Two Filtration Camps and 2500 km Through Russia: An Interview With a Ukrainian Who Left Mariupol to Save His Life
I met K about ten years ago; we worked together in a very energetic advertising agency. Since then, he became a successful tech entrepreneur and partner of a VC fund. He got married and lived the happy life of a modern Ukrainian.
A lot changed for him since Russia launched its full-scale invasion. Born in Mariupol, he watched how his hometown was being destroyed from afar; he couldn’t reach his parents trapped there, for more than a month.
He was from Mariupol, but also in the back of my mind all the time. At the beginning of May, K wrote on Facebook:
“Parents got out of Mariupol. 2 filtrations in DPR. 2 borders in Russia.
2,500 kilometers of travel through foreign territory. And finally, they are safe.
1.5 months without water, heat, electricity, shower.
25 nights of life in the basement under shelling.
20kg of weight lost.
And much more that is still yet to be revealed.”
Because of K’s efforts and the courage of his parents, they managed to overcome terrible obstacles to be safe, and have a chance to see their children again.
I talked to K’s father about the experience of filtration camps and how Russia is trying to find Nazis where there are none:
_____
How did you manage to evacuate from Mariupol? What was the reason you were able to leave?
Our children and brother helped, as they followed all options and looked for opportunities to leave the city. We were out of touch for more than a month, and the connection was reestablished on March 23. A shop with a Wi-Fi hotspot was opened in eastern Mariupol, where you could also charge your phone. The internet was terrible, but it was enough to get in touch with the kids. We realized that we had to leave Mariupol; that bad times awaited the city, as it was no longer connected with Ukraine.
Why did we leave? Because we are Ukrainians, and the ‘Russian world’ is not for us. Thank God there was a connection, and we followed the route that our children had shown.
Did you reach the territory of the DPR first? (a self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic)
You know, after the connection disappeared, we started swimming downstream. But where to? I didn’t want to live in Russia under any circumstances. The left bank of Mariupol was cut off from the central part of the city, and had been since the first days of war, so it was impossible to evacuate to Ukraine. Among those who tried, two-thirds came under fire or were shot en route. So, we lived in occupied territory, and as soon as the opportunity arose we immediately rushed and decided to go to the DPR.
However, to move through the DPR, you need to go through a filtration camp which can be found in several cities. For example, in Bezymenne, where it is much harder, especially for men. Women have less trouble getting through. There are also rumors that this place is a deportation center to Siberia.
So we decided to go to Novoazovsk — there is also a filtration camp, but with fewer people. That’s because you can only go there via your own transport, unlike Bezymenne, where DPR representatives take people en masse in an orderly fashion. We had to take a taxi to Novoazovsk, and when we got there they told us that the last filtration had already taken place and there would be no more throughout the next few days. I turned red as a watermelon. After all, we spent 1,000 hryvnias out of the last 1,400.
There were six of us and we started asking a guard at the entrance and then persuaded the manager to conduct that filtering for us. We were very worried, and everything was decided very slowly. Only then did we realize that the biggest problem, in fact, was crossing the Russian border.
Despite the long wait and confusion, the filtration in Novoazovsk was simple — if you were fifty years old, you didn’t go to questioning. They fingerprinted us, then took full-face and profile photographs. They recorded where we lived, and issued a document with the seal of Novoazovsk City.
On April 1, we set out on a journey to the DPR-Russia border. We had to exchange our Ukrainian hryvnia for Russian rubles. No one asked about the filtration process at the DPR border, though. The DPR guards were only interested in whether we had vodka or cigarettes, and how much money we were carrying.
What was the procedure for crossing the Russian border?
We were kept on the border of Russia for 5 hours; it was terrifying. We had wiped our phones beforehand — deleted all pictures that the Russians may not like. We specifically left pictures of our dog, flowers, and dacha on the phone — which has nothing to do with military action or political views. At the last moment, on the way to the border, I found and with big pain in my chest deleted a photo of a yellow-blue mural with the Azov fighter. This mural was created on the stone fence of a private house in the city center, several times people restored it after vandals.
I have no confirmation of this, but instead of border guards, it seemed like FSB officers were the ones who interrogated Ukrainians.
It was easier for women, but men were undressed, examined for tattoos, traces of a military background, and then a boring interview began. In my opinion, it was all a bit silly; they asked me three times if I had ties with AZOV and the Armed Forces. What did they think? That I would say AZOV fighters were near my building and I talked to them?
There were also questions, such as the reason we were leaving, why we didn’t want to stay, and so on. I told him that I was the director of a construction company and that together with my wife we ran a building materials store. The store didn’t work out, however, so in recent years I’d been working on local lore, my dacha and gardens. They also asked me why I didn’t want to remain a historian in Mariupol. They didn’t even understand the difference between local lore and history.
They asked if I knew anything about the ‘five underground floors of Azovstal’. I personally don’t know, but the DPR and the Russians are convinced that there is an entire city underground. They kept asking provocative questions like, “Are you for Ukrainization?” I said that Ukrainians have their own language, but Russians were not oppressed here in Mariupol. The mayor knows 15 words in Ukrainian at most and he speaks Russian all the time. It took them around 20 minutes to get through those stupid questions.
I’ll try to make the filtration process seem a bit clearer. A young man on crutches had a rune Odal tattooed on the back of his hand. It was part of Viking culture, which was then passed to the Slavs. I don’t know how it ended, but he had been sitting at a computer for 2.5 hours, explaining what it meant. Russians are desperate to tie everything to Nazism. They don’t care if the tattoos are symbols of Vikings or Slavs — they want to find something and then show off their trophy. One professional musician was forced to play the guitar to prove that he was indeed a musician, although his fingers were beaten with strings themselves.
I want to emphasize once again that it’s essential to wipe your phone. There was a case where a man kept a scanned copy of his neighbor’s passport, as they were afraid of losing his documents. They found the photo on the phone and checked the name, with it turning out that he served in the Armed Forces. They were held there for a long while.
So they wanted to find any reason to connect you with Azov, or the Armed Forces? To find an excuse to call you a Nazi?
This is their standard set of questions, which alternates with the usual questions — what is your dog’s name and so on. They want to build trust so that a person makes mistakes at some point. If you lie, you are either worried or will make a mistake. I didn’t see it happen but read that they called children to confirm their parents’ words if the parents raised questions.
My wife and I decided to tell the truth. And if something was not wholly accurate — then to look in the eye. Because if you look them in the eyes, you have an advantage over a person who is not as honest as yourself.
Many Ukrainians were forced to sign refugee papers and afterward were sent to Siberia. Have you been asked to sign such documents?
They didn’t ask me such questions because they found Tallinn/Estonia in my phone’s search engine history. They realized that we were not going to Russia.
Most of the people I know who went to Russia, went there to stay with their relatives. At the border, Russians promise you ten thousand rubles. You need to sign several documents and be registered as a refugee to receive it. Not everyone wants that — most understand that it restricts their freedom of movement. Wherever you’re told to go and whatever job you’re told to do, you will have to do it.
People like me, for example, just wanted to get out. Others signed for the money and waited until the funds showed up on their card, and then they were sent elsewhere.
My neighbors, people in their mid-fifties, ran out of our apartment building in Mariupol while under shelling, before we were forcibly evacuated by the Russian army. They were frightened and detached from reality in the middle of the night. In these kinds of circumstances, Russians could make inadequate demands and my neighbors could sign anything and regret it the next day when it’d be too late. I don’t know how they are now. Before, a neighbor told me that he didn’t want to go to Russia. He wanted to stay here, in Mariupol.
The Russians are taking advantage of temporary information inadequacy and confusion, forcing people to sign anything.
As soon as these neighbors left, their apartment burned down that night. We were in the basement at the time, and it seemed to us that someone was chopping and burning firewood, while someone else was filling bathtubs with water. It turned out that the apartment and the common area were burning, most likely from phosphorus bombs. The plaster was burning, the resin was dripping, everything was cracking, and only the back part of the refrigerator was to survive in the apartment — the grid. There were 12 cats in the building, but I don’t know if they escaped.
I looked at how loud a tank’s fire was — up to 170 decibels. For comparison, that’s much louder than the speakers at a rock concert (where it can reach 110–120 decibels). There was a time when we hid in the common area between the floors in our apartment building. A tank approached and fired on a neighboring house, which had already burned down. It was so loud that the sound flew into my head. The projectile flew one way, and the sound flew another — into my head. Directly into my brain.
How did you move around Russia? Who helped you?
We stayed for a few days in different cities — the first two nights were in Novoazovsk, in the DPR, then a few nights in Mamayev Kurgan. We were received there by acquaintances or relatives of my wife. But even with them, we didn’t discuss the war because, in their understanding, “everything is ambiguous.”
We talked about the basic things — what medications and clothes we needed, and so on.
A very old acquaintance, with whom we stayed in Novoazovsk , said: “Stay here, you love it so much, you wanted to live in the DPR,” and laughed. He knows that I always speak Ukrainian and have pro-Ukrainian views, but during the occupation, I had to speak Russian and accept the positions of people who somehow helped us leave.
What motivated us? We were driven by the desire to stay alive, to see our children, and do something useful in the future for Ukraine. Because what I saw there needs to be told.
(sighs hard)
How did you manage to leave Russia? Is there any program or any logic in this, or is everything very situational?
Our son paved the route for us. Already in Mamayev Kurgan, we bought a ticket for the train Makhachkala-Petersburg. And in St. Petersburg, we purchased tickets for the Ecolines bus to Estonia. Then we had to buy a separate ticket at the children’s price for our dog. Usually, they don’t allow dogs, but now they make exceptions for Ukrainians.
We were also interrogated on our way out of Russia. The Russian who questioned us said: “You are such a strange family. One works as an accountant in slippers at home, and the other writes books at the dacha.” It was suspicious to them that people could live like that. The questions were: where are the children, whether they serve in the army or not, whether you know where the troops are — to which you can safely answer “no” because they won’t check it without evidence. Even if you know something, you have to beat the enemy.
At the Estonian border, a woman approached us, asked a few questions, chipped the dog, and let us go.
I remember 2014 when the Russians wanted to occupy Mariupol and tried to hold their pathetic referendum. At that time, three young men approached me. They asked me:
“Why didn’t you go home, Bandera?”
“And who are you?” — I answered
“What’s the difference?” — he told me
“How old are you, boy?” — I asked
“Twenty one”
“And I’ve been living here for twenty-four years. Can you imagine?” — I replied. — “Tell the person who sent you here that I will find him and punish him when Ukraine returns.”
I haven’t punished anyone. But I should have.
