Scramble over border for families in rebel-held areas
DRESSED in their warmest clothes, a confused group of mothers and grandmothers with their children and suitcases stood in the middle of a parking lot dotted with inflatable tents.
Nataliya Klimchuk gripped her suitcases tightly as she carried a red paper bag full of water bottles to a taxi cab, a three-year-old son in tow.
She had crossed over from separatistheld Donetsk earlier yesterday only to see the improvised tent camp just a stone’s throw from the border, but had received little guidance or direction of where she should go next.
Each tent in the car park housed at least 30 people, mostly women with small children. Many were asking emergency workers if there was a microwave nearby to warm up baby food.
Unlike others, Mrs Klimchuk has relatives in the region who were able to find an apartment for her to rent in a nearby village.
The 35-year-old lives near the frontline near the disused Donetsk airport but thought it was no longer safe to stay.
“I heard shelling all night last night,” she said. “I couldn’t get to sleep until 4am. I thought it’s time to go.”
As separatists in the self-proclaimed Donetsk Republics issued evacuation orders and announced plans to take about 700,000 people to Russia, authorities in Russia’s neighbouring Rostov region have scrambled to set up tents near the border, even clearing a couple of dilapidated sanatoriums to host the evacuees.
Vasily Golubev, governor of the Rostov region, said they would be ready to host about 14,000 people.
So far, separatist officials have said fewer than 20,000 people have left, a fraction of the region’s estimated population of three million people.
The separatist capital of Donetsk has not seen real fighting since the summer of 2015, but with tensions escalating, many have been left with a choice over whether to stay put or leave for Russia.
Albina Zhilina, 29, a mother of three, signed up for the evacuation on Friday after watching the news on TV. She boarded a bus yesterday that took the residents of her district in Donetsk.
“Some people are staying. Some people are leaving. I only left because of the children,” she said.
She said the evacuation felt more like a precautionary step rather than an escape from an immediate danger as fighting in eastern Ukraine is nowhere near as heavy as at the height of the hostilities in 2014.
But she added that her feeling was: “We’d better leave before things kick off.”
Ms Zhilina and others are eligible for a one-off £100 payout from the Russian government but she said she still had no idea how to claim the money.
Housing in the region appeared to be in short supply, with evacuees from the Donbas region taking rooms in guest houses and hotels that appeared to be completely unprepared for the influx of evacuees.
Cars with number plates of the selfproclaimed republics filled the parking lot of a spa hotel in Taganrog, the nearest large city about 60 kilometres to the south.
Traffic around Taganrog, a city on the Azov Sea, has been snarled by dozens of buses shuttling people from the border and back to take new arrivals.
A few kilometres away from the border crossing, armed men with no insignia and two armoured vehicles appeared to be setting up a check-point.
Meanwhile, back at the wind-swept parking lot where the tents had been set up the February chill left women and children in their parkas and duffle coats shivering.
‘I heard shelling all night last night. I couldn’t get to sleep until 4am. I thought it’s time to go’