"It was necessary to swear allegiance to Russia." How Ukrainians manage to leave occupied territories

"My daughter told me - either take this passport or you won't be able to go," the man explains.

Alexey is a miner from Lisychansk. But after retirement, he and his wife Oksana (name changed) moved to continue their lives in her native village in the Svativ region.

There, they and their two grandchildren, aged seven and 10, were caught by the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The mother of the younger child was living and working in Lisychansk at the time. The mother of the older child was in Boyarka, Kyiv region.

"The armed forces of Ukraine were retreating through our village, and the Russians were surrounding it from the north and south. At the beginning of March, the village was occupied. We saw the evacuation from Lisichansk on TV. And it was no longer possible to leave our village," explains Aleksij.

Together with his wife, he hid Ukrainian textbooks and symbols and tuned Ukrainian radio on an old tape recorder. The task was to survive and protect the grandchildren.

Meanwhile, Aleksi's daughter, Svitlana, who was in Kiev at the time, was looking for ways to return her son, who, together with her parents, found himself in the territory occupied by the Russians.

She was able to see her child only after two and a half years.

"I can't tell you what I went through. How many people told me I was a bad mother," says Svitlana.

 

Occupation and Russian passport

“This is our house, and I was walking down this street to look for a signal so we could communicate,” Alexey shows a map of his village on a tablet.

On the maps, he draws imaginary lines of the Russian attack on his village.

“I remember where they were shooting, where their weapons are,” Alexey explains in perfect Ukrainian (Svativshchina and Starobilshchina in the north of Luhansk Oblast are mainly Ukrainian-speaking areas). - I had all this on a USB drive, but at the Belarusian border (due to the risk that Belarusian security forces might find it), we were asked to get rid of any potentially compromising material, and I left it there.

Despite the difficulties in communication, during the occupation, Alexey followed the news. When Ukrainian television was completely shut down before May 9, 2022, Alexey remembered his old radio.

“I was a radio amateur, I made an antenna and found a place in the yard where it picks up a Ukrainian signal,” the man recalls.

At first, Aleksi's family refused to take Russian passports and help.

"Before the war, we planned to insulate the house and collected some money. In the first half of the year: when the hryvnias were still there, it saved us," says Aleksij.

But when the money ran out, Aleksi's wife had no choice but to take a Russian passport - to get a pension and help.

"We had to go to Svatov to get a passport, where the Ukrainian document was translated. The procedure was quite simple, but we had to swear allegiance to Russia," says Oskana.

Fortunately, their Ukrainian passports were not confiscated.

"They were simply not interested in Ukrainian passports," recalls Oksana.

Having a Ukrainian passport later made it easier for Oksana to return to the territory controlled by Ukraine.

 

 

The liberation of Kharkov and then Kherson regions gave hope to Alexey's family.

"At the very beginning of 2023, the Armed Forces were nine kilometers from our village," says Alexey. - "We expected them to arrive near Kremina."

But when it became clear that the Armed Forces of Ukraine were not approaching, but were retreating from this direction, the family began to look for opportunities to leave the occupied territories.

"There was a lot of Russian propaganda at school. It was quite dangerous, especially for boys - they were openly militarized," recalls Oksana.

"It takes strength to endure this 'Hitler Youth,'" confirms Alexey.

On the radio, he heard the phone number of a public organization that helped Ukrainians leave occupied cities and villages. At the first opportunity, the husband gave this number to his daughter in Boyarka.

 

Through an acquaintance who had left Svativshchyna and then returned to take care of her elderly mother, Alexei's daughter managed to send her parents a notarized power of attorney for the child - so that the grandmother could cross the border with him.

"My mother was torn between her two grandchildren. My sister decided to live in occupied Lisychansk, her son also lived with our parents at that time. But in the end, my mother dared to bring the child to me, and my sister took her son to live in Lisychansk," explains Svitlana.

The woman does not condemn her sister's choice - she believes, everyone lives as they can.

The first attempt to get Oksana and her grandson to leave Svativshchyna turned out to be unsuccessful. The Russian border guards did not like the phrase "occupied territory" in the Ukrainian notary's power of attorney. They had to return.

"My daughter started looking for a new notary and a new opportunity to submit the document," Oksana explains. "We really wanted to do everything in the summer, during the holidays, so that the Russian authorities would not immediately notice the children's absence from school."

When the new document was handed over, the grandmother and grandson set off again. A few days later, they had already crossed the Ukrainian-Belarusian border.

Svitlana was already waiting for her son and mother in Boyarka. She had rented a larger house specifically for her parents. Then all that remained was to wait for her father.

"When my mother came with my son, I could not believe that my child was here," Svitlana recalls. "I immediately found him a psychologist, but it seemed to be harder for me than for him - I was constantly checking to see if he was there or if he was still there. The waiting and uncertainty wore me out."

 

 

With the start of the school year, teachers, and then the Russian military, visited Alexey's house in the Svatyiv region. They were interested in why the children were not going to school and had completely disappeared from the village.

Alexey was beaten, and then threatened with being deported in a tank to the trenches of the Ukrainian army.

"I told them it was risky, because after that I would come and get them myself in a tank," Alexey commented.

"When my neighbor saw me beaten, he said there was no need to argue with them. But I'm used to speaking my mind," Alexey recalls.

He refused his Russian passport until the last moment. But then it was not possible to leave Svatyivshchyna without this Russian document.

 

Once the passport was ready, all that remained was to wait for the driver.

Leaving home in the occupied territories of Ukraine usually takes place through a network of local carriers that replace each other at certain points. A local man drove Alexei to the Russian border with the so-called LPR. He had been unable to reach the village for a long time. In order to move from one settlement to another, local residents throughout the occupied Luhansk region must obtain a special pass.

“You can’t even move between villages without documents in the occupied territories,” Alexei explains.

In November, the driver finally managed to reach Alexei’s village. He packed a small backpack with documents and said goodbye to home.

“For some reason, at the border, they didn’t like my passport. The documents issued in the so-called LPR are actually different from the Russian ones. I replied that I had received such a document,” Alexei says.

“This is not a passport, this is an occupation visa,” Alexei insists.

Before crossing the Belarusian-Ukrainian border, Alexei had to say goodbye to his most valuable possession - a USB drive, on which he had collected information during the occupation.

"I buried him under the fence. And it's good that I did that, because the Belarusians stripped us down to our underwear."

 

Thanks to the efforts of the NGO Helping to Leave, 568 people were evacuated from the temporarily occupied territories in 2024.

In the first two years after the start of the war, these numbers were much higher - more than 4,500 in 2023 and more than 20,000 people in 2022.

The public organization initially helps with housing and documents, provides psychological support and helps find work.

The fact that Alexey's family had Ukrainian passports simplified the situation. But it happens that people have lost them or they have been destroyed. In such cases, obtaining documents takes a long time.

"The biggest problem is the elderly, who have extremely few traces in the electronic system, because they used only paper documents. Establishing their identity - if they do not have a passport - can take a long time," explains Sofia Gedzhenko from the NGO Helping to Leave.

Some of the archives of the Luhansk and Donetsk regions have been lost since 2014, so it is often difficult for people from these regions to obtain new documents.

 

To obtain documents, people can contact the consulate in Belarus or Kazakhstan. There, they can be issued a so-called "white passport" - a special permit to enter Ukraine.

In addition, Russian President Vladimir Putin has obliged Ukrainian citizens who are "illegally in Russia", that is, in the Ukrainian territories occupied by Russia, but without a Russian passport, to leave by September 10, 2025 or "regulate their legal situation".

"In fact, people living in the temporarily occupied parts of Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhia and Kherson regions and do not have a Russian passport are equated with foreigners. They are obliged to either leave these territories within three months or obtain a Russian passport," explains Sofia Getzenko.

Pavlo Lisianski, director of the Ukrainian Institute for Strategic Studies and Security, believes that this decree of Putin is aimed at Ukrainian citizens who have not previously received Russian passports.

According to him, Ukrainians who received Russian passports in the "DNR" and "LNR" between 2019 and 2022 must go through the procedure again, since they did not take the oath then, and Russia does not recognize their citizenship.  

"Essentially, people are told that they, as foreigners, have been living too long in the territory where they were born and grew up," Gedženko explains. "Not only are they punished, but sometimes they are sent to so-called temporary detention centers for foreign nationals. It's like a prison, but you don't need a court order to get there."

 

 

At the end of our conversation, Aleksij takes out an old phone with a small screen.

 

"I managed to transfer it across the border, I took out the SIM card and hid it, because the phones were being checked," explains Aleksij.

A man nostalgically flips through photos of his grandchildren in embroidered dresses, roses near his house in the village, his attention stops at the children's drawings of the youngest grandson.

"This is a Ukrainian plane flying and throwing ammunition at the soldiers. And this is Putin, and out of fear - he is painted brown," he comments on the pictures of the children. "I must have hidden them all at home so they wouldn't find them."

 

"Mom took the youngest grandson to her in Lisičansk, she didn't want to leave him with me. A mother is a mother, she takes care of the child," says the grandfather nostalgically.

And then he shows the fresh photos that his daughter sends from Lisičansk. He does not really want to talk about his daughter's choice and asks for the anonymity of the conversation so as not to harm her.

"It's very difficult to start over," he shares his experiences. "We were offered to live in an abandoned house somewhere in a village in the center of Ukraine. But my daughter convinced me to stay with her".

Finding a job and an apartment is the most difficult, representatives of the Public Organization Helping to Leave confirm. Failure to arrange life in a new place or the illness of elderly relatives who refuse to leave often force people to return to the occupied territories.

"The mood of those who remained is different. Some adapt to the new government, while others simply keep quiet and take care of their old mother, like our neighbor," Aleksij talks about life in the village.

Alexi and his wife assure that they will safely go home if their village is liberated.

"We will return, even if only the foundation remains of the house. A house is a pile of bricks stacked in a certain order. Well, that order has collapsed - let's build a new one," says Alexey.

And then he drinks tea and continues to explore the surroundings of his village via Google Maps.