Resettlement Secrets
March 9, 2016
Tetyana Rikhtun: In summer 2014, people from Donbas were running anywhere they could go from the war: to places where there were relatives or friends.
The war was ruining families and people’s fates, putting cold fear into people’s hearts. Sometimes in just half a year people switched where they lived 2-3 times, looking for more acceptable ways of existence.
Larisa, a resident of Donetsk, was in Crimea when the armed conflict started in Donbas. Her family was having their annual vacation. People from Yevpatoria, from whom they were renting their vacation home, sympathized, but nevertheless demanded rent money one month later. In order to not leave Crimea, they decided to register at a refugee camp, which was located at an abandoned sanatorium, with the Federal Migration Service.
Larisa, internally displaced person from Donetsk: People were given rooms there. They cleaned them up, remodeled them a little, and got them back into shape. However, then, we were put in front of the fact that either we had to pay for how long we lived there, about a month, which would have come up to a very significant amount of money, or we were asked to leave. We would have had to pay for all members of our family.
Rikhtun: Larisa’s family, which consists of six people, would have had to pay about 162 thousand rubles, which is about 900 rubles per day per person, including their one-year-old child. It is no wonder that they, and 200 more people, agreed to travel on a transport plane from the Russian Ministry of Emergency Situations to Stavropol region. However, they landed in Moscow, where they were reloaded onto buses and were sent farther into Russia’s lands.
Larisa: The Ministry of Emergency Situations brought us near Riazan. It was the village Bolon. We were met there pretty well. They were communicating with us really nicely. They gave us lodging at a hospital, where they set aside an entire floor especially for refugees. The housing was nicely remodeled. All of the rooms were furnished and nice. So the conditions were really good. Lodging, food and everything was free. We lived there for a month. They tried to find us jobs since we had to maintain our family of six: my family of five, plus my mother-in-law. Later, my father-in-law joined us too. We had no income coming to us. We had no retirement or social payments coming. So all seven of us had to survive on 16,000 rubles.
Rikhtun: Misery is also evident in the story of Nataliya from Luhansk.
Nataliya, internally displaced person from Luhansk: We crossed the border and ended up in a refugee camp in Rostov region near Novoshakhtynsk. I had a laptop with me so I started looking for directions on where to go next. I was contacted by one person. So this girl came with her boyfriend, picked us up, me and my child, and this is how we ended up in Old Crimea. In the beginning, we were placed at a hospital and then people offered for us to live with them and we are extremely grateful to them. These people gave us a place to live and told us many things about life there. We lived there for about a month. However, my child needed to be registered for school. We needed some documents and legalization. We already started to feel uncomfortable for abusing these people’s kindness. Therefore, in August, I started running across the country, looking for documents. The response was – we cannot do anything; we cannot help you. I did not know what to do next. We came to Simferopol to the Artek resort camp. There was a refugee center for internally displaced people from Donbas. They were helping people with lodging and with documents. I approached an employee from the Ministry of Emergency Situations about what would happen next. He said, “We are in a state of emergency and we are distributing people from here.” When I asked to where, he responded, “Russia is a vast land. You can go anywhere you want.”
Larisa: It was possible to register with the refugee program, but that program is not that flexible since on the program people do get temporary lodging, but then no social payments. And as far as refugee status, not all regions in Russia had that working. Only in some regions, some beyond the Urals, or somewhere very far north. So, Riazan region was where we could not get such a status. It was not among the regions that could give this status. So we had no way to get refugee status. We could only get temporary lodging. This temporary lodging provided housing and a permit to work.
Rikhtun: While in Russia, Ukrainians call themselves refugees. However, the Russian Federation does not consider them to be refugees. In this way, in 2014, 5,789 Ukrainians asked for refugee status from Russia. In the first ten months of 2015, there were 245 people. In total, full status was granted to 315 people, which was 5.2% of all requests. Interestingly, in total, in the Russian Federation, by October 2015, there were about 900 people with refugee status. Among them, 383 were from Afghanistan and 356 from Ukraine. In September 2014, Larisa and her family returned back to her occupied native Horlivka. In her passport, there was no stamp that they were in Russia and lived there for a few months. Her family members tried not to tell anyone about their long journey around Russia to find a better life since it was waiting for them here in Ukraine, in Druzhkivka, where they moved at the end of 2014. Here they managed to receive their social payments for their child and their husband managed to find a factory job. Often, those who are thinking about returning to Ukraine are being frightened by the horrible, made up accusations.
Ivana, internally displaced person from Horlivka: They were frightening us so much, but we moved out with no problems. One customs station on their side; one customs station on this side. It used to be that people drove through Kharkiv, but now I do not know the name of the checkpoint. They were frightening us that as soon as we returned that we would be “interrogated,” but I said, if it will happen, then it will happen. If they kick us out, then they will kick us out. What did we have to lose? In another case, I would just have to sit and be frightened. So I made a decision to go and check it out. After we moved, everybody kept asking us how it was. My sister called – from Russia – and asked how we got there, if everything was OK, if anyone bothered us at any checkpoints. And I answered, everything was OK. I got a job. Zhenya is also OK.
Mykhailo, volunteer from Donetsk: People get incorrect information. As far as I know, many of those people who ran to Russia came back.
Rikhtun: Really?
Mykhailo: Oh yes. And when they were leaving, they were so full of pride, saying things like Ukraine does not like us and that Ukraine does not do anything good for them. Everybody is a fascist, but then quietly, one by one, they all returned to those fascists. Because apparently life here is much better with those who they called fascists, nationalists, etc. As far as I know, most of them returned.
Rikhtun: As we can see from the response of the State Migration Service of Ukraine to our request, this service does not keep count of residents of Luhansk and Donetsk regions who temporarily move to the territory of the Russian Federation. According to data from the State Migration Service of the Russian Federation, in the last two years more than 1 million people moved there from Southeastern Ukraine. At the same time, in those same last two years, a little over 4,000 people have refused Ukrainian citizenship and received permission from the State Migration Service of Ukraine to permanently live in Russia.
Oleksandr Voroshkov, advisor to the Ministry of Social Policy of Ukraine and employee of SOS Kramatorsk: People who move far away are the people who do not plan to return. This concerns people from western and central Ukraine, Belarus and other countries. However, people who do plan to return, even if they do move somewhere, do come back to our city. For example, there were a lot of people who moved to other cities like Zaporizhya, Berdyansk, Dnipropetrovsk and Kharkiv. They slowly, one by one, returned to Kramatorsk to be closer to home.
Rikhtun: By the end of 2015, 1,023,542 people moved from occupied territory and the Anti-Terrorist Operation area to other parts of Ukraine. In the first month of 2016, this amount grew by 6,232 more people. People are still trying to stay close to home. More than half of internally displaced people, specifically 581,826 people settled in Donetsk and Luhansk regions. All people started helping these temporarily displaced people with things and to survive.
Voroshkov: When in the morning people came to me who were from a totally different social sphere, saying ‘We are from Horlivka and have nothing to eat, please help us,’ I was shocked. I went to meet with the mayor and other city officials, and they did verify that there are no social programs for these people and that nobody was helping them. So we were all pretty shocked. We did not know what to do or how to help them, but all we knew was that among us and among officials there was a positive desire to help. We, together with Stas Chornohor, started this activity and we met with the mayor on one day at 5 p.m. Already on the second day, at 10 a.m., there was a big meeting with the mayor and all of the necessary departments, and the day after a headquarters to help internally displaced people started operating in our city.
Rikhtun: According to official information from Social Services, as of the end of 2015, the amount of internally displaced people in Kramatorsk reached almost 70,000, specifically 69,062. Only one-third of them applied for social benefits: 20,640.
Voroshkov: We had many non-food assistance programs when we were handing out blankets and pillows. We handed out about 5,000 blankets, and more than 1,000 pillows. We gave them out not only in Kramatorsk, but shared this assistance with the cities Konstantynivka, Druzhkivka, Dobropilliya, Artemivsk and Slovyansk. We were the hub and received assistance for all of these cities. We also received diapers for children and hygenic sets. Other NGOs are working based on our operations. For example, the food program, Don’t Leave a Person in Need, which gives people food vouchers and the organizations Adra and Caritas use our database and select people from it who they think need help the most and work with them directly.
Rikhtun: Very often, internally displaced people who received help from locals have become volunteers themselves. At the headquarters for humanitarian assistance, SOS Kramatorsk, we met this refugee from Donetsk.
Oksana Muravlova, volunteer and organizer of the club Faino: I really like local people here. I really enjoy them all. They are so hospitable and so open. You know, in Donetsk, people were totally different. Over there, nobody cares about anyone else’s problems. When we were leaving Donetsk, right in the midst of shooting, we did not know where to go. We came to Kramatorsk and then we saw a lady who was 80-years-old carrying a bucket of potatoes to feed somebody else’s kids. The entire street started helping us. It was way before this organization started. There was no humanitarian movement. That was two years ago. Only much later did our officials start doing something. Only then international organizations. And now, when people are coming, they are sharing their stories. Somebody had a relative die. Some had their houses bombed. Somebody had something else happen to them. Then I realized that my problems compared to theirs are nothing. That is why I started to work and have been volunteering already for two years. God help us to carry on if all of this keeps going.
Rikhtun: Oksana Muravlova and her friend Viktoriya Kopnaya organized the club Faino, where they actively promote the Ukrainian language among refugees and local people. According to Oksana, the last meeting of the club was even visited by a representative of the OSCE. He was Polish by nationality. He knew Russian very well and now decided to learn Ukrainian as well. Afterward, they had a class on Ukrainian cross-stitching; and many people decided to do that too. Now Ukrainian militants receive towels with patriotic cross-stitching. Oksana is so excited about this new hobby that she didn’t stop cross-stitching, even during our interview.
Muravlova: Every day is very busy for us. We spend one day meeting people in the Old Town; the other day we meet people in the Children’s Library. The third day we might meet with other activists. So we move around the city constantly, trying to see everyone, trying to get them not to sleep, and trying to encourage them to do more.
Rikhtun: Refugees are the driving force behind patriotically-minded Kramatorsk residents. Lyudmyla Fialko is a refugee from Makiivka who came to Druzhkivka in search of a peaceful life.
She herself organized the collection and distribution of humanitarian aid to internally displaced people.
Lyudmyla Fialko, head of the NGO Raduga: One by one, we started helping people who also arrived from the occupied territory. We understood that for some of them it was much harder than for us. Some were left without shoes and without clothes, without any means for existence because most of them were literally running away from bombing. So we started helping those people. Little by little, we started a volunteering movement here and started working. Now we get help from programs such as the International Organization for Migration, Caritas, and A Person in Need. We started distributing information about this program among refugees. We helped them in many ways and wrote business plans for them so people could carry on living and start things here.
Rikhtun: Raduga fund, which was created by her, has been working for half a year. Every month, about 3,000 people who are in Druzhkivka go to the fund for help.