Imagine being uprooted in your own country. This happened to a 16-year-old boy named Dima. With a hodgepodge of Russian and Ukrainian documents, he fled the Crimean Peninsula, which has been occupied by Moscow since 2014, and arrived in Kiev a few days ago, where he now lives with his brother. To reach the Ukrainian capital, he had to travel through three countries (Russia, Turkey and Moldova) for four days. A necessary detour to leave the peninsula belonging to Ukraine but under Russian control and return to an area belonging to the same country. It is clear from his testimony that he is not leaving behind a ruthless dictatorship, but a system that seeks to erase Ukrainian identity, history and culture.
The great concern of many Ukrainians like Dima is that because they live in an occupied zone they will be forced to put on a Russian uniform and end up shooting their compatriots. Although he is still a minor, this is what torments Dima (not his real name for security reasons). “I would run cross-country if I had to,” he assures. He already has acquaintances who have just turned 20, have been drafted into the occupying power and are operating in the neighboring Kherson region.
The same fear afflicts young men and women living in other Russian-held areas of Ukraine, such as parts of the Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhia and Kherson regions, where Russification is also being enforced by the invasion authorities distributing passports as a requirement for conscription pensions, paying bills and banking. “Even at school, we were given pamphlets to be brainwashed,” the young man adds.
In Sevastopol, nobody cares about each other, everyone tries to cheat and screw the next one
The escape plan, tempered with an unwavering desire to return to his hometown of Sevastopol as soon as possible, is part of a process that has been simmering for some time and is based on a rejection of life under the Russian tricolor. Dima was seven years old when the Russians occupied Crimea and remembers “almost nothing” about that attack, but as he explains, he did his best to maintain ties with Ukraine and complete his training in the system. On the advice of his family, he had completed four years of distance learning in the Ukrainian education system while attending face-to-face classes required by the Russian Ministry of Education in Crimea.
During the interview with this newspaper in a Kiev store, Dima enjoys several glasses of Pepsi Cola in a row. Until now they have been an unattainable luxury among Russian imitations of American soft drinks. “With the start of the invasion last year, Crimean-made ‘coketails’ stolen from factories in Kherson entered Crimea,” he explains, showing a photo of one of the cans on his phone. “You could buy them in small shops,” he notes.
Gradually, his life adapts to the capital. In a few days he will be taking the university entrance exams with the idea of studying Economics or International Relations. Kiev’s education authorities were surprised that when he enrolled, he presented a Crimean birth certificate and his grades from a school in the Donetsk region. Although he has lived under Russian occupation in the peninsula for more than half his life, the war that began last year eventually affected his academic training. The first institution where he enrolled in distance learning under the Ukrainian system was in the city of Volnovaya (Donetsk). It was destroyed last year and is now in the middle of the front line. He had to attend a school in Sloviansk in the same region and received his Ukrainian certificate by taking the exams in Sevastopol.
Dima comes to our meeting directly from the hairdresser. His haircut, he claims, could be a reason why he is teased or called gay in Crimea, “a closed and violent society.” Because of details like that, he wanted to “escape from a regime” that is always “tightening the screws,” he says. In Kiev he was surprised when a salesman took the time to ask his preferences or when a friend of his brother’s at the book fair took an interest in him and his trip. “And he didn’t know me at all,” he says. “In Sevastopol, no one cares about each other, everyone tries to cheat and screw the other,” he argues.
Dima left home with his 47-year-old mother on June 18 and arrived in Kiev on June 22. His 46-year-old father has no way of walking. To avoid being drafted into the invading army, he is not registered with the Moscow authorities and is therefore unable to travel abroad.
A two-hour bus ride allowed them to get from Sevastopol to Simferopol. They then traveled around 20 hours by train to Sochi in Russia and exited Crimea via the Kerch Strait Bridge. The transport link that Putin opened in 2018 to support the occupation was attacked for the second time this week. The young man admits that they didn’t have to go through any special checks by the security forces, but describes the carriage as “a hell hole with no air conditioning, old and very Soviet”. A plane from Sochi then flew them to Istanbul. And that’s when the family’s original plan began to fail. The mother had to turn back because Istanbul Airport would not accept her Russian passport to catch another flight to Chisinau, the capital of Moldova. Paradoxically, the minor managed to get through with a Russian passport and drove on alone, he says.
His mother, a legal adviser, is now trying to get a Ukrainian passport – her old one had expired – to try to leave Crimea again.
The young man arrived alone in the Moldovan capital, where he says a border guard immediately began questioning him while he was rummaging through his suitcase. “Everything changed when I told him that I was a Ukrainian refugee who left Crimea and would return to my family in Kiev. Then he stopped asking me questions and helped me repack,” he explains. A driver contacted by his brother picked Dima up and drove him to a Moldovan border crossing point with Ukraine in the Chernivtsi region. If the Russian passport was enough to leave Crimea, a birth certificate was enough for him to enter Ukraine.
Arriving by road in Kiev on June 22 with his brother and sister-in-law, Dima saw with his own eyes the damage done by the Russian invasion. The vehicle drove past the remains of the battle and ruined houses and buildings around towns such as Bucha and Makariv. He has not seen the “warscape” he describes in Crimea, where shelling and clashes between the two armies can be seen in the distance.
Dima has also experienced that alarms in Kiev are still frequently warning of possible attacks. Just two days after his arrival, a Russian missile killed five civilians. The rumble was heard at his brother’s house in the middle of the night. “There are no sirens in Sevastopol,” he says, explaining that the Russians are trying to give everything on the Crimean peninsula a patina of normalcy.
His mother is now waiting there for a new opportunity to leave the country. The city of Sevastopol is the base of the Russian Black Sea Fleet, one of Moscow’s most important military instruments for securing the occupied peninsula. In parallel, in 2014 the Kremlin launched a massive resettlement program for Russian civilians and military personnel to mingle with the Ukrainian population. Crimea had 2,350,000 inhabitants that year. By the end of 2021, the Kiev government estimated that at least 600,000 Russians had arrived in the peninsula during that period, representing a 30% population growth. Dima and his family have noticed it in their own neighborhood community, where sparks often fly between Ukrainians and Russians.
Crimea is the jewel of the Russian occupation of Ukraine. Kyiv insists his return is an essential condition for peace talks. Dima has just arrived in Kiev, but leaves in the back of his mind the desire to return to Sevastopol. He is optimistic and hopes that it will be there in a year or a year and a half. The prerequisite is that “the Ukrainian flag flies over Crimea”. On the wall of his bedroom, meanwhile, is a map showing the country’s official borders, which are recognized all over the world except Russia.
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