As happened with Korea or Germany, where after the wars many families were divided between north and south, or east and west, the Russian occupation of 19% of Ukrainian territory is leaving deep family wounds. Hundreds of thousands of people have fled areas that have come under Russian control. Many of them have relatives who stayed on the other side by choice, necessity or due to the inability to travel. The separation represents one more consequence that adds to the trauma of three years of war.
Katerina – for security reasons, everyone with relatives on the Russian-occupied side withholds her last name – fled Mariupol with her husband and three children on March 15, 2022, when this city in the Donetsk region was under siege. . His parents, aged 66 and 71, his in-laws and his siblings were left behind, not only by choice, but almost by devotion. “My parents believe that the Soviet Union must return, that it is the only way to survive. When I initially tried to leave through Berdiansk, in the Zaporizhzhia region, my mother told me not to do it, that we were finally going to live in paradise,” he remembers.
This 36-year-old former judicial official hardly talks to her family, and when she does, she prefers to chat about the children, the weather, any banality. Many things bother him, such as receiving pensions from both Russia and Ukraine. Katerina attributes her relatives’ pro-Russian fervor to Moscow propaganda, which they already consumed on satellite television before the occupation. “At first I was trying to reason with my mother. I told him: ‘Have you seen that they have fired missiles at civilians?’ But she told me that it was Ukraine, or a gas explosion. “Like this every day.” He also repeated the craziest stories, “like that in Ukraine they eat children or that there are biological weapons laboratories.” His sister-in-law is convinced that it was Ukrainian troops who destroyed the city of Mariupol. “It’s impossible to talk to them,” he says with a mixture of frustration and resignation.
Oleksandr Khalavinskii is director of the Mariupol Hub in Dnipro, the first of a network of 25 centers throughout the country that offers all types of help – humanitarian, legal, psychological, medical, labor, accommodation, etc. – to displaced people from that Donetsk city. According to him, about 194,000 people of the more than 420,000 that existed before the war left in the spring of 2022. “Every day people continue to leave,” he says, and he calculates that about 70,000 inhabitants of the previous population remain in the city. , to which Russia has added new residents.
The reasons of those who have decided to remain under the authority of the invaders are varied. There are those, like Katerina’s relatives, who feel closer to Russia. But there are also Ukrainian-supporting neighbors who could not leave or did not have the energy to do so because they were older, or because they had relatives in their care. Among divided families there are also everything: those who talk frequently on the phone or video calls; those who have a relationship, but prefer not to talk about politics, and those who have cut off contact.
Being pro-Ukrainian and living in an occupied zone poses a high risk. Khalavinskii says that there are children in Mariupol who continue studying with Ukrainian teachers, but he would never give a single name. “It is very dangerous,” he insists, and it is difficult for people with relatives on the other side to share their story, for fear that their communications will be tracked. “Our people are afraid: they live in a place controlled by armed thugs in the streets. Furthermore, they operate in groups, get drunk and fight and shoot each other. It’s like a zoo, uneducated people, with weapons, who behave like animals,” he criticizes. However, there are clandestine networks that collaborate with the Ukrainian authorities, with information or with acts of sabotage.
Contact without talking about politics
The relatives of Anastasia, a 40-year-old energy engineer, are not one of those. The entire family is from Omsk, in Siberia, and their loyalty is to Moscow. “I maintain a relationship with my mother, but not with my father, for political reasons,” he says. “I talk to her almost every day on Telegram, but I prefer not to talk about politics or war.” He is worried that she is not in good health, and there is nothing he can do for her. “He asks me a lot when we will see each other again and I don’t know what to tell him,” she says, sitting next to Katerina in a room of the student residence rehabilitated as accommodation and medical center for residents of Mariupol in Dnipro, a project of the Khalavinskii center.
His case is similar to that of Volodímir, 71 years old. He also prefers not to discuss certain topics with his two children – they left for Russia in 2014 – nor his brother, who lives in the occupied part of Donetsk, like almost all of his relatives. “My brother has properties there and decided to stay and continue living in his lifelong home.” Volodymir, however, had to flee Marinka, in that same region of Donbas, in 2022. His house no longer exists. From there he went to Dachne, which is now at the front. At the end of November he was evacuated to Pavlograd – where he has a daughter – and lives in a center for internally displaced people. “I don’t talk about political issues with my family. If the points of view are very different, the relationship can break and I prefer to maintain contact,” he says in his room. “Also, I don’t trust talking on the phone.”
The separation of families due to armed conflicts and the occupation of territories is an issue as old as wars. The 1949 Geneva Convention, which is mandatory for Russia and Ukraine, establishes the right of families to establish contact and, to the extent possible, to reunify, especially in the case of minors. The office of the Ukrainian Ombudsman, Dmitro Lubinets, explains that “Russia fails to comply with its international obligations” and does not properly report the whereabouts of civilians under its control, including those it forcibly detains or deports.
In a written response to Morning Express, he points out that “as of December 24, 2024, it is known that at least 1,042 children have returned to Ukrainian territory controlled by the Government” from occupied areas, deportation or forced displacement. In July 2023, they managed to return two sisters, ages 5 and 12, who were caught by the invasion with their grandmother, who for a year and a half refused to return them to their parents. On December 10, among several people who managed to get out of the occupied territory, there was a 77-year-old grandmother who had not been able to flee since the arrival of the Russians.
Federico Sersale, head of the Dnipro sub-office of UNHCR, the UN refugee agency that collaborates with the Mariupol Hub and the Pavlograd center, reflects on how “invasion and displacement fracture families.” “It’s not just starting over, but also doing it without part of your family. This adds a challenge to the mental health of the displaced, as they do not have their family support network. And the psychological trauma is enormous,” he explains. They are people who are going through very dramatic moments: war, attacks, flight, displacement, “and they have to continue without their families.”
That pain goes through not only those who maintain a good relationship, from a distance, with their loved ones. It also affects those who have broken contact or who maintain it despite deep disagreements in their vision of the world and the conflict. Anastasia, who often talks to her mother, but not to her father, gets emotional when asked how she feels and barely manages to say that “it is very hard and very sad.” Katerina, with a less frequent and more conflictive relationship, shares next to him: “When you have an argument, you can’t sleep afterwards. A mother is a very important person in your life and when you have a relationship this complicated, it affects you a lot.”
