After two weeks of no news, Alexsandr Obedinsky cried with happiness when he received a video call from his granddaughter, Kira. The last time he knew her whereabouts was just after her father was killed, shot on the balcony of the family’s Mariupol apartment by a Russian sniper. In the aftermath, contact with the 12-year-old girl was lost.
Obedinsky had already managed to flee the besieged city for the relative safety of western Ukraine, but his son and Kira’s father, Evgeny, had refused to consider the dangerous journey. His death left Kira an orphan as her mother died two weeks after she was born.
After Evgeny was killed, his partner, Anya, tried to take Kira and her own children on foot out of the city. What happened next is unclear. Obedinsky’s joy at realising Kira was alive quickly turned to fear when he realised where she was.
“She was in a hospital bed, she had shrapnel wounds around her ear and face and her legs, but she seemed OK. I was so relieved. But she told me she’s in Donetsk, and it seems like she’s on her own. She told me they’re taking her to a Russian city.”
The southern port city of Mariupol has been a major focus of Russia’s now six-week-old invasion of Ukraine: capturing it would link other parts of the Donbas region – such as Donetsk, which has been de-facto Russian-controlled since 2014 – with the Russian mainland.
As a result, Mariupol has faced some of the worst suffering in the conflict to date. Approximately 150,000 or so of the city’s prewar population of 400,000 are still trapped by the Russian ground forces encircling the area, with diminishing supplies of water, food, medicine and fuel. All the while, besieged residents have faced airstrikes and shelling, which have killed an estimated 5,000 people.
This is the situation that Anya, Evgeny’s partner, decided she and the children had to escape after his death on 17 March. From what Kira told her grandfather, it seems the family and a group of neighbours walked for around two days before coming across a minefield, which killed a little boy and injured Kira. The girl was picked up by Russian soldiers and taken to a hospital in Donetsk, where doctors said they’d take care of her, allow her access to her phone to call Obedinsky and eventually send her to a new home in Russia.
“She is so scared. She doesn’t know where or why she is going,” the 67-year-old said.
“I can’t say for sure what she understands about what’s going on and the war … She’s seen people killed in front of her, explosions and shelling. She just wants to come back to her family and come back home.”
The Guardian has previously reported that Russia is sending Ukrainian citizens from Mariupol to “filtration camps” in Russian-controlled areas before forcibly relocating them to Russia, which is considered a war crime under international humanitarian law.
A satellite image captured by US-based Maxar Technologies last week showed tented camps set up in the Russian-controlled village of Bezimenne, near Novoazovsk, and representatives of the two self-proclaimed republics in Donbas said they have set up a “tent city” for those fleeing Mariupol, which can host up to 450 people.
The scale of Russia’s reported forced deportations remains unclear. The Ukrainian government has accused Moscow of transferring 40,000 people to its territory, a claim the Russian authorities deny. Russia media outlets have reported that hundreds of Ukrainian refugees have been sent by train to the northern regions of Yaroslavl and Ryazan.
Obedinsky is desperately afraid that Kira is about to become one of that number.
“I’m waiting for Kira to be able to call back again and she can tell me what’s going on,” he said. “I didn’t hear from my son for days before he was killed and, even up until the last second, I was waiting for good news. I just pray God will protect her and we can bring her home.”
