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."
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.
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.
"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'
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.
Ukraine's government says the vast majority of these movements are war crimes — forced transfers of civilians into the territory of their invaders.
Ukraine's Deputy Ambassador to the UN Khrystyna Hayovyshyn told the UN Security Council in September that 2.5 million Ukrainians had been forcibly deported to Russia, including 38,000 children.
These figures are virtually impossible to verify and talk of forced deportations has been dismissed by Russia as being part of a disinformation campaign from Ukraine and the West.
"They are living freely and voluntarily in Russia," Russia's ambassador to the UN Vasily Nebenzya, said in early September.
"Nobody is preventing them moving or preventing them leaving the country."
However, a report by Human Rights Watch found that most of the cases they documented "where Ukrainians from the Mariupol and Kharkiv areas were transported to Russia amount to forcible transfers".
The report described the practice as a "serious violation of the laws of war amounting to a war crime and a potential crime against humanity".
The Institute for the Study of War has stated that Russia "continues to conduct massive, forced deportations of Ukrainians that likely amount to a deliberate ethnic cleansing campaign".
Others choose to leave
There is however, no doubt that there are refugees who are making the trip over the Russian border voluntarily.
In the Estonian capital Tallinn, the ABC spoke to one young man who fled Ukraine to avoid the travel restrictions on males aged 18-60 under martial law.
Back in the border city of Narva, Oleksandr — another refugee from Mariupol — explained how he and his family decided to escape over the Russian border of their own free will.
"I wouldn't say they [the Russians] were friendly, but it was OK," he says.
The Human Rights Watch report does document examples where civilians from the Kharkiv region were given no choice but to flee to Russia.
"What they share with the civilians from Mariupol is that they wanted to go to Ukrainian-controlled areas but went to Russia because Russian and [Donetsk People's Republic] forces boarded them onto buses and gave them no choice, or no meaningful choice, except to stay under shelling where they believed their lives were in imminent danger," the report states.
'If anything happens to them, no-one will ever answer for it'
Other cases are more nuanced.
Elena is a mother of three from Melitopol — the first major city that was occupied by Russia after the invasion.
She says her three children were forced to go to an occupied school that was guarded by the Russian military.
"There was always a danger that a missile or an artillery shell would hit the school, and no-one will ever know if it was a genuine strike or a provocation," she says.
Elena escaped the city with her children in late July and paid a driver to take her to Estonia via Russia.
She says she had no real choice but to escape via Crimea and over the Russian border.
"You can leave Melitopol theoretically, via Zaporizhzhia region, via Vasylivka," she says.
"It is the prime way, the only way to get to Ukraine-controlled territory.
"But practically it is impossible, with little kids — it is not safe, and I don't have spare kids.
"If anything happens to them, no-one will ever answer for it."
The Human Rights Watch report is more explicit about the lack of choice given to civilians trying to flee fighting.
"Russian and Russian-affiliated officials organised transport to Russia and told some civilians that they had no choice but to stay in Russian-occupied areas or go to Russia and should 'forget about' going to Ukrainian-controlled territory," the report says.
Crossing the border in search of a new life
Narva is an Estonian border town just 160 kilometres from Vladimir Putin's home city of St Petersburg.
On a wet Tuesday afternoon, around 40 Ukrainian refugees are waiting in the car park near the crossing for a bus that will take them to a new life in the Latvian city of Riga.
The bus has been organised by the volunteer organisation Rubikus, which has helped more than 15,000 Ukrainian refugees make it out of the war zone through Russia and Estonia.
Rubikus has been helping evacuate Ukrainians since February. But in April they started getting requests for help from people trying to escape the war zone through Russia and Estonia.
"Our first request came from a family from Mariupol who was travelling by car. By the time they made it into Russia, their car was covered in bullet holes," Rita Vinokur, the chief operating officer of Rubikus, tells the ABC.
"As soon as we began collaborating with Russian volunteers, we discovered that there were hundreds of people who had been brought into Russia against their will and were struggling to return to Ukraine, or to find a temporary home in Europe."
Denys, a big bear of a man from Donetsk in Eastern Ukraine, is getting on the bus organised by Rubikus. He is relieved to be taking his family to a new country removed from the despair and destruction of a war zone.
"We are moving into a new world with open hearts," he says.
"We have decided ourselves it will be a new life for us, we will be learning the language and trying our best to blend in."
When Ukrainian refugees cross this border a weight lifts off their shoulders.
More than 90,000 of them have crossed through checkpoints like this one since the war began in February.
Sergey Tsvetkov helps provide Ukrainian refugees with temporary accommodation when they cross into Narva.
He says he's noticed a change in the people arriving in recent months.
"The people that came in the early days were definitely forcibly moved to Russia, nowadays they are mostly people who voluntarily decide to go to Russia and then to Europe," Sergey says.
Rita Vinokur has noticed a similar trend.
"In the beginning of the summer, many if not most of the Ukrainians we were helping to leave Russia had been brought in by buses coordinated by Russian military forces," he says.
"Now, this process seems to have quietened down, and Russia is no longer as interested in bringing Ukrainians into their country."
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."
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.
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."
