Exodus
A refugee woman, during her bus ride from the Ukraine-Poland border to Warsaw, March 13, 2022. Photo by Manuel Ortiz Escámez for palabra.
A MEXICAN JOURNALIST IN UKRAINE DOCUMENTS A GROWING REFUGEE CRISIS
Editor's note: This story has been updated to describe with more clarity how the treatment of Ukrainian refugees fleeing to European countries contrasts with the experiences of Middle Eastern refugees in the past.
Read the Spanish version of the story here.
Lviv, Ukraine - Larysa Koltsova, Konstantino Makruha and their 10-year-old son André bid farewell at the Lviv Main Bus Station in western Ukraine. It’s March 12. Larysa and André are leaving for Poland, the border is some 45 miles away. But Konstantino will stay behind to defend his country. This family, like so many in Ukraine, is being separated by Russian President Vladimir Putin's invasion.
In their last moments together, André clings to Konstantino in a long embrace, while Konstantino and Larysa communicate wordlessly with a sweet, deep gaze. He touches her face gently and she holds back from bursting into tears.
Men between the ages of 18 and 60 must stay in Ukraine to fight for their country. Konstantino tells me that he has never touched a weapon, as he is a man of peace. “Violence is for cowards,” he says, but “today it is our turn to fight for the freedom of our country.”
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine that began on Feb. 24 has caused millions of Ukrainians to leave their country.
Larysa Koltsova, Konstantino Makruha, and their son André part ways at the Lviv Main Bus Station in Ukraine. Photo by Manuel Ortiz Escámez for palabra.
As a journalist specializing in documenting global migrations, and myself a Mexican migrant in the United States, I was motivated to travel to Ukraine earlier this month to cover the impact of the Russian invasion on Ukraine’s residents. On March 6, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees called the exodus of Ukrainians “the fastest-growing refugee crisis in Europe since World War II.” I saw it happening first-hand.
Experts all over the world are analyzing this war, many of them from far away. However, I wanted to know and sense the emotions of the people involved, and explore the war from their perspective.
At the train station, Larysa tells me this conflict is particularly painful because it rips at her identity. “We are a dual-language family,” Larysa says, using a third language, English, to speak with me. “We can speak Russian and Ukrainian. And both languages are native to us. Today our hearts are broken because our country has been caught up in a war that we didn't start.”
I ask Larysa what message she wants to share with the world.
“Stop the war,” she answers. “War is not a toy, war is a business of politics. Ordinary people should not suffer, families should not collapse, innocent young people should not die. I ask ordinary people to appeal to their governments to support Ukraine and end the war.”
People from across Ukraine arrive at the border with Poland. Photo by Manuel Ortiz Escámez for palabra.
The International Organization for Migration has said almost 6.48 million people are internally displaced within Ukraine, in addition to the more than 3.63 million who have left the country, according to UNHCR figures. That data, last updated March 22, indicates that almost 60% of Ukrainian refugees are going to Poland. Approximately a third of the refugees are going to neighboring countries, including Romania, Moldova, Hungary, and Slovakia. About 7% of those fleeing Ukraine are going to Russia and Belarus.
Most of the Ukrainians I meet tell me they do not wish to migrate to the U.S., but some are choosing that route. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has announced that Ukrainians who have resided in the U.S. continuously since March 1 are eligible for Temporary Protected Status for 18 months.
A couple of days before I meet Larysa at the bus station, I visit the Lviv railway station on March 10 and find it is crowded with people who have fled other parts of Ukraine and are trying to get to safety. I see mostly women descend in masses from the old blue train cars arriving from all over the country. It’s cold and the smell of burned diesel permeates the atmosphere. Tired people walk with desolation and confusion.
“I would have stayed too, my country needs us, but I had to get my daughter to safety, we have to secure the lives of the new generations.”
Liudmyla, who I ask – as I do with everyone I encounter – to please write her name as she wishes it to appear in this article, writes only her first name in my notebook. She describes how she and her one-year-old daughter had to trudge across the tracks to join the long lines of buses leaving for the border with Poland. They came here from Zaporizhia, a town in southeastern Ukraine that has been heavily shelled by Moscow’s troops.
“We traveled for 30 hours, some stretches by car and some by train, which is the safest at the moment because many roads are destroyed," Liudmyla recounts. She tells me she feared the car could be attacked by the Russian military.
Liudmyla's husband, father, and mother stayed in Zaporizhia. “They stayed to resist the invasion. I would have stayed too, my country needs us, but I had to get my daughter to safety, we have to secure the lives of the new generations.”
Liudmyla and her daughter at a refugee shelter in Poland near the border with Ukraine. Photo by Manuel Ortiz Escámez for palabra.
Displaced people crowd into the dark, dank, damp, and cold underground tunnels of the train station as they wait in silence, with children and pets in their arms, for their turn to board transportation to the Polish border.
Makeshift shelters have sprung up in Lviv to house displaced people. Those who stay in the shelters came to the city with no intention of leaving the country, but simply to wait here for a few days while the conflict was being resolved, says Yana Kosareva, a young Ukrainian volunteer. She is one of many volunteers who are donating their time and effort to help others in the shelters in whatever way they can.
Many in Ukraine believed that Putin's forces would not dare to attack Lviv because of the city's proximity to Poland, which is both a member of the European Union and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, NATO .
But air raid sirens began to sound more frequently in Lviv, and a World War II bomb shelter in the city’s Ivan Franko Park has been reopened.
And not for nothing. Two nearby attacks on March 11 shattered the relative calm; one to the north in Lutsk and the other to the south in Ivano-Frankivsk. Later, on March 18, Russian missiles hit an aircraft repair plant near the Lviv airport.
These events caused many people who had fled temporarily to Lviv from the horrors of war in the east of the country to rethink their escape plans. “Now they want to leave to get their children to safety,” Kosareva tells me. When I ask her if she is afraid, she bursts into tears.
A bomb shelter from World War II at Ivan Franko Park. Photo by Manuel Ortiz Escámez for palabra.
As I walk Lviv’s crowded streets, squares and public transit stations during the day, I notice a surreal silence despite the large masses of people. At night at the fountain in the park in front of the Opera House, however, the silence is finally broken. There, a street musician, surrounded by a crowd of young people who clap along with him, sings the cheerful song, Chervona Ruta.
It’s a beloved song here, and it has become something of an unofficial Ukrainian anthem for hope and joy that is needed during this dark time. Anastasiya Markuts, an active volunteer, later explains to me that the song brings Ukrainians together, in unity.
A long-standing conflict
On March 2, the United Nations General Assembly adopted a resolution deploring Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and calling for an end to attacks and the immediate withdrawal of Russian forces from the country.
“Putin’s invasion has no legal justification whatsoever,” says Octavio M. González, a researcher at the National Autonomous University of Mexico’s Center for International Relations. González, who lived in Ukraine and knows the region well, states the Kremlin's military actions “set a dangerous precedent and constitute a flagrant breach of the contemporary international order.”
Putin has said the goal of what he calls a “special military operation” in Ukraine is to “demilitarise and denazify Ukraine.” He has claimed that Ukraine poses an imminent threat to Russia because it has allegedly embraced a far-right, neo-Nazi stance that is hostile to ethnic Russians and because Ukraine wants to join NATO, which will expand the alliance’s territory.
But Russia’s claim about the neo-Nazi threat in Ukraine is distorted.
While González says it is true that there are extreme right-wing groups in Ukraine, such as the militia known as the Azov Battalion, Putin’s claims about the influence of neo-Nazis in Ukraine is overblown. “The political ruling class in Ukraine is mostly composed of centrist politicians who align with the ideals of the institutions of the European Union,” González says.
Not only has the international community overwhelmingly rejected Russia’s war, so too have some members of the Russian media who were previously loyal to the Kremlin. Marina Ovsyannikova of Russia’s state-controlled Channel One television station protested the war during a live broadcast and was then detained, interrogated, and fined.
Anti-war protests have also taken place in Russian cities, such as St. Petersburg, where police arrests, according to information shared on social networks and European media, number in the thousands. Some Russian journalists were arrested for covering those protests. A new law passed by Russian lawmakers would allow journalists to be punished with jail sentences for reporting so-called fake information about Russia’s military operations – meaning information that is inconsistent with the Kremlin’s version of events.
A new life
Buses carrying people from Lviv arrive near the border with Poland. The buses drop the weary travelers off about 330 yards from the border crossing. The refugees then walk in line to a heavily guarded military checkpoint.
I’m standing at the border on March 13 when I see mothers and grandmothers carrying babies with one arm and using the other to drag heavy suitcases in which they seem to carry their entire lives. Small children, exhausted and with frightened faces, clutch a cat, a dog, a stuffed animal or a bag with family belongings.
People fleeing Ukraine on the border with Poland. Photo by Manuel Ortiz Escámez for palabra.
Arriving at the checkpoint, still on Ukrainian soil, they hand over their documents to a soldier and wait. After 40 to 50 minutes pass, their passports are stamped and they are allowed to continue.
A few yards ahead, on the Polish side, each family hands over their documents to the migration officer once again. The Ukrainians enter without major complications. The rest of the refugees, who have also fled Ukraine but are nationals of other countries, form another line to be listed in a registry.
The treatment of Ukrainian nationals at the border contrasts sharply with the alleged rejection of some Africans fleeing Ukraine more recently and the restrictions in past years on Middle Eastern refugees in European countries.
In comparison, Ukrainian refugees have been welcomed with open arms. Once on Polish soil, after an hour and a half waiting in temperatures in the low 20s (-5 degrees Celsius), a bus takes refugees to a large gymnasium set up as a shelter in the Polish village of Lubycza Królewska, approximately 6 miles from the border.
Two women proceed toward Poland, immediately after passing through the military checkpoint at the Ukrainian border. Photo by Manuel Ortiz Escámez for palabra.
At the shelter, as in other parts of Poland, there are waves of volunteers organized through Facebook from all over the country, and other parts of Europe. They offer food, hot tea, clothes, medicine and even toys to the new arrivals. Some children smile for the first time in many hours.
Liudmyla, holding her daughter in her arms, seeks out warmth from a gas heater placed inside a tent that serves as a makeshift dining room. It has been a long journey.
Many elderly people, Liudmyla says, don't make it this far. They stay in the bombed areas by personal choice, because they want to support their country, but also because it is impossible for them to flee due to the enormous physical difficulties of the journey.
“They, like people with disabilities, cannot stand the long walks, sometimes without food and very low temperatures.”
Refugees register as they enter the shelter. Hundreds of mats, cots, and blankets are spread out on the floor. Everyone has to find a place to spend the night.
Volunteers, who wear yellow vests for easy identification, can be seen cooking, organizing lists, carrying boxes, and cleaning, even in the wee hours of the morning.
The lights at the shelter never turn off. There is activity 24 hours a day. The place never empties because as some leave, others arrive, which keeps the mats warm.
Mariia Bachynska, a Ukrainian refugee, begins her journey to Warsaw, Poland. Photo by Manuel Ortiz Escámez for palabra.
At five o'clock in the morning, a loudspeaker announces that the first bus leaves for Warsaw, and so on throughout the day. But everyone must wait their turn and the list is long. I tell the person in charge in the shelter that I’m a journalist, and I’m following some refugees. They write my name down for the next bus available.
Late in the afternoon of March 13, Mariia Bachynska and her 16-year-old daughter manage to board one of the buses to Warsaw. They travel through the night to a new life. I sit on Mariia’s right side, next to the window.
The darkness prevents me from using the Nikon Z7II camera that accompanies me. That makes me think of the many images of this trip that I only have recorded in my memory, such as the emotional farewells with tears and the hugs and kisses at the border, where Polish authorities stopped me from taking photographs.
Mariia Bachynska looks at the photos of her husband who stayed behind in eastern Ukraine. Photo by Manuel Ortiz Escámez for palabra.
Nor is it possible to photograph the pain of separated families that is in the air everywhere, including this bus. War is both a visible and invisible monster. And yet some of us still believe that photographs, like journalism, can help stop a war.
It is also true that in war the best of humanity also rises to the surface, like the solidarity of the thousands of volunteers who work tirelessly in the shelters, the mutual support between mothers and grandmothers to take turns carrying small children, or the solidarity of those who stay behind to resist – sometimes even with music – the invasion of their country.
As the bus drives us closer to Warsaw, Mariia looks again and again at the photos on her Instagram account. There are photos of her and her husband, who stayed behind in the battered east of Ukraine, and of her cat, Fantik, misplaced somewhere during the escape.
“I don't know when, but I am sure I will see them again,” Mariia tells me. She is expressing out loud what I have come to understand to be what all displaced people long for: a reunion with loved ones, the end of war, the ability to return home.
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Manuel Ortiz Escámez is a national award-winning (US) social documentary photographer and journalist based in Redwood City, California. He was born in Mexico City where he received a BA in sociology and an MA in visual arts, specializing in documentary film. He has traveled through over 20 countries for his photographic, and multimedia projects, most of them about immigration, social justice, and the environment.
He has long taught Visual Sociology at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), where he was the director and founder of the Multimedia Laboratory for Social Research for more than seven years.
Manuel is the director and founder of Peninsula 360 Press, a digital and print media outlet in Redwood City, California. He also has collaborated as an independent reporter and photojournalist for media outlets such as El Mensajero (San Francisco, CA), Alianza News (San Jose, CA.), Ethnic Media Services (San Francisco, CA), Proceso (Mexico), Sin Embargo (Mexico), Univisión (USA), The Nation (USA), and Gran Angular Agency (France).