Russia ‘holds back thousands’ of fleeing Ukrainians
Ukraine claims Moscow has abducted 2.5 million Ukrainians since the invasion began in February.
It was late last month when Tatiana decided it was time to leave her Russian-occupied hometown of Kakhovka as President Putin announced a mass mobilisation of troops and the battle for southern Ukraine was set.
Three weeks after fleeing, she is still stranded inside the territory the Kremlin has annexed for itself.
“They will not let anyone out,” she said tearfully down the phone from Russian-occupied Dniprorudne, on the road to the only remaining crossing to Ukrainian control, just outside the city of Zaporizhzhia.
Ukrainians fleeing Russian occupation in the south have been welcomed in Zaporizhzhia since the start of the war. Yesterday volunteers hoping to receive new evacuees waited in the rain at the assembly point outside the city where they are met. Nobody came.
There were 4000 cars of fleeing Ukrainians in Dniprorudne when Tatiana, 37, arrived along with her husband, sister and 97-year-old grandmother. Almost none have got through.
Tatiana and her family found a hostel but others sleep in their cars waiting for an opportunity to leave. Every day they apply to the Russian authorities for permission. Every day the rules inexplicably change and they are told to try again. Or, if they are willing, they are welcome to continue east to Russia.
“They send about 600 people that way a day, claiming they will be sent to holiday resorts,” Tatiana said. “They know it’s not true, they are going to Ufa,” in the shadow of the Ural Mountains in central Russia, “but some agree to go, saying ‘at least they will feed us’. ” Ukraine claims Moscow has abducted 2.5 million Ukrainians since the invasion began in February.
Permission to leave the occupied areas can be sought online too but Tatiana is reluctant to try after neighbours who applied digitally were picked up by Russian forces and never seen again.
Tatiana’s home in Kakhovka is just upstream of the hydroelectric power plant at the centre of an information war between Moscow and Kyiv over who is planning to destroy it, unleashing disaster on the lower land below where the city of Kherson sits.
As impassable as the Russian authorities have made it, Zaporizhzhia is the only official escape route left from Kherson. Evacuation across the front line to the west has been all but impossible for months. The only civilians to be extracted are from villages that the Ukrainian military has taken back from Russian control in the past two months.
The Russian authorities ordered all civilians to leave Kherson city by the end of the weekend ahead of an expected Ukrainian offensive. The loss of Kherson, the only regional capital Russia has captured, would represent a serious blow to its claims over Ukraine.
Russia hit Ukraine’s energy infrastructure in new missile strikes over the weekend, with nearly 1.5 million homes left without electricity. A storage facility for aviation fuel in the Cherkasy region was also said to have been hit.
The Times
More Coverage
Lies and conspiracy theories seducing our schoolkids
Teachers have told a landmark survey that they feel powerless to combat the spread of misinformation from social media, even when children know it’s untrue.
Island’s ice melting at a cracking pace
Hungry polar bears in Greenland have been known to wander into town from the melting sea ice in search of food – one was shot and turned into polar bear soup.