Thousands of Crimean refugees flee to mainland to escape Russia
Usman Abdulaev, his wife Elmaz, their two children and wife’s mother Gulnar sit on a single bed in an old vacation sanatorium room to pose for a picture.
“This will be our first family portrait in Kyiv,” Elmaz says, making another attempt to get her 6-year-old son Tymur to sit still for a moment.
Abdulaev’s family fled Crimea, Ukraine’s Russian-annexed peninsula with a population of two million people, this week. The family of Crimean Tatars lived in Yevpatroia, had a house and worked as doctors.
“I came back here with my family in the 1990s, we came back to the land of my father, just wanted to live on native land. Built a house,” explains Abdulayev’s 60-year-old mother-in-law, Gulnar.
But now it’s all gone – their home and their native land. The same is true already for thousands of former peninsula residents who don’t want to live under Russian rule.
As Russian troops invaded on Feb. 27, many people fled, with the flow increasing after a March 16 Kremlin-orchestrated referendum was held to ratify Russia’s seizure of Ukrainian territory.
Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatseniuk said Ukraine’s mainland is ready to accept and accommodate up to 23,000 refugees. Temporary shelters for displaced Crimeans have been organized in Lviv, Lutsk, Vinnytsia, Dnipropetrovsk and other Ukrainian cities.
According to Ukrainian Social Policy Minister Liudmyla Denisova, some 3,600 Crimeans have already applied for state help to regional coordination centers as of March 25, with a third of them in Lviv and another third of them in Ivano-Frankivsk.
Besides the government relocation centers, many people are volunteering to take Crimean refugees into their homes. Some 150 Crimeans have already registered in the Kyiv Coordination Center for Crimean refugees, founded by the Ukrainian government on March 20. Some 50 have already been placed in old sanatoriums that belong to Kyiv city enterprises.
Abdulayev’s family started looking for a place to stay in Kyiv, found the hotline of the Kyiv Coordination Center for Crimean Refugees and thus got a temporary home in an old sanatorium not far from Kyiv.
“We just caught the train to Kyiv, had no idea what the future would bring us or even where we are going to live,” Usman Abdulaev says.
And this is the same story for more than 40 Crimea refugees who got their shelters in the Kyiv suburban resort of Pushcha-Vodytsya.
All are confronted with the same issues: what to do with the property left in Crimea, restoring documents, finding permanent homes.
The biggest worry of Crimean refugees, however, is the safety of those who stayed on peninsula.
“I kind of understand that there is a 99 percent that nothing bad will happen to them there, but there is still that one percent and one percent is a lot when it comes to your loved ones,” says a 60-year-old journalist from Sudak. He did not want to be identified because his wife remains in Crimea. He left his hometown this week, desperate to keep his two sons safe.
The journalist believes that Russia will return Crimea to Ukraine eventually. “Even if I don’t live long enough to see that, I know my son will be on the tank, taking over our native land again,” he laughs as tears spring from his eyes.
Kyiv’s Crimean guests are amazed by the hospitality of people.
“We’ve been told there are just Molotov cocktails flying here, we expected it to be different of course, but this is just unbelievable,” says Usman Abdulayev. “People bring food, toys, clothes, books, shoes, cosmetics and always come with a good word.”
Valeriy Slutskyi, an employee of Kyivpastrans, which owns sanatoriums where the refugees live, is organizing accommodation for them. ”Just two days after we called on people for some help, we got enough to feed 50 people for a week plus a room full of clothes and toys,” he says.
Kateryna Stelmah, a mother of two and a private entrepreneur from Kyiv, is among the donors. “I gathered a whole truck of stuff for them overnight,” Stelmakh smiles. “We all can appear in the same situation at any moment now and they would do the same for us.”
Elena Tsyganko, who is Russian, left her home and family business in Sevastopol a week ago. She feels Ukrainian and wants to live in Ukraine. Tsygolko and her husband stayed with friends at first but then came to the coordination center to see how the state can help.
“We need not only financial support but moral support as well,” Tsygolko says, and then, tearing up. “Tell me who on earth had a right to take our home from us.”
Daryna Shevchenko
