This narrow, rocky path is the last open route between Russia and Ukraine

In April 2022, after the Russian army had pulled back from Kyiv, Dima, a man in his late 40s with flinty blue eyes, banded together with some acquaintances to form a volunteer organisation. They called it Pluriton after a pet supply company owned by one of the members. The group decided to head to Donbas, a region in the east of the country, where the Russians were mounting a new offensive. They supplied aid to people under bombardment in front-line towns, rescued abandoned dogs and evacuated those who wanted to leave.

A couple of months later, Dima and two colleagues were working near the front when Ukrainian soldiers told them to turn around and head to safety.  The team made an “unwise decision”, said Dima, wryly, to take a back road. Their car got a flat tyre and they were soon surrounded by 30 or so Russian soldiers.

The men were imprisoned in Luhansk, a region of Ukraine annexed by Russia. Their captors paraded them on Russian TV but after a lucky intervention – one of the volunteers had a relative in the Luhansk administration – they were released two months after they were seized. The men were able to stay with friends of friends for a while, but wanted to return home. However, some of their passports and documents had been confiscated. Without them, they couldn’t take the easiest route home – through Russia and then on to Europe.

They tried to hire a driver to take them across the front line, but they were unable to find a checkpoint that would let them through. Finally, in January, they learned of a route. It involved taking a taxi across the border into Russia and then crossing back into Ukraine at a place near the northern Ukrainian city of Sumy. Here was a discreet, informal border post between the two countries at war. With a bit of luck, the Russians would let them through.

At the start of the invasion in February 2022, Ukraine officially closed all its border posts with Russia and Belarus. Still, for the first months of war, Ukrainians fleeing Russian occupation were able to cross the front line in a few places, though they risked being detained at Russian checkpoints or struck by shells. After the success of the Ukrainian counter-offensive in the autumn of 2022, which liberated swathes of territory in the east, the last of these routes, near Zaporizhia, was closed. Sumy, on the Russian border, was the only place where Ukrainians could cross into Ukraine from enemy-controlled territory.

The crossing point at Sumy was opened in the early months of the invasion as a humanitarian corridor through which the two sides could exchange prisoners-of-war and the bodies of dead soldiers. For reasons that are unclear, the Russians allowed some civilians to pass through too.

Roman, the press officer for the border guard in the Sumy region, explained that the crossing point is little more than a gravel track nearly two kilometres long. It runs through open country and is visible from both sides. Only Ukrainians leaving Russia can pass along it. It’s not an official border post, but the Ukrainian border guard won’t turn their own citizens away.

Most people who want to leave Russian-occupied Ukraine take circuitous routes, either south through Crimea or east through occupied Donetsk. Then they might traverse southern Russia and the Caucasus mountains to reach Georgia, or loop back to reach Europe through Belarus or the Baltic states. There are numerous Russian checkpoints when leaving occupied Ukraine. Soldiers inspect phones, take fingerprints and subject the refugees to interrogation. People report strip-searches to check for patriotic tattoos, beatings, and delays of hours or even days. There are plenty of cases of families being split up, and individuals have been detained or disappeared.

Many travel by car but there are also companies that run bus services from occupied Ukraine to various European destinations for a fare of $250-450, according to adverts on Telegram, a messaging platform. One, called Lux Express, offers a 50% discount to children under 12 years old, as well as hot drinks, meals, WiFi and comfortable seats. Routes are offered to Warsaw, Prague and cities in Germany. Improbably, there are even direct ones from Donetsk and Mariupol, Russian-occupied cities, to Kyiv and Kharkiv. (In reality, passengers are deposited on the Ukraine-Russia border and then picked up on the other side.)

Telegram channels are filled with questions about what documents different routes require. Some people have only Ukrainian domestic passports, which are not valid for international travel. Some have no documents at all. In these cases, Ukrainian authorities verify citizens entering the country using a range of national databases. There was one case, Roman remembered, where they identified a man from a speeding ticket.

The crossing near Sumy is not well known. Between 50 and 150 people shuffle across it daily, many of them older women. Those with deficient documents are often allowed through the Russian checkpoint with a wink and some cash. When Vova, one of the volunteers marooned in Luhansk, crossed, he had no papers but managed to convince the Russians to let him go by showing them footage of an appearance he made on Russian TV as a prisoner. But there are no guarantees of sympathetic treatment. Vitaly, a volunteer with Pluriton, told me a story of a man urging his wife and baby to continue, even as he was detained and beaten. “He just wanted to encourage his loved ones to get to safety.”

Several hours of questioning are often required to pass through the Russian and Ukrainian checkpoints. Arrivals often reach free Ukrainian soil at night, exhausted and with nowhere to go. Buses that had been laid on for them have sometimes departed, leaving them at the mercy of taxi drivers who charge exorbitant sums to take them 40km to Sumy.

This spring the Pluriton volunteers set up free transfers from the border and organised a shelter in Krasnopillia, a nearby village, where people could get a cup of tea, a meal and a bed for the night. There they often refer people to other organisations that can help them register for benefits, health care and housing.

At the end of May, after a militia formed of Russian dissidents, apparently based in Ukraine, made a raid across the border into southern Russia, the Russians stopped allowing cars to cross. Everyone had to walk – a punishing trek for those who are infirm or carrying children and luggage. Katarina, one of the Pluriton volunteers, showed me a video of a woman being dragged along the rocky path in a wheelchair with a busted front wheel. “And this lady”, she said, presenting me with a photograph of a frail old woman lying on a pallet of blankets, “could not walk.” Her daughters put her on a wooden plank balanced on a child’s pram and pushed her through the grey zone.

The Russian bombardment on villages and towns on the border near Sumy increased through June and July. Several times people crossing on foot had to take cover in ditches because artillery rounds landed close by. “Almost every day, there is shelling,” said Roman. When I met him, he had just come from the funeral of a colleague. He told us that Russian sabotage groups regularly infiltrate the border areas. In June six people were killed when their van was ambushed. “There are a lot of cases like this,” he said.

Three days before I arrived the Pluriton volunteers had been forced to close their shelter in Krasnopillia, because Russian artillery fire was drawing close. When I met them on July 22nd, they were still in the process of refurbishing an unused shopping centre in Sumy. That evening, near midnight, I watched the refugees climb down from the van. They were carrying plastic bags and backpacks, a few had suitcases on wheels. They wore shorts and sandals, but it had rained all day and their feet were grimy from the walk. One woman had a large dog. The volunteers wondered out loud where to kennel it for the night; she shook her head and refused to be separated from it. A woman from Oleshky – a town occupied by the Russians on the Dnieper delta that was almost entirely submerged by flooding after the explosion of the Kakhovka dam – carried a baby in her arms. Volunteers guided them into the shelter where fresh sheets and blankets were laid out on single beds. They were given tea and a meal of stew, rice and cucumber salad on plastic trays.

Many had spent months under bombardment, seeing their livelihoods disappear and their homes destroyed. Julia, a tall woman in her 40s with long dark hair and a narrow face, had left Oleshky with her husband and their ten-year-old daughter. Her house had been damaged by shelling at the end of last year, then her mother had died – partly from the stress, Julia said. After the dam was destroyed at the beginning of June, her home was flooded, then her new apartment was hit by artillery fire and her husband received a shrapnel wound to his stomach. The apartment was hit again three days later.

“Doctors refuse to treat people without Russian passports,” she said, in a rush of pent-up emotion and relief. “You can’t call an ambulance or the fire department; houses that are shelled just burn to the ground. Sometimes there is no electricity for a week.” She had stayed so long, she said, because she hadn’t wanted to leave her animals, and worried whether her husband would be allowed through Russian checkpoints.

Most of the city was inundated after the dam burst and many people had to escape onto their roofs. She knew people had been paid to collect the dead and bury them in black-plastic body bags in a mass grave. “There are still people looking for their relatives,” she told me.

The volunteers have noticed a difference between those who have come from Kherson and Zaporizhia, regions that were occupied last year, and those from Donetsk and Luhansk who had been living under Russian-sponsored separatist regimes since 2014. The former were more voluble. Those who had stayed under separatist rule – because they needed to work, care for their relatives, or protect their homes or businesses – observed a certain reticence.

To Dima, the volunteer who had spent several months marooned in Luhansk, the separatist areas of Ukraine felt like another country. “It’s as if the atmosphere is grey. People don’t really walk around – only if they need to get somewhere. There was nothing there. No jobs, only old people.”

Those people I spoke to from Donetsk and Luhansk were friendly enough. Irina, with ash-blonde hair and heavy black eyeliner, was clutching two tiny dogs (a third was left behind because he didn’t have the right documents for travelling). She was from Horlivka, a town in the Donetsk People’s Republic. In 2017, she finally decided to move to the unoccupied side near Bakhmut, a city that has seen vicious fighting in the past months. Her home was destroyed earlier this year. “We lost everything twice,” she said.

Her father died last year and Irina had recently returned to Horlivka hoping to persuade her mother to leave – but she refused to abandon her husband’s grave. The failure clearly pained Irina. “I was trying to fix things…” she said, her voice snagging. She looked out into the middle distance and tried not to cry even as the tears seeped out and smudged her eye makeup. “I am 52,” she said, “I am afraid of having to start all over again. I can’t imagine how I will do it. All I can do is cry and it’s just embarrassing.”

Over the course of the Saturday that we visited, there were 14 explosions in Krasnopillia. One person died and six were injured. On the Sunday night, Russian drones attacked the city of Sumy. Then the Russians unexpectedly closed the crossing point. Telegram channels for would-be refugees filled with worried chatter. But the crossing reopened a few days later and the sad trail of people fleeing from one side of a war to another resumed. ■

Wendell Steavenson won feature writer of the year at the Press Awards for her reporting on the Ukraine war for 1843 magazine. You can read her previous dispatches and the rest of our coverage here.

IMAGES: Redux / eyevine, IMAGO, Getty, SOPA Images, ZUMA, alamy