2023-11-15 10:54:00
To leave occupied eastern Ukraine and reach Kiev, Olena Yevdokiyenko had to pass through Russia and walk the last two kilometers, dragging her suitcases and pushing her mother’s wheelchair, on a dark night.
With her family, she used a humanitarian corridor, the only entry into their country from Russia for Ukrainians fleeing territories controlled by Moscow’s troops.
This border crossing connecting the Russian regions of Belgorod and the Ukrainian regions of Sumy can only be crossed in one direction, from Russia to Ukraine, but the dirt track is very busy, more than a year and a half after the start of the conflict.
“I had the impression of traveling twenty kilometers and not two,” Olena Yevdokiïenko, 48, told AFP once she arrived on the Ukrainian side.
She and her teenage daughter crossed it “in stages”, by “walking a little with the bags, then coming back to get Granny to push her, before returning to the bags”.
“It was very difficult,” she said.
The crossing is done on foot rather than by vehicle, which is too dangerous given the bombings, explains a spokesperson for the border guards, Roman Tkatch.
Because around this humanitarian corridor, the war continues and “Russia strikes the border area daily,” he continues.
The border is officially closed, continues this spokesperson, but since Russia is letting Ukrainians through, their country is welcoming them.
Every day, between 60 and 120 enter, he said.
“Pariah”
Once the controls passed, in the border village of Krasnopillia, Olena Yevdokiïenko slept in a center of the NGO Pluriton in Sumy, capital of the eponymous region.
Wrapped in a sleeping bag, she explains that she left the occupied Lugansk region when her pro-Russian neighbors started calling her a “Nazi” and a “Ukrainian bitch”.
Because the teacher refused to take Russian nationality or use Russian school books.
“I became an outcast,” said this woman, surrounded by suitcases and bags containing her mother’s medicine. “They insulted me, threatened me, there was a lot of pressure.”
His family home, near the front line, was destroyed by bombings. Her mother Raïssa Demianenko, 69, says between sobs that she is just beginning to realize “the horrors experienced” by her family.
The next stop on their journey will be kyiv, more than 300 kilometers away and where Olena Yevdokiïenko hopes to find work.
“Tyrans”
In Krasnopillia, Sergiï Gouts-Zassoulski, 57, has just arrived from an occupied zone in the Donetsk region with his partner, Tatiana Katchilova, and their twelve-year-old son.
While telling his story, this man with gray hair and a leather jacket must sometimes interrupt himself, hiding his face in a handkerchief. “It’s emotion,” he apologizes.
Seeing the Ukrainian flags, after crossing the border, Serguii said he felt “immense joy”.
“You say to yourself: ‘My God, has all this torment ended for good, and am I home?'” he says.
He claims to have been beaten and imprisoned by the occupation authorities.
“They took me and put me in a cellar for a month, without me knowing why. It was only later that I understood that it was because I am Ukrainian,” explains Mr. Gouts-Zassoulsky.
The blows were so violent that he says he can no longer see well in his right eye.
The couple explains that without a Russian passport, it was impossible for them to work or even call an ambulance.
At the crossing point, they say, Russian border guards asked them why they were going to a country run by “tyrants”.
But for Tatiana Katchilova, returning to the occupied zone is out of the question. “We understood how Russia was, how it treats people.”
Others, however, only go to Ukraine temporarily, for example to see a loved one, collect their pension or obtain medical treatment.
Among them, Valentina, a fifty-year-old from the Lugansk region, who intends to return there after her medical appointments in kyiv.
Her husband has heart problems and “almost all the cardiologists have left” the occupied territories, she regrets.
15/11/2023 09:53:11 – Krasnopillia (Ukraine) (AFP) – © 2023 AFP
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