories were swept up. Some were taken after their parents had been killed or imprisoned by Russian troops, according to local Ukrainian officials.

This systematic resettlement is part of a broader strategy by the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin, to treat Ukraine as a part of Russia and cast his illegal invasion as a noble cause. His government has used children — including the sick, poor and orphaned — as part of a propaganda campaign presenting Russia as a charitable savior.

[…]

Source: Emma Bubola, “Using Adoptions, Russia Turns Ukrainian Children Into Spoils of War,” New York Times, 22 October 2022

The Church Militant

Archbishop Pitirim of Syktyvkar has called on his parishioners to rally not around Christ, but around Putin, calling the West “the enemy of the human race.”

“After [hearing] the appeal made by His Eminence the President (on supporting the war – ed.), I considered it my duty to appeal to all the clergy, monastics, and God-loving laypeople of the Syktyvkar Diocese of the Russian Orthodox Church, as well as to all the patriots of our Northern Region, to rally even closer around our supreme military and political leadership and our valiant army, which, as in the years of the Great Patriotic War, is defending our earthly Fatherland from the insidious enemy of the human race.

“Only by joint prayer and tireless military efforts will we be able to contain the enemy and erect a strong barrier to the West’s aggression.”

It should be noted that “the Great Satan” is Iran’s traditional name for the United States. Meanwhile, the Head of the Spiritual Assembly of Muslims of the Russian Federation, Mufti Albir Krganov, invoked the same metaphor in a speech he made during Eid al-Adha.

Previously, Pitirim (who had already taken holy orders) expressed his pride at being awarded the rank of Cossack colonel.

We should also add that Metropolitan Leonid, appointed Patriarchal Exarch of Africa, has devoted seven of his last ten posts on Telegram to the polemic with the “collective West.” Leonid’s position statements were published as part of the ROC’s revenge on the Patriarchate of Alexandria for supporting Ukrainian autocephaly.

Source: Sota, 11 July 2022. Photo courtesy of Sota. Translated by the Russian Reader

The officers who raided Father Ioann Kurmoyarov’s home reportedly seized his mobile phone, a laptop, two icons, a cassock and a wooden cross.

He was taken to a police station in St Petersburg, and allowed to make one phone call to his family.

He told them he had been arrested.

Father Ioann is believed to be the first priest imprisoned under laws introduced in Russia to punish those who spread information countering the Kremlin’s narrative of the war.

“I am a prisoner of conscience, suffering for my beliefs. I consider the charges against me and my detention to be illegal,” says Father Ioann now in a statement he dictated to his lawyer in St Petersburg’s Kresty Prison.

Father Ioann adds that he is a Christian pacifist whose moral views are entirely based on the commandments of the Gospel and canons of the Russian Orthodox Church.

“Blessed are the peacemakers for they will be called the sons of God,” and “Thou shalt not kill,” are among the quotes he includes in his statement.

On 12 March, just over two weeks after Vladimir Putin launched his invasion of Ukraine, Father Ioann uploaded an eight and a half minute video to YouTube.

In it he said that those who unleash aggression would not go to heaven, and that in this case it was not Ukraine that attacked Russia but the other way around.

“You are the aggressors who attacked and killed civilians. You will not be in any kind of heaven, you will be in hell,” he says of the Russian leadership.

A picture from a sermon posted on YouTube in which Father Ioann Kurmoyarov said Russian aggressors in the conflict would go to hell. — In a sermon posted on YouTube, Father Ioann Kurmoyarov said Russian aggressors in the conflict would go to hell.

In his video Father Ioann goes on to compare the Russian invasion with violent “jihad” suggesting that bloodthirsty leaders in Moscow should have converted to become “militant Islamists”, a theme that he kept returning to.

“We worried but we just didn’t expect that he would be arrested,” says his brother Alexander Kurmoyarov. He tells me that Father Ioann is currently serving an initial two month detention and is then likely to face trial.

“We thought maybe he would be given a warning by the police, but now we are worried that he will get 10 years in prison,” he says, referring to the maximum sentence Father Ioann could receive.

The only visitor to have seen Father Ioann in Kresty Prison is his lawyer Leonid Krikun who says his client appeared to be in good health and also defiant.

“I told Father Ioann that if he pleads guilty he will probably get a shorter sentence, but he refuses to say he has committed any crime,” Mr Krikun says.

“He says that he would rather serve a longer sentence than admit any wrongdoing and if that happens he will preach to fellow inmates.”

Father Ioann has shown before that he is unafraid of speaking out. He was suspended from the church in 2020 after calling the newly-built Church of the Russian Armed Forces a “pagan temple”.

The Cathedral in Moscow was the brainchild of Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu and was due to house frescos that featured President Putin and Josef Stalin as well as scenes that celebrated the Crimean occupation.

In a social media post, Father Ioann said Mr Shoigu should be arrested for offending religious sentiment.

But what makes Father Ioann’s story all the more unusual is that before he got in trouble with the Russian state, he also had a brush with the Ukrainian security service, the SBU.

Ioann Kurmayarov lived in Vinnytsia in central Ukraine for most of his life, his parents having moved there after his father retired from the Russian army.

“Even as a child he was always very outspoken, always searching for the truth,” says his brother Alexander who speaks to me from Vinnytsia.

“It was in the church that he found a place where that search for truth was satisfied,” says Alexander.

But in 2017, Father Ioann made the news in Ukraine for an act of defiance.

With Crimea annexed by Russia and parts of the east occupied by Russian-backed forces, Ukraine expanded laws banning Soviet symbols.

But Father Ioann posted pictures of one of the most controversial of them, the St George’s ribbon.

He was taken in by police for questioning and the SBU brought administrative charges against him.

“He was not radically pro-Russia, he was standing up for freedom of speech and simply believed the authorities were doing the wrong thing by banning displays of the ribbon,” says Alexander.

At the time Father Ioann said he was prepared to pay the fine, worth around $100 (£84.50), but said he would then openly wear the ribbon seeing as he had now paid for the privilege. The Ukrainian case against him was dropped.

He soon moved to Russia where he is already paying a much higher price for speaking out against curbs on freedom of expression.

In April he was defrocked by the Russian Orthodox Church’s Moscow Patriarchate, though members of the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad (ROCA) say he has been accepted by them.

More pressing is that he remains behind bars at Detention Centre Number One in Kresty Prison with the prospect of staying there for years. His initial detention period ends on 6 August after which his trial date is due to be set.

“I want him to be found innocent, as a Christian who was talking about Christian values,” says Alexander.

“But I worry about what is going to happen now and I worry about his future.”

Source: Aleem Maqbool, “Russia-Ukraine war: Priest detained for criticising Putin,” BBC News, 17 July 2022

There are tens of thousands of refugees from Ukraine in Russia. Some of them are trying to leave Russia for countries in Europe or the Transcaucasia, while others remain in temporary accommodation. Both groups are being helped by Russian volunteers. One of the informal leaders of this movement in Petersburg is Grigory Mikhnov-Vaytenko, a bishop of the Apostolic Orthodox Church and a member of the St. Petersburg Human Rights Council. Farida Kurbangaleyeva spoke with him about why he is not afraid of the Russian security forces, why Ukrainians are being taken to the Far East, and why the Russian Orthodox Church failed to oppose the war.

Father Grigory Mikhnov-Vaytenko, holding a copy of the Russian constitution across the street from the Russian Constitutional Court’s current home in downtown Petersburg. Photo courtesy of Facebook and Republic

— How did you start dealing with the problem of Ukrainian refugees?

— In the very first days of the war, we thought about the Ukrainian nationals already living in Russia. According to various estimates, there were from eight hundred thousand to two million such people. We assumed they might have problems. I proposed to the Human Rights Council that we set up a hotline for Ukrainian nationals, and all my colleagues [on the council] supported me. Immediately, there was a large number of inquiries from people trying to leave Russia. In fact, if people’s papers were in order, there was nothing complicated abut the situation. But while we were figuring it out, refugees from Mariupol reached out to us. Som of them wanted to leave Russia, while others wanted to stay. But all of them were asking for legal assistance.

— Could you have imagined that Ukrainians would be brought to Russia?

— To be honest, no. Although it didn’t surprise me. I don’t want issue any judgements now—for this you need to be inside these events. But if you believe what the people directly involved have been saying, there was no possibility of organized evacuation anywhere except to Russia. At least, that’s what these people were told. And yet, when it is said that these people were taken to Russia by force, this is a somewhat inaccurate way of putting it.

— When I spoke with refugees from Mariupol, they said they had wanted to go to areas controlled by Ukraine, but that was tantamount to death—the humanitarian corridor was being shelled all the time.

— I don’t question what they said. I accept it as a fact. There was a humanitarian corridor to Russia, and, apparently, it was quite safe. I know that some people also left for Ukraine, but mostly at their own risk and mainly those who had vehicles. There was no way out on foot, as far as I know.

— But isn’t this violence on Russia’s part?

— When we talk about forcible removal, what I see in my mind’s eye are stills of German shepherds and people being struck in the back with rifle butts. There was no such thing [in this case], of course. But as far as I understand, people were not offered much choice. So, there was an element of there being no alternative. I personally am not ready to speculate about why it happened. I was not an eyewitness myself, and I have not seen any documents in this regard. I have only heard stories.

But it would be much worse if people who found themselves on Russian soil were legally subjected to forced detention, if the authorities prevented them from moving freely. According to my observations, they have not been prevented from doing this. Those who do not want to go to the proposed temporary accommodation facilities can safely go wherever they want.

It is another matter that these people have no money, that they have telecommunications problems, problems with paperwork. In this sense, the Russian state has not been providing them with anything. Ukrainian nationals could not cope without the volunteers who have been helping them obtain papers, board trains, and buy clothes and medicines, including prescription medicines, because there are people with chronic diseases among them.

— But why do the Russian authorities tell Ukrainian refugees to evacuate if they cannot provide for them? Is there no Pharisaism in this?

— I think there is an element of Pharisaism. But, again, now is not the time for making judgements. Now is the time for action. For example, I need to find a place for refugees to spend the night. Here we are talking, but at the same time I am corresponding on a chat, because another family is waiting for help.

The point is that what happened on February 24 is a crime—a crime against humanity, the unleashing of a war of aggression. Period. Everything else is a consequence of this crime.

We’ll figure out a bit later who is a hero and who is a scumbag. But now everyone should do what they can where they can do it. Journalists should write stories, human rights defenders should defend human rights, and caring people should make moral decisions by sharing their apartments, cars, or their own time. Not helping a refugee—even from the point of view of a book called the Bible—is a very grave sin. As the saying goes, “for you were strangers in a strange land.”

— How many Ukrainian refugees are currently in Russia? And how many camps are there?

— There are no official statistics. There are figures from different departments, and they radically contradict each other. The Russian authorities cite certain fantastic figures that are impossible to believe—860,000 people. I don’t understand where they came from, because there are much fewer people in Mariupol. Are they from the Donetsk region? But there seemingly hasn’t been a mass evacuation from there.

I think that these figures, as they pass along the chain through different departments, get zeros and ones added to them. I think that around one hundred thousand people have actually arrived in Russia from the war zone. Several thousand of them have already left, while a certain number of others are planning to leave.

We know of around five hundred temporary accommodation camps. That sounds scary, but you have to understand that there are places housing literally between fifty to seventy people. They’re like small boarding houses. There are probably only a few large camps, like the one near Petersburg, where 550 people have been accommodated. Or, for example, there are around three hundred people at the camp in Vladivostok.

— But why have refugees been taken so far away? Do you have an explanation?

— To be honest, I don’t see any special malicious intent in this. Apparently, somewhere in the presidential administration there was a request to all regions of the federation to ready sites for taking in refugees. And each region reported how many people it could take in. They are still trying to place these people in more or less normal conditions. These are not tent camps or barracks in the taiga.

The regions were also tasked with providing jobs and papers to the people who wanted them. It is clear that no region in the European part of Russia is ready to take in one hundred thousand people and give them jobs. Where would they find them? So, they began spreading people [around the country] as thinly as possible. Taking into account the size of the country, it turned out the way it turned out. We should be grateful that the most distant reception center is in Vladivostok, not Kamchatka.

— The buzz on social media is that this is another [mass] deportation.

— I don’t want to use words lightly. And, since the phrase “special operation” was introduced, words don’t function anymore, they’re finished. The safety of people has been ensured, and tickets from Vladivostok to Moscow, Petersburg, or Tokyo cost no more than money. Of course, this is all redundant. But what can be solved with money is not the problem.

Excerpts from Facebook chats between Ukrainian refugees and Russian volunteers. Courtesy of Republic

— Can people who have no papers at all leave Russia—for example, if they burned up during bombing?

— Refugees can receive a temporary document called a “Certificate establishing the identity of a foreign national or a stateless person.” It’s a very valuable invention. It is issued at police stations, and features a photo, a seal, and three signatures. With this document, a refugee can leave Russia.

To apply for this paper, a person must confirm their identity in any way. They can even submit an electricity bill, or provide witnesses. For example, a family leaves [Ukraine]: five of them have their papers, but the sixth does not. Cases when an entire family does not have their papers are rare. Besides, there is an analogue of Russia’s Public Services Portal in Ukraine, so in ninety-nine percent of cases it won’t be difficult to confirm a person’s identity.

This document was introduced several years ago. As far as I understand, it was championed by the human rights activist Svetlana Gannushkina and her Civic Assistance Committee—because there were a large number of migrant workers in Russia, and their cases were different. Some people had lost their papers. Or, a person, for example, worked in Tyumen, but their country’s consulate was in Yekaterinburg.

Clearly, the nearest Ukrainian consulate is located outside the Russian Federation. Fortunately, the Russian border service understands this, so [Ukrainian refugees] face no particular difficulties when leaving [Russia].

There are more complex dilemmas. For example, there are infants who were born in the now-infamous Mariupol maternity hospital and did not have time to receive any papers. I met a couple here: the dad and mom are legally married, they have plastic biometric cards, but the child’s only ID is the tag it had on its hand or foot.

— Have you baptized any refugee children?

— I was asked to baptize two children, but at that moment there was no room ready. When I asked for a room to be readied, the baptism was postponed. I think we’ll go there in a week. God willing, we will baptize them.

— Who are more numerous—the people who want to leave or the people who want to stay?

— The overwhelming majority (and among them there are people who are absolutely pro-Russian) say that their greatest desire is to get home. You ask, “But isn’t everything wrecked there?” They reply, “That’s okay, we’ll rebuild it.” We’ll set aside how they imagine reconstruction from a political point of view—it’s not about that. The point is that people want to return [to Ukraine]. And they will do so the first chance they get.

That’s why, by the way, the vast majority of refugees do not apply for the fast-track Russian citizenship they are offered. They get either a temporary residence permit or a residence permit. Even those who don’t want to go to Europe and say “We’ll stay here for a while” still regard returning home as their ultimate task.

— How ethical is the offer of Russian citizenship under such circumstances?

— If we set aside February 24, it is something that is done within the concept that the Russian authorities have proclaimed.

— But we cannot set aside February 24, can we?

— That is why it is an outrage. But within this outrage, there may be things that are completely beyond the pale, and there may be things that, from a humanitarian point of view, make it easier for a person to live at a particular moment.

— It seems to me that this is like torturing a person and serving them cake during the breaks.

— But it’s a slightly more complicated scheme if they are told, “Eat cake and we’ll let you go.” Purely practically, there are people who gave the orders to start shelling, others who set up a humanitarian corridor, and still others in the federal migration service who offer fast-track citizenship. All of them together constitute the state apparatus. But individually, they are different people—who, by the way, also have different judgementsd of what is happening.

A very great misfortune has come into our home. But now, I repeat, is not the time for judgements. Now is the time for action.

If a person asks you to give them underpants, a t-shirt, and a toothbrush, you don’t need to ask them who they voted for in the previous election. You have to give them what they ask.

— If martial law is imposed in Russia, will refugees become more vulnerable?

— Such a turn of events would affect everyone. It’s another matter that I have a rather low opinion of our government’s administrative willpower. In Russia, things are usually loudly announced, but come to naught.

I strongly doubt that the authorities would impose martial law. Most likely, they will again make do by adopting hybrid measures so as not to call things by name, because the level of support for this whole business is quite low. In 2014, all the cars were decked out with Saint George’s ribbons and everyone shouted joyfully, “Crimea is ours!” But now we see the letter Z only on Russian National Guard vehicles.

— What about the opinion polls?

— In an authoritarian country that is smoothly segueing to totalitarianism, the worth of such polls is quite low. People are well aware of what answers are expected from them. By the way, the latest poll by the Levada Center says that support for the war has decreased ten percent in a month. This is quite a serious drop, despite the fact that hysteria is being whipped up.

Yesterday, we sent abroad a [Ukrainian] family who had arrived from Astrakhan. They got to Petersburg by train without concealing from others who they were. They did not hide the fact that they were leaving our blessed country. People gave them food, and money, and toys. This is a very important indicator. All the people they met tried to make amends to them.

— Many volunteers also say that they do not go to protest rallies, but help Ukrainians because they feel guilty.

— Now is not a time when you can change the opinion of the authorities with a protest rally. Now there is a flesh and blood problem—the people who have ended up here [in Russia]. And a lot more problems will start to emerge, because the war does no one any good.

I have an appeal on my hands from two hundred families of conscript soldiers who, as you can guess, wound up in this war without any desire or legal grounds for it. But now the high command won’t issue them papers stating that they were involved in hostilities [and are thus owed veterans’ benefits].

Some of them were injured and need long-term rehabilitation and treatment.

It’s called a “ruined life.” A man goes into the army to serve the Motherland and comes home without legs. But he is told, “Actually, fellow, you’re nobody, and we didn’t send you there.” I’m not even talking about those who came back in zinc coffins. War benefits no one except the idiots at the very top.

— If we go back to the statistics, the Ukrainian authorities say that about 200,000 children have been taken to Russia. It turns out that these numbers also don’t jibe with yours?

— Unfortunately, the situation is so monstrous that I am not sure that there is even one agency that can responsibly cite exact figures about the refugees. Imagine: it is a war zone. Management at each individual site belongs to the operational command located there. From there, people are sent to a variety of pretrial detention camps in the Rostov and Belgorod regions, and so on. And from there they are sent further on.

How well are the records kept there? How systematic and accurate are they? Or do people cross the border and that’s the end of it? If I understand correctly, the Russian border service should, theoretically, have more or less accurate data. It should also be borne in mind that among the refugees there are people who managed to get DNR-LNR passports, and people who managed to get Russian citizenship. Some are even citizens of third countries. My data revolves around the number I cited. Perhaps it is already larger. But in any case, it is tens of thousands of people.

— And what is happening in Russia with Ukrainian children who have been left without parents?

— This is the most important issue we are trying to deal with. Fortunately, so far we have not found documentary evidence of such cases. We know that a few days before the war started, an orphanage was evacuated from the DPR. As for all the other children from Ukraine who are in Russia, if they are not with their parents, they are with legal guardians—meaning grandmothers, grandfathers and so on. So we’ve read a lot of stories about total orphans, but we haven’t encountered them yet.

— Do you know what to do if such children turn up?

— Theoretically, we do. In the interests of such a child, a lawyer would represent them with the consent of its legal guardians. This is a difficult job, because the Ukrainian side would have to be involved. I think we would solve the problem somehow.

— You now communicate a lot with children from Ukraine. They say that a child’s psyche is supple, but surely war leaves an irreparable mark on it?

— Of course it does. We can do a deep dive philosophically and discuss when and how to talk to a child about death—what to do if its hamster has died. But what to do if a loved one has died in front of the child? Today, we helped a family travel on to Estonia. The father and grandfather were killed [in Ukraine]. The grandfather died in the arms of his grandson. The boy was barely eighteen years old. And his two younger sisters saw it. Words and tears fail me. This is monstrous.

— How do you find the right words for them?

— I don’t try to find the right words. I try to behave in such a way that, perhaps, they themselves will feel like talking. Of course, post-traumatic syndrome is a very difficult situation. Very often people need to talk to a person who inspires confidence. But I’m not unique in this. All our volunteers are caring, empathetic people. And they all tell their own stories about the refugees.

A few days ago, we had a difficult case getting a family out of the country. The eldest son, who is seventeen years old, has a severe form of cancer. We carried out the evacuation along with the Ukrainian League of Oncologists, because the boy was scheduled for surgery in Switzerland. That was why the family was evacuated directly there, via Warsaw. One of the younger children, a three-year-old boy, has a shrapnel wound. That is, out of four children [in this family], two are in serious condition.

Naturally, this family communicated with our case managers. Our volunteer asked them a completely standard question in the chat: “Do you have pets? Do you need carriers?” And the mother of these children replied, “No, we don’t need anything: our parrot was incinerated along with our apartment.” Such details reveal the degree of horror that has been occurring there.

Yes, a child’s psyche is supple, but we know that young prisoners kept their memories of Auschwitz for life. Many of those who survived have lived thoughtful, fulfilling lives. But this does not mean that they [the Ukrainian children] will forget everything. A lot will depend on the environment and the circumstances in which they find themselves. This is supremely hard work for many years to come.

Father Grigory (far left) with a family from Mariupol whom Russian volunteers were able to send to Switzerland.
Photo courtesy of Facebook and Republic

— I can’t help but ask you as an Orthodox priest: how do you feel about the ROC’s position on the war in Ukraine?

— I feel bad about it. This stance was the basis for my leaving the ROC clergy—because I’d been seeing this position since 2014. Let’s set aside all the theological chatter and just say it outright: the ROC is a public organization with members in two countries. Naturally, this public organization has all the levers it needs for getting involved in peacemaking and bringing people together. Instead, the organization a priori takes one side: these guys here are right, and those guys there are wrong.

This is no dialogue. This is the clerical habit of preaching from the pulpit, from the position of “I teach, and you listen.” This has facilitated only one thing—a decline in the ROC’s authority among the faithful both in Russia and Ukraine and around the world. Read what Pope Francis had to say about his conversation with [Patriarch] Kirill: [he called him] “Putin’s altar boy.”

— But why does Patriarch Kirill support this war?

— Kirill is a man of the system. He has his assignment, and he is carrying it out. His assignment is to support the party line. He is part of the Russian leadership. Recently, a friend told me that there is Rosneft [the Russian state oil corporation], and then there is Roschurch, the state corporation in charge of spirituality. Rosspirituality is probably the right name for it.

That’s the wrong way of doing things, guys. In any case, [Patriarch Kirill] is the head of a powerful organization. It has tens of thousands of regional branches—let’s call them that. It has tens of thousands of rank-and-file clergy. I’m not even talking about the millions of believers in Ukraine. And Ukraine is a much more religious country, a much more “observant” country than Russia. That is, they are people who don’t go to church only out of obligation. Many people in Ukraine now say, “Yes, we are parishioners of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church in the Moscow Patriarchate. But, of course, it should stop communicating with Kirill. Of course, Kirill should no longer be our leader.”

I’m not even talking about the huge number of people in Russia who say, “That’s it, we’re not setting foot in that church.” [The ROC] doesn’t have to condemn or anathematize Putin. But it can and should clearly explain the difference between killing and peacemaking.

— Does this mean that Orthodoxy as a whole is losing its reputation?

— The reputation of religion generally will be greatly devalued by this war. Because religious leaders, unfortunately, do not have sufficient resources for peacekeeping missions. Yes, I know a number of clergymen in Ukraine—they are not necessarily Orthodox, many of them are Protestants—who are working in the war zone, evacuating civilians and helping the wounded. This is the Church’s business.

But the Church cannot make political decisions nowadays. Its word doesn’t have the weight it did in the Middle Ages, when wars were stopped and started because the Pope said so. It has no such resources. And there is no Sergius of Radonezh in Russia nowadays who could seal off the churches in Nizhny Novgorod.

One could, of course, do a performance. I could go to Red Square and seal the doors of St. Basil’s Cathedral. It would get written about, but it would be forgotten in five minutes, because [the Church] has now sway over minds. Society has long been de-Christianized.

— But the Pope has spoken out against the war, hasn’t he?

— I have a lot of sympathy for Pope Francis. But the Catholic Church is not just the Pope. There are also a huge number of people who should have worked even more vigorously. Now, unfortunately, what the Pope says is not heard by those to whom it is primarily addressed. Putin does not hear [the Pope], and Kirill does not tell him what the Pope says. We have reached a dead end. This is the trouble with ecclesiastical diplomacy and the Church’s influence.

— Do you cooperate with the Catholic charity organization Caritas?

— I don’t have any prejudices about anyone at all, especially when it comes to humanitarian cooperation. People can be atheists to the fourth degree or Catholics to the eighteenth power, but I say, “Lord, what a blessing that there are people who care.” Basically, we are willing to work with absolutely everyone—with the police, the border service, the Defense Ministry, the FSB. If it can be of real benefit to people, I say let’s cooperate, let’s look for a solution. If people are sitting and talking it’s always better than when they are looking at each other through the sight of a gun.

— Some of the volunteers helping the refugees have now become targets of harassment. Aren’t you afraid of this?

— I’m definitely not afraid of bullying. I didn’t experience it in 2014, when I supported Ukraine. Although I was asked a lot of puzzled questions. I think that the events that are happening now with the volunteers have to do with the fact that one of the heads of the regional special services isn’t quite up to his job. He misunderstands the state’s goals and objectives.

I talked to the big bosses in Petersburg and got their full agreement that everyone who wants to leave [Russia] should be sent away as soon as possible. This is in the public interest. Because otherwise we end up with an unmanageable number of socially disadvantaged people who still have personal ties to Ukraine and may have grievances against the Russian state.

Today, they say they want to live here, but tomorrow? Are we sure? Maybe we should get them out of her faster? And if the state does not have the material resources to keep them here and send them off, then thank God that there are volunteers who are willing to help these people go quietly and calmly wherever they want. [The officials] thought it over. They said, “This is an approach that suits the state.” I replied, “Well, you see.”

— Is it true that volunteers do not unite in one big movement and instead operate as discrete partisan detachments intentionally so that the authorities don’t harm them?

— We don’t have time to unite in one big movement. We would start spending time on organizational work, on electing a chair—on nonsense. Now there is a simple task: a man arrives at a train station [in Petersburg] and writes, “I have three bags and four kids.” He needs to be helped through simple efforts.

You can even just stand at the Moscow Station in Petersburg holding a sign that says, “I am driving refugees to Ivangorod.” That’s it. If you seem basically trustworthy, [the refugees] will approach you.

I am very happy (if I can say that at all nowadays) when I see thousands of volunteer chats. All my hopes rest on this.

People ask me, “Aren’t you afraid that half of [the people on the volunteer chats] are officers in the special services?” If that’s the case, then I’m doubly happy that they see and read everything. A person with the remnants of a healthy psyche cannot help but reach the right conclusions. It is a lot of fun to press a button and destroy an abstract opponent from afar. You listen to [pro-Putin TV talk show presenter Vladimir] Solovyov and go into battle for denazification. But when you come across people who have nothing to do with it at all—such as the dead grandfather [that Father Grigory mentioned, above] and the dad, who worked as an engineer at the Azovstal plant—you get a completely different picture.

— Aren’t you afraid of being named a “foreign agent”?

— I am a foreign agent by definition, because I abide by the the laws of the Kingdom of Heaven. It is not subject to the jurisdiction of the Russian Federation. This does not mean that I would deliberately and maliciously violate the laws of the state. But there are primary laws and secondary laws. The primary laws are: do not kill, do not steal, and so on down the line. So it is shameful to be afraid.

I don’t believe that I am violating the law by doing what I do. I obey it scrupulously. The law does not stipulate that the phrase “no war” is a crime.

Nor do I think that these words discredit the armed forces. I believe that they are words that any sane person would say. War is something that should not be part of humanity in the twenty-first century.

— Now you are you refraining from judging what is happening. When can we make this judgement?

— First of all, the fighting must end. Secondly, all refugees must find a home. It is clear that everyone won’t be getting home anytime soon. And considering such dangers as the use of nuclear weapons, this whole business could drag on for a very long time.

But that day will come. Someday a peace treaty or an act of surrender will be signed. The guns will stop talking. Not only analysts, but also historians will start talking. Sooner or later, judges and prosecutors will have their say. It’s a very sad spectacle. Of course, I would have rather that Russia had avoided this shock. But that didn’t happen.

Source: Farida Kurbangaleyeva, “‘I am a foreign agent by definition, because I abide by the laws of the Kingdom of Heaven’: how a Petersburg priest who left the Russian Orthodox Church has been helping Ukrainian refugees,” Republic, 10 May 2022. Translated by the Russian Reader

Absolutely Horizontal

Olga lived in Mariupol for many years. Until February 24, she worked as a courier, while her husband worked at the Azovstal steel works, and their two children studied at school. Since early March 2022, due to the so-called special operation, Mariupol has been under siege, and fighting has been going on in the city. In the middle of the month, when humanitarian corridors opened up, the family was able to get to Donetsk, and from there they took a bus to Petersburg. Their bus tickets were bought by volunteers — ordinary people who are not connected with government agencies. They also met the Mariupol residents in Petersburg and housed them in their apartment for the night, and then took them to Ivangorod, where Olga and her relatives crossed the Estonian border. The family is now in Finland.

There are many similar stories. In Petersburg, hundreds of residents help transit refugees every day. There are so many people willing to help that all requests — from putting up a family of five people and two dogs to transporting a nursing mother with a baby to Ivangorod — are claimed by volunteers in a matter of minutes. Over the border, in the Estonian city of Narva, Ukrainians are also welcomed by volunteers. This is the story of how ordinary citizens sat and watched the news, feeling powerless, but then found an opportunity to help others and themselves.

How Volunteering Heals Witness Trauma
Alexander from Petersburg is an artist. If it weren’t for [the war], he would now be engaged in art making. “I won’t be getting around to art anytime soon, but there will be food for it,” he says.

In April, Alexander and other volunteers launched a platform on the internet where they coordinate requests for assistance in crossing the border with Estonia and (less often) Finland. For security reasons and at the request of the volunteers, we are not publishing a link to this resource. Currently, there are more people willing to help than requests for help: people span up the requests in minutes.

Here is an example of a typical request: “A family is coming from Mariupol: a grandmother, grandfather, their daughter, grandson (12 years old), and a pregnant cat. You need to meet them at the train station, feed them, provide overnight accommodation, chip the cat and put the family on the bus to Tallinn the next morning.”

“Society has been traumatized. People were watching the news and tortured by a feeling of impotence, so we created a platform where we try to cure this powerlessness. I have the feeling that any problem can be solved en masse. People are competing for the opportunity to help,” says Alexander, “and so [the campaign] has turned out absolutely horizontal. People find the requests on their own and fulfill them on their own. In the past, I worked on the problems in my neighborhood, and back then it was several activists dragging the whole movement like locomotives, but now the wave rolls on by itself.”

We thought we were going to disappear inside Russia, the refugees tell local volunteers. People travel mostly in groups. Most of them are women, children, and the elderly. There are fewer men. “Many people are traveling with their pets,” says Alexander. In addition to Mariupol and the surrounding area, they come from the Kharkiv region, Donetsk, and Luhansk. They are going to European countries, but some seek to return to Ukraine as quickly as possible because they have relatives there, they can speak their native language, and they don’t have to deal with the “refugee” label.

It is not only Petersburgers who have been helping them to make the journey to the Russian-Estonian border. There are also hundreds of volunteers in Moscow. The Petersburgers are now establishing contacts in Rostov, Krasnodar, and Belgorod, the [southern] Russian cities through which the refugees travel most often.

“The other day I came to my senses, looked up from the screen, and realized that nothing was hurting inside me. I haven’t watched the news for more than a week and I don’t know what is happening in the political space. I have a specific task, it is very simple and clean. Unlike everything else, I have no doubt that it’s a good thing,” says Alexander. “Everyone wants to do good, and helping refugees certainly satisfies this need.”

How Natalia Got from Mariupol to Vilnius via Petersburg
Natalia got from Ukraine to Lithuania thanks to the internet platform where Alexander volunteers.

Previously, she worked as a cook in the Shchiriy Kum retail chain. She has two daughters: one is a high school student, the other, a university student. On the morning of February 24, Natalia went to work as usual. “I heard that there had been an explosion somewhere. But in Mariupol this is so routine that no one paid it any mind. (Echoes of the fighting have been audible in Mariupol since 2014, and most residents were used to the sounds of distant explosions and shooting — The Village.) When I arrived at work, I realized that things were serious. I finished up by three o’clock, and they let us go home. I didn’t go to work anymore after that.”

Natalia and her family remained in Mariupol until March 23. There was no “serious fighting” in her neighborhood, so she and her daughters stayed in their apartment, not in a basement or a bomb shelter. “But our things were packed to leave at any moment,” she says. The electricity in the city had been turned off, and the water was also turned off, so the family went to a spring to get water. Then the gas was turned off, so they had to cook on a bonfire.

When the fighting got close, Natalia, her girls, and her eldest daughter’s boyfriend went to the outskirts of city, where “there were buses from the [Donetsk People’s Republic].” They went on one of these buses to her parents who live near Mariupol and stayed there for three weeks. Then all four of them traveled to Taganrog [a Russian city approximately 120 km east of Mariupol]. At the local temporary accommodation point, they were offered a choice: they could go either to Khabarovsk or to Perm. Natalia didn’t want to go to Khabarovsk or Perm. She needed to get to Lithuania, where a friend of hers lives. That was when a Mariupol acquaintance put her in touch with the Petersburg volunteers.

“The vbolunteers bought us tickets to Petersburg. We got to Rostov, where we boarded a train. In Petersburg, we were met by Ivan, who took us home to eat. We washed up and changed clothes, and he took us to get on a minibus to Ivangorod,” Natalia says. The Mariupol residents crossed the Russian-Estonian border on April 23. “At the Russian border, they asked [my daughter’s boyfriend] where he was going and why.” The Petersburg volunteers had put Natalia in touch with Narva volunteers, and so the family immediately boarded a free bus to Riga.

Natalia is currently in Vilnius. She has no plans to leave — she no longer has the strength to travel with suitcases. “We’ve rented a room. We’re going to look for jobs,” she says.

How to Help via Twitter
“It all started with the fact that I felt helpless and useless. I really wanted to do something,” says Katya from Petersburg.

You can find out about helping refugees who are traveling to Europe via Petersburg on various websites. The one on which the artist Alexander volunteers is the largest. There are others. For example, Katya saw such a request on Twitter. In mid-April, a friend of hers asked whether anyone could welcome a family (a mother, son and daughter) and an 18-year-old girl who was traveling with them for a couple of days. Katya responded. The family was put up by her friend, while Katya took in the girl. “She met the family she came with two weeks before [the war]. They went for a walk once with the boy, and he decided to take her with him. Her mother refused to leave, and so now the girl is all alone, without relatives here,” says Katya.

Katya met the girl at the Moscow Railway Station and they traveled the rest of the way to her house. The question arose: how to talk to a person who has country has been invaded by your own country? “Either we were a match, or the girl herself is this way, but it was easy to communicate with her, like with a sister,” says Katya. They sat down to drink tea, and the girl recounted in a calm voice how one day a tank drove up to the nine-story building in Mariupol where she was hiding in a bomb shelter, raised its turret, and began shooting into the distance. “I was bored, and I started counting. It fired seventy shots,” the girl said.

Before the girl left, Katya and her guest hugged tightly. The Mariupol family eventually stayed in Sweden, while the girl ended up in Germany. “I was constantly thinking about what is it like to live when your city is gone, when it has been wiped off the face of the earth,” says Katya.

What Ivangorod, the Transit Point for Refugees Going to Estonia, Looks Like
It takes two hours to drive from Petersburg to Ivangorod. At the outskirts of the city, you need to show the frontier guards a passport or a special pass for entering the border zone. Refugees are allowed through with an internal Ukrainian passport. A kilometer from the checkpoint, on a pole right next to the highway, storks have built a large nest.

Ivangorod is home to around nine thousand people. Its main attraction is a medieval fortress. In the six years that have passed since The Village‘s correspondents last visited the city, it has become prettier. The local public spaces have been beautified under the federal government’s Comfortable Environment program.

Estonia can be seen from the bank of the Narva River. To get to the European Union, you need to walk 162 meters across the Friendship Bridge. At the entrance there is a hut where insurance used to be sold, but now it is abandoned, its windows broken. People walk down the slope carrying bags and plastic sacks stuffed with things. The local children ride scooters. Closer to the shore, the children turn right onto the embankment, which the local authorities attempted to beautify in the 2010s with funding from the EU. The people carrying bags go to the left.

There are several dozen people at the border checkpoint. A heart-rending meow resounds from the middle of the queue. A woman removes a black jacket from a pet carrier: a hairless Sphynx cat stares at her indignantly.

“Maybe I should let him out on the grass?”

The people in the queue say there is no need, that they will get through quickly. But it seems that this forecast is too optimistic.

“Are they all Ukrainians?” a man with a reflector asks loudly. The people in front of him shrug their shoulders. “Are they Maidanovites? Refugees? Are they fleeing from the nationalists?”

Someone argues that the frontier guards should organize two queues — “for people and for refugees” — to make the border crossing go more quickly.

Under the bar at the border restaurant Vityaz hangs a homemade “Peace! Labor! May!” banner and an image of a dove. On the way to the Ivangorod fortress there is a memorial stone dedicated to “the militiamen, volunteers, and civilians who perished and suffered in the crucible of the war in the Donbas.” The Village‘s correspondents did not encounter a single letter Z — the symbol of the “special operation” — in Ivangorod. Nor they did encounter a single pacifist message either.

How Narva Helps Transit Refugees
At the border checkpoint, people are met by numerous volunteers from various associations, including the Friends of Mariupol. “These are all private initiatives,” says Narva volunteer Marina Koreshkova.

“We have been seeing exhausted people,” says Marina. “Many are in rough psychological condition, and they really want to talk. We listen to them for an hour, two, three — we empathize with them and share important information. People say that while they were traveling through Russia, they saw the Z, heard unpleasant messages addressed to Ukrainians, and were forced to put up with it and remain silent just to get to Europe. But I often see examples of Stockholm syndrome. Or maybe people are just afraid to say the wrong thing.”

Six years ago, Marina and her children moved to Narva from Petersburg, because she understood that the situation in Russia was getting worse. In Russia, she was a lawyer, working for ten years in a government committee on social policy, then as an arbitration manager. She started her life from scratch in Narva, and is now studying new professions. She is a member of Art Republic Krenholmia and Narva Meediaklubi, nonprofits engaged in civil society development and social and creative projects.

On April 10, Marina received a call from the manager of the Vaba Lava Theater Center, who said that they had decided to temporarily convert a hostel for actors into an overnight accommodation for refugees. Soon, the Narva Art Residence also let transit refugees into its hostel for artists. Then the Ingria House, located near the train station, equipped a room to accommodate Ukrainians. And on May 1, a Narva businessman temporarily vacated his office, located near the border, for daytime stays.

“For the first week, Sergei [Tsvetkov, another volunteer] and I tried to do everything ourselves. We quickly realized that at this pace we would burn out or get sick. Now about sixty local volunteers are involved, and people have come from Tallinn to help. The number of people helping out has been growing every day. Local residents collect the refugees’ laundry for washing, and bring them food and medicine.”

Almost none of the refugees remain in Narva. “The proximity to the border generates a new sense of uncertainty for them,” Marina argues. In addition, the region’s refugee registration office, which enables Ukrainians to gain a foothold in Estonia, has been closed. The nearest one still in operation is in Tartu [a distance of 180 km from Narva by car].

Narva is also “the most Russian city in NATO.” Only four percent of the city’s population is ethnic Estonian, and thirty-six percent of residents are Russian passport holder. “I don’t have time to read social media, but until April 10, I constantly observed negative comments [from Narva residents] about the refugees, although I have not seen any outward aggression in the city,” says Marina.

She believes that a welcoming station where refugees could get basic information and relax inside in the warmth should be equipped at the border. “It was quite cold in late April. People were freezing on the border outside in the wind, then thawing out for an hour and not taking off their outerwear.”

There is not even a toilet on the Russian side of the border, however.

Source: “‘An absolutely horizontal business’: How residents of Petersburg and Narva are helping Ukrainian refugees going to Europe,” The Village, 5 May 2022. Image (below) courtesy of The Village. Thanks to JG for the story and the link. Translated by the Russian Reader

______________

Umm Khaled hardly leaves the tent where she lives in northwest Syria, and she says she doesn’t pay attention to the news. But she knows one reason why it is getting harder and harder to feed herself and her children: Ukraine.

“Prices have been going up, and this has been happening to us since the war in Ukraine started,” said the 40-year-old, who has lived in a tent camp for displaced people in the last rebel-held enclave in Syria for the past six years since fleeing a government offensive.

Food prices around the world were already rising, but the war in Ukraine has accelerated the increase since Russia’s invasion began on Feb. 24. The impact is worsening the already dangerous situation of millions of Syrians driven from their homes by their country’s now 11-year-old civil war.

The rebel enclave in Syria’s northwest province of Idlib is packed with some 4 million people, most of whom fled there from elsewhere in the country. Most rely on international aid to survive, for everything from food and shelter to medical care and education.

Because of rising prices, some aid agencies are scaling back their food assistance. The biggest provider, the U.N. World Food Program, began this week to cut the size of the monthly rations it gives to 1.35 million people in the territory.

The Ukraine crisis has also created a whole new group of refugees. European nations and the U.S. have rushed to help more than 5.5 million Ukrainians who have fled to neighboring countries, as well as more than 7 million displaced within Ukraine’s borders.

Aid agencies are hoping to draw some of the world’s attention back to Syria in a two-day donor conference for humanitarian aid to Syrians that begins Monday in Brussels, hosted by the U.N. and the European Union. The funding also goes toward aid to the 5.7 million Syrian refugees living in neighboring countries, particularly Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan.

Last year, the EU, the United States and other nations pledged $6.4 billion to help Syrians and neighboring countries hosting refugees. But that fell well short of the $10 billion that the U.N. had sought — and the impact was felt on the ground. In Idlib, 10 of its 50 medical centers lost funding in 2022, forcing them to dramatically cut back services, Amnesty International said in a report released Thursday.

Across Syria, people have been forced to eat less, the Norwegian Refugee Council said. The group surveyed several hundred families around the country and found 87% were skipping meals to meet other living costs.

“While the humanitarian crisis in Ukraine continues to demand world attention, donors and governments meeting in Brussels must not forget about their commitment to Syria,” NRC’s Mideast Regional Director Carsten Hansen said in a report Thursday.

The U.N.’s children’s agency UNICEF said more than 6.5 million children in Syria are in need of assistance calling it the highest recorded since the conflict began. It said that since 2011, over 13,000 children have been confirmed killed or injured.

Meanwhile, UNICEF said funding for humanitarian operations in Syria is dwindling fast, saying it has received less than half of its funding requirements for this year. “We urgently need nearly $20 million for the cross-border operations” in Syria, the agency said in a statement.

Umm Khaled is among those who rely on food aid. With her aid rations reduced, she has gone deeper in debt to feed her family.

Her husband and eldest son were killed in a Syrian government airstrike in their home city of Aleppo in 2016. Soon after, she escaped with her three surviving children to the rebel enclave in Idlib province. Ever since, they have lived in a tent camp with other displaced people on the outskirts of the town of Atmeh near the Turkish border.

Her family lives on two meals a day — a small breakfast and a main meal late in the afternoon that serves as lunch and dinner. Her only income is from picking olives for a few weeks a year, making 20 Turkish liras ($1.35) a day.

“We used to get enough rice, bulgur, lentils and others. Now they keep reducing them,” she said by telephone from the camp. She spoke on condition her full name is not made public, fearing repercussions. She lives with her two daughters, ages six and 16, and 12-year-old son, who suffered head and arm injuries in the strike that killed his brother and father.

The price of essential food items in northwest Syria has already increased by between 22% and 67% since the start of the Ukraine conflict, according to the aid group Mercy Corps. There have also been shortages in sunflower oil, sugar and flour.

Mercy Corps provides cash assistance to displaced Syrians to buy food and other needs and it says it has no plans to reduce the amount.

“Even before the war in Ukraine, bread was already becoming increasingly unaffordable,” said Mercy Corps Syria Country Director, Kieren Barnes. The vast majority of wheat brought into northwest Syria is of Ukrainian origin, and the territory doesn’t produce enough wheat for its own needs.

“The world is witnessing a year of catastrophic hunger with a huge gap between the resources and the needs of the millions of people around the world,” said WFP spokeswoman Abeer Etefa.

In many of its operations around the world, WFP is reducing the size of the rations it provides, she said. Starting this month in northwest Syria, the provisions will go down to 1,177 calories a day, from 1,340. The food basket will continue to provide a mix of commodities, including wheat flour, rice, chickpeas, lentils, bulgur wheat, sugar and oil.

Rising prices have increased the cost of WFP’s food assistance by 51% since 2019 and that cost will likely go even higher as the impact of the Ukraine crisis is felt, Etefa said.

Earlier in the year, before the Ukraine conflict began, a 29% jump in costs prompted the Czech aid agency People in Need to switch from providing food packages to giving food vouchers. The vouchers, worth $60, buy less food than the group’s target level, but it had to take the step to “maximize its coverage of food assistance to the most vulnerable,” a spokesperson told The Associated Press.

As the world turns to other conflicts, “Syria is on the verge of becoming yet another forgotten crisis,” Assistant U.N. Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs Joyce Msuya warned in late April.

In northwest Syria, “a staggering 4.1 million people” need humanitarian aid, Msuya said — not just food, but also medicines, blankets, school supplies and shelter. She said almost a million people in the territory, mainly women and children, live in tents, “half of which are beyond their normal lifespan.”

Many fear that the situation could only get worse in July, because Russia may force international aid for the northwest to be delivered through parts of Syria under the control of its ally, President Bashar Assad.

Currently, aid enters the Idlib enclave directly from Turkey via a single border crossing, Bab al-Hawa. The U.N. mandate allowing deliveries through Bab al-Hawa ends on July 9, and Russia has hinted it will veto a Security Council resolution renewing the mandate.

A Russian veto would effectively hand Assad control over the flow of aid to the opposition enclave and the U.S. and EU had warned earlier they will stop funding in that case.

The result will be a severe humanitarian crisis, likely triggering a new flood of Syrian migrants into Turkey and Europe, the German Institute for International and Security Affairs warned in a report.

Umm Khaled said she has no choice but to endure her deteriorating living conditions.

“They keep reducing our food basket,” she said. “May God protect us if they cut it completely.”

Source: Bassem Mroue, “Syrians in desperate need of aid hit hard by Ukraine fallout,” AP News, 8 May 2022. Thanks to Harald Etzbach for the story.

Staying

We have made the difficult decision to stay in Russia. I can’t leave my beloved parents. I can’t leave my younger sister, who is planning to apply to the Academy of Arts this year. They are dear to our own little family, and we are dear to them. Why do we need another, freer life if our loved ones will be far away? How can I deprive my children of unconditional love and their extended family?

If we leave, who will stay here? Everyone is fleeing thinking that it won’t be for long, that they will return home. But I feel that it will be a one-way ticket for many.

I look at the Ukrainian refugee families who are rushing home from Europe, even though their homes are no longer there, at those Ukrainians who won’t agree to go even to the most hospitable homes and remain under bombardment with their relatives.

I look at those who are fleeing Russia, because it is difficult to endure the tension, shame, fear, condemnation, and uncertainty.

I think that this is the first time that I have felt such love for my unhappy country and the people here.

We are not afraid of everyday troubles and the danger of losing our jobs. Much more terrible is the fact that people are voluntarily drawing the symbol of the war [“Z”] on their cars. The criminalization of society, which is already beginning to gain momentum, is frightening. The propaganda in the schools scares me.

I have friends who have gone from being poor to being almost beggars. There are those whom I can help just with my presence, hugs, and the opportunity to say what they think.

This disaster has united us even more, and I will live in the hope that together we will survive it all.

[…]

I’m sorry that I’m writing incoherently — I don’t even remember the last time I got a good night’s sleep.

Source: a private communication to a close friend of mine from an acquaintance in Petersburg, 8 March 2022. Although the author gave me permission to translate and publish the letter, and to identify them by name, I decided to conceal their identity for their own safety and to omit certain parts of the letter. Translation and photo by the Russian Reader

How Belarusians Feel About the War in Ukraine

“*No war!”: detail of a placard held by a female Belarusian protester in Minsk on March 3, 2022. Photo credit: anonymous*

How do Belarusians feel about their country’s involvement in Ukraine? This was one of the most debated topics on my friends’ social media pages during the past week. Belarusian territory is being used as a launching pad for Russian rockets. At least seventy out of the 480 rockets that have been launched on Ukraine so far were launched from Belarus. There is also the imminent possibility that the country’s troops will be directly involved. In light of these events, many Belarusians may feel concerned about an increased level of animosity towards them, which is understandable, given the circumstances. It is also understandable that many may feel vulnerable and discriminated against, as accounts of Belarusians who have been denied services or housing in Ukraine and European countries only begin to circulate online.

But I would argue that we should not despair and overreact. Instead, we should explain to those affected by the war who we are: activists, opposition members, protesters, exiles, immigrants, or victims of the Lukashenka regime. At the moment, the best thing that we Belarusians can do as a group is to signal unequivocally which side we are on and focus on what needs to be done to stop this war, not on our personal feelings. And if our feelings are to be channeled, we should talk about collective responsibility, which, as decades of philosophical discourse have demonstrated, is not a simple thing. In a nutshell, people may or may not consider themselves responsible for what has already taken place, but we are all now collectively responsible for bringing it to an end. And only when we succeed, if at all, will we be able to discuss how guilt and responsibility may be applied to various scenarios. First, though, Putin’s and Lukashenka’s regimes must be overthrown.

The Belarusian community as a whole has become increasingly transnational, encompassing people within Belarus, displaced persons, and diasporas around the globe. Ukraine is our neighbor and ally. We are connected to it by thousands of invisible threads, through our families, friends, and recent refugees who fled the Lukashenka regime. Together with Ukrainians, we are living through a trauma that will take years and years to heal. And I want to say to those who keep reposting messages about feeling ashamed that you should perhaps stop because this language is inadequate to express the complex mix of emotions that we are experiencing at the moment.

As I am typing these words, my husband’s father is being bombed in Kyiv. As a result of a stroke, he is paralyzed and cannot leave his apartment. My journalist friend has sent me an encrypted message with her son’s documents, asking me to find and adopt the boy if they were to be killed. As part of the message, she attaches a photo of her family, so that the kid can remember his parents. My other friend’s parents are too frail to go to the shelter, recuperating from covid. Her mother is sleeping in the bathtub, and her father is sleeping by the bathroom door. The grandmother of another friend is in her nineties and in poor health. Has she survived the massacre of Babyn Yar only to be bombed by Putin and Lukashenka? How is the family to tell her that Putin has bombed the sacred ground of Babyn Yar? I see many people writing on their Facebook pages, “Thank God, my parents (grandparents) did not live to see this.”

Enough of being ashamed, do something! Actions today are more important than words, and our efforts, at the very least, should go to aid the refugees. Over a million people have already arrived in Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, Romania, and Moldova, and some will eventually arrive in the United States. From my feed, I learned that my professional contact in Kyiv, who is nine months pregnant, is walking alone with her six-year-old across the border, wondering if her husband who stayed behind to defend Kyiv will survive. She’s asking on Facebook for someone to take her cat since she can no longer carry him. My best friend from college managed to relocate her family first to Kyiv and, after the war started, to Poland. She says they are still in a haze. Watching the bombs go off over Borispol airport, she kept asking herself how it could be real.

These are just a few glimpses of this humanitarian catastrophe. Do something to help them but don’t forget about the groups that are discriminated against in this conflict, like our own people who are left behind in Ukraine. Earlier today, I saw a Facebook post from sociologist Andrey Vozyanov writing that Ukrainians are refusing to let Belarusians on the evacuation trains since Belarus has become a party to this conflict. Seeing our people abandoned is heartbreaking. They already escaped the concentration camp named Belarus only to be repressed again. This is not the time to be silent.

And do we really have anything to be ashamed of? Over the last year and a half, the regime leveled our resistance to the ground so that Russia could use it as a military base. Our country is occupied by Russian troops. We have lost our critical infrastructures. There are no independent journalists on the ground to keep the population informed. Human rights organizations have nearly disappeared. And we have more than 1,000 political prisoners in a country with a population of 9.4 million. Those who are still in Minsk protested the war yesterday, and 800 of them went to jail. All these people will face torture, and many will face criminal charges. One protester commented that he put his body on the line to show his solidarity with Ukrainians and distract their jailers from the war. If anything, we should drop the sense of shame and look up to the Ukrainians and learn from their know-how. After all, our countries share a common regional destiny and common enemies – Putin and Lukashenka. During the Maidan, some Belarusians fought side by side with Ukrainians, and now a new Belarusian battalion in Ukraine is being formed. Those who are not ready to take up arms should at least oppose a world order that puts profit above human life. Or the production of knowledge about the region, which results in Belarusian and Ukrainian bodies being less valuable than those of citizens with other passports. It is by acknowledging responsibility that a new sense of agency and ability to act is born. Glory to Ukraine! Long live Belarus!

Sasha Razor is a Belarusian-American scholar and activist who lives in Los Angeles.