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The Ukrainians forced to flee their homeland through the country of their invaders
By Europe bureau chief Steve Cannane in Narva, Estonia
Posted 19m ago19 minutes ago
A woman sits in front of a damaged residential building on a rainy day in Mariupol.(Reuters: Alexander Ermochenko)
Before Russia invaded Ukraine, life in the port city of Mariupol was wonderful for Alex and his wife Rita.
"We had the best jobs. We had our own apartment in the centre of the city. It was beautiful," Alex says.
"In the last few years, we had some reconstruction in Mariupol. It was bright, it was nice, it was European.
"We loved the sea, our Azov Sea, swimming, enjoying the sun, being beside the seaside."
Alex was forced to flee his hometown of Mariupol via Russia when soldiers besieged the city.(ABC News: Adrian Wilson)
But after February 24, Alex s beloved city came under siege from Russian forces.
The city s 450,000 residents suddenly had no access to electricity, clean water or heating.
Within weeks Russian shelling had pulverised Mariupol, damaging or destroying around 90 per cent of the city s buildings.
WATCH
Duration: 46 seconds46s
Drone footage shows the devastating aftermath of destroyed buildings in Mariupol.
In those early weeks, aid workers described scenes in the city s neighbourhoods as "apocalyptic".
"It was hell," Alex says.
"We were afraid. I tried not to go outside my home. I was cooking food over candles.
"Outside was really dangerous, it was awful."
The Mariupol resident felt he had no choice but to escape.
He told himself that to reach the safety of an EU nation he would have to cross the border into Russia and travel through the country that had destroyed his city and his life and was continuing to shell, starve and kill his friends, family, and neighbours.
Alex was able to escape Ukraine by paying people smugglers to get him to Latvia, via Crimea and Moscow.(ABC News: Adrian Wilson)
"I couldn t do anything else," he says.
"You have no other option."
Eventually Alex made it to Latvia after paying people smugglers to take him on an arduous bus trip that went from Zaporizhzhia to Crimea and Moscow before finally crossing to safety into an EU country.
The trip took six days, and he and other refugees — including families with small children — had to sleep on the bus with no accommodation included on the journey.
"I was suffering, suffering all this time on that trip," he says.
Forcible transfers
People from Mariupol and other parts of eastern Ukraine have fled, with many ending up in or travelling through Russia.(AP)
It s unclear how many Ukrainian refugees have escaped over the border into Russia.
In July, Russian state media put the figure at 2.8 million.
Sergey says when refugees told him they had been forced to go to Russia, he helped them contact Estonian police and report their cases as war crimes.
"There were a number of such people, I gave them a lift to the police station," he says.
"And it is not only cases of forcible deportation, but cases of shootings, murders, people witnessed a shooting of a mother or father, other relatives.
"The most horrible things."
Thousands of Ukrainians have came through Narva to flee the war.(ABC News: Adrian Wilson)
When the ABC asked the local Narva police and border guard officials how many complaints of forced deportations had been made to them by Ukrainian refugees, they responded with a statement:
"Unfortunately, we do not have this kind of statistical overview … the vast majority of them have not stated that they were forcibly deported from Ukraine to Russia.
"Mostly these persons are coming from occupied eastern and southern Ukraine, many have been in filtration camps, but most often they have left their homes because of the war and difficult social-economic situation, not because of forcible deportation."
They took my passport and phone
As Ukrainian refugees have made their way across the border into Russia they have been subjected to punitive security checks conducted by Russian forces.
The practice, known as filtration, has been described by Human Rights Watch as "a form of compulsory security screening, in which they typically collected civilians biometric data, including fingerprints and front and side facial images; conducted body searches, and searched personal belongings and phones; and questioned them about their political views".
US State Department spokesperson Vedant Patel labelled it "a massive campaign that the Kremlin has launched to imprison, to forcibly deport or disappear those Ukrainian citizens Moscow decides could be a potential threat".
There have been reports of men being strip-searched for signs of military tattoos during filtration.
Family members have claimed that some men who were found to have military links have gone missing. Some civilians have been interned for up to a month during the process.
Russia s ambassador to the UN, Vasily Nebenzya, has denied the allegations made about filtration, saying it was merely a way of registering Ukrainians coming into Russia.
Andrei, a truck driver from Russian-occupied Melitopol, told the ABC he went through the filtration process twice when he crossed the border.
Andrei was forced to go through the filtration process twice when crossing the border.(ABC News: Adrian Wilson)
He says he s concerned about what the Russians will do with his personal data.
"They can do anything," he says.
"They took my passport and phone, and it has all the data."
"What can they get there? Passwords, pin codes from my cards. I have nothing to hide, but still, it is unpleasant when they make you naked like this."
Former Mariupol resident Alex says he "cleaned" his phone before going through the filtration process, to remove most of his contacts and traces of his Facebook account.
He feels this helped minimise the interrogation he received on the border.
He believes Russian officials were looking for evidence of military service or his political views.
"I was never in the army," he says.
"But they can find some reason [to refuse entry] because of my views. I deleted my Facebook page because of all the information about me.
"I m Ukrainian, I support Ukraine."
Alex says after he went through a seven-hour filtration process, a soldier asked him to do 100 push-ups before he would let him pass.
"This process is about making people feel ashamed," he says.
As he makes a new life for himself in Estonia, Alex can t stop thinking about his home city of Mariupol, destroyed and now occupied by Russia.
"You think, why has it happened with us? What did we do, the people of Mariupol, to suffer all this?" he says.
"Mariupol was a beautiful city. I do not have words to describe what we feel.
"It s emptiness inside."