Going against the tide, some Ukrainians return to their homes under Russian rule | International

On a pockmarked road heading to the south of Ukraine, a few kilometers from the war front and through the green fields of Zaporizhia, a procession of cars seems to go against the tide. They are filled to the brim with plastic bags, suitcases, blankets. And crowded people. They are people who fled the Russian offensive at one point in the war and are returning home. They return to their cities and towns, now under the control of the Kremlin, while many take the opposite path, fleeing.

Raisa and her husband, Anatoli, travel in the back seat of an old dark gray Renault. With a very sad look, the octogenarian says that they both worked almost all their lives in a factory in the south of Ukraine. Everything they have is in a town near the port of Berdyansk, occupied by the forces of Vladimir Putin. Anatoli cries silently. At the beginning of the Russian invasion, they hurriedly left for a cousin’s apartment in the center of the country. Since then they feel disoriented. They just want to get home. To her kitchen. To her bed. They expect everything to be just as they left it. They don’t know what life will be like under the command of the Kremlin forces, but they are tired. Resigned.

The war launched by Putin nine weeks ago seems stalled. Moscow is consolidating control of occupied areas in the south — such as the town of Raisa and Anatoli — and is seeking to integrate the territories in some way into the Russian system. He has appointed administrators and puppet authorities. And it is trying to implant the Russian curricula, the bureaucracy and the currency there.

All this is happening while trying to reinforce its offensive in the Donbas region, where the Kremlin is facing well-positioned, increasingly well-equipped and trained Ukrainian troops. After the failure of the offensive on kyiv and with slower and lesser advances than expected in this second phase of the battle to conquer eastern Ukraine, analysts fear a fierce attack on the territories under fire. Moscow has mobilized more soldiers, according to UK Defense Ministry reports; troops moving to the front lines from points as disparate as the Russian Far East.

Peace talks are deadlocked, with the Kremlin not backing down from its goal of undermining Ukraine’s sovereignty. The war has entered a new chapter: that of attrition. Russia has intensified attacks on the attacked country’s transport lines, supply routes and fuel depots, which has led to gasoline shortages and huge queues throughout the country.

With no end to the war in sight, Lyudmila has decided to repack her belongings and return to Novodanylivka, a small town near Melitopol, under Moscow’s command since the first days of the invasion, when troops sent by the Kremlin used as a military launch pad the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea —illegally annexed in 2014— and advanced on the southern flank. She confesses that she thought that the Russian offensive would last just a few days and that afterward, the Moscow troops would withdraw from the area. But it has not been that way.

Liudmila is worried about money, but above all about her sick mother. She says that she has no choice but to return. “In the area there is a lack of medicines or they are very expensive. Also, 10 days ago, my mother had a heart attack and there is no one else to attend to her. She turns 81 this week,” she explains. He hopes to arrive in time to spend her anniversary with her. She doesn’t know how long her trip will take, which before the war she would have done in about four hours. To cross into territory controlled by the Kremlin, aboard a car that he shares with other returnees and is driven by a volunteer, who hopes to bring evacuees back to the Zaporizhia region, he has to go through a number of checkpoints. . First, Ukrainians; and then Russians.

Liudmila admits that she is afraid. Like Anatoli and Raisa, they don’t want to give her last name. She fears criticism for the decision to return. Also, she has heard too many things about life in the areas occupied by Russian soldiers, and she doesn’t want retaliation. Civil rights organizations and the Ukrainian ombudsman report arrests of officials, activists and journalists, kidnappings of mayors and other elected officials in the areas under occupation, who are replaced by commanders close to the Kremlin. There are reports of random arrests and torture.

Media closures and diffusion of Russian channels

In much of southern occupied Ukraine, collaborator authorities have shut down independent media outlets, promoted the broadcasting of Russian state channels, most broadcasting from Crimea, and are torpedoing telecommunications systems. Over the weekend, Russian commanders cut mobile phone and internet service to much of the occupied southern region. This is a maneuver, said the Ukrainian government, to prevent access to “true information about the course of the war.”

Volodímir Zelensky’s government has been warning for weeks that the Kremlin is preparing a pseudo-referendum to declare the “people’s republic” of Kherson, the only regional capital under its command; following the recipe applied in Crimea and in the provinces of Donetsk and Lugansk in 2014, which has served the Kremlin to feed its rhetoric about the “defense” of those territories as a justification for war.

The protests against the invasion are fading in the occupied areas, although if you scratch the surface, anguish and anger are “in the stomach of many”, explains Andréi. He can swear in Ukrainian, Russian, Romanian and Italian. “Skill,” he says with a small smile, which he retains from his time as a freight forwarder across Europe. He has left the busy zone to shop. “Everything there is at least twice as expensive and there is beginning to be a shortage,” he says. The Ukrainian hryvnia remains the legal tender, he explains, but the Russian “civil-military administration” that heads his city has already announced that it will soon start using the Russian ruble.

Andréi has filled his car to the brim with products of all kinds. He has several orders from his neighbors, but he also wants to sell some things. It’s the first time he’s tried it and he doesn’t know if he’ll get through it all. He says that for now he will stay home because he doesn’t see where else to go. But he is worried. He is 58 years old and fears the information circulating about the forced recruitment of men up to 65 years old, as was done in the provinces of Donetsk and Lugansk, part of which Moscow has controlled through pro-Russian separatists for eight years.

If that happens, he will make the opposite trip in a hurry, he says. The same as the hundreds of people who continue to arrive in Zaporizhia from the southern flank in precarious vehicles and buses. This Sunday, according to Zelensky and the United Nations, after weeks of attempts, a hundred people have managed to leave for that industrial city from the Azovstal steelworks, in devastated Mariupol, the last stronghold of Ukrainian resistance in the port town of the Sea of ​​Azov.

On the bumpy road connecting Zaporizhia with the occupied south, between military guard points, both processions of vehicles meet side by side. Those who flee and those who return. Irina left with three of her children from the town of Energodar when Russian forces seized the nearby nuclear power plant. The oldest, 14 years old, stayed with her grandparents. She now, she is on her way to the city taken by the Russian forces to pick them up. She has rented an apartment in the center of the country and believes that she too will find a job. “Everything is temporary”, she says with conviction, “I know that sooner or later we will return home to stay”.

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