‘These people are trapped’

How Ukrainian refugees are ending up homeless in Russia

After the start of the full-scale war, tens of thousands of Ukrainian refugees from Mariupol and other Russian-occupied Ukrainian territories ended up in St. Petersburg. Many hoped that in a big city, they’d have better chances of finding work and providing for their families. For some, however, this has proved impossible, and they’ve ended up on the streets. Over the course of six months, the St. Petersburg news outlet Bumaga followed two Ukrainian refugees who, after fleeing the war, found themselves homeless in Russia. Meduza shares an English-language retelling of their stories.

Thirty-five-year-old Artur relies on crutches to get around. In early May 2022, just a few hundred meters from his home in Mariupol, Ukraine, he was struck by two bullets. “One hit my butt and went into my pelvis; the other hit my right side and traveled through my intestines. The bullets passed straight through,” he recounts. When asked who shot him, Russian or Ukrainian soldiers, Artur shrugs: “It’s hard to say.”

He spent eight months in a Mariupol hospital, confined to his bed, only able to move his head. The hallways were “filled” with wounded people, he recalls. “There was no space between the beds.” Doctors operated on him, but it didn’t help. “They screwed a bolt into my pelvis, inserted a rod into my knee and heel, but everything healed wrong,” he explains.

Russian volunteers suggested he go to St. Petersburg for a new operation that might be able to restore mobility to his injured leg. In late February 2023, they took him to Russia. Getting to St. Petersburg took another three months. The only documents Artur had with him were his hospital discharge papers. He says that everything else, including his passport and diploma, was destroyed in an attack.

Nowhere to go, no one to turn to

In 2022, St. Petersburg wasn’t officially designated as one of the Russian regions responsible for taking in refugees, meaning the city wasn’t obligated to provide social housing, medical care, or employment to those fleeing the war in Ukraine. Nevertheless, thousands of families have come, according to information from local charities and volunteers. In September 2022, Deputy Governor Boris Piotrovsky commented that there were 7,000 Ukrainian refugees in St. Petersburg. Volunteers say the flow of refugees still hadn’t reached its peak at that time.

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Many families managed to rent housing in St. Petersburg with their savings or with the help of volunteers or sympathetic apartment owners. Some turned to organizations that help people experiencing homelessness. One such NGO, Nochlezhka, told Bumaga that about 100 refugees in St. Petersburg and Moscow asked for their help in 2023.

However, according to Danil Kramorov, the director of Nochlezhka, the actual number of refugees from Russian-annexed Ukrainian territories living on the streets far exceeds 100 in St. Petersburg alone. Many may be reluctant to seek help because it’s difficult for them to come to terms with being homeless.

The problem is exacerbated by the fact that it’s unclear where exactly Ukrainian refugees experiencing homelessness can turn to for assistance. Despite its promises to meet the needs of Mariupol residents and other refugees, the office of the Human Rights Commissioner for St. Petersburg ignored Bumaga’s inquiries about homeless Ukrainians.

Artur

When volunteers finally brought Artur to St. Petersburg, they settled him into a hostel on Nevsky Prospect, assuring him that he’d soon be scheduled for surgery. Another four months passed. Doctors at St. Petersburg’s Mariinsky Hospital examined him and decided that before fixing his leg, they’d have to remove a postoperative hernia that had developed following his surgery in Mariupol.

In the fall, he was relocated to a shelter for homeless people with disabilities. Artur says it was fine there, but he didn’t interact much with the residents — he simply had nothing to talk about with them. “Sometimes there’s this image in my head of everything burning, bodies lying around,” he says. “During those times, I can’t eat for three days, I don’t want to see or hear anyone, I just want to sit in the basement, drink strong tea with sweets, and smoke.” He refuses to support either the Ukrainian or Russian stance on the war, and simply decries the violence as pointless and unnecessary.

A Crimean Tatar, Artur was born in Kerch but grew up in Ukraine’s Sumy region. He moved to Mariupol in 2012 to live with his aunt. On February 24, 2022, as air raid sirens blared, he and his family sought cover. They hunkered down in shelters for more than two months.

We were holed up in basements. The city was wiped off the face of the Earth. Everything was burned and there were corpses lying around. My aunt and I went to get food and saw the bodies of grandmothers, grandfathers, women, and children lying strewn along the road. It was horrifying. Some were covered, others weren’t. […] They turned the drama theater into a mass grave for a thousand people; the building collapsed like a house of cards. Whatever wasn’t destroyed in the city, burned down.

Artur received no psychological support in St. Petersburg. According to him, the volunteers didn’t offer it, and he doesn’t think he needs it. “I’m normal, like everyone else,” he says, abruptly concluding his tale of horrors. “I’m surviving.”

His surgery kept getting postponed. First, because he lost his refugee certificate. Then, he ended up in the hospital several times due to falls. The first time, he lost his balance on his crutches. But the second time, he was drinking on New Year’s and slipped on ice. In the fall of 2023, shelter staff told Bumaga that Artur could stay with them indefinitely, so long as he didn’t “get drunk.” After the New Year’s incident, they refused to take him back, citing their zero-tolerance alcohol policy.

After the fact, the shelter concluded that there’d been other suspicious things about Artur. “He’s an erratic person, not very sociable,” reasons a shelter representative. “He sat on his phone and didn’t answer questions. He caused a commotion in the hospital, almost got into a fight with the doctors. He’s a shady character. How did the FSB let him through? It’s unclear whose side he’s on [in the war in Ukraine]; supposedly he was accidentally wounded.”

After his second fall, Artur was taken to St. Petersburg’s Elizavetinskaya Hospital. There, he says, he almost got into a fight with the doctors because they started to tie him down, which triggered him. The episode led to him being transferred to a psychiatric hospital where he was kept for a month without any outside contact.

Ivan

Ivan, now 55, was born and raised in the city of Vasylivka in Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia region. Despite spending most of his life in Ukraine, he calls himself a Russian reservist because he graduated from a military academy in Krasnodar, Russia and later studied in Moscow.

Following his studies, Ivan returned to Zaporizhzhia before eventually settling in Donetsk. However, when the war started in 2014, he decided to leave Ukraine so he wouldn’t be “forced to fight.” “I left when they started shooting in Donetsk,” he explains. “I grabbed my son and took him to my mom in Zaporizhzhia. They were already attacking the train station as we were leaving.”

Ivan left his son with his mother and went to annexed Crimea, then to Rostov-on-Don in Russia, where he worked in advertising and sales. But after the pandemic, he returned to Vasylivka to take care of his mother. He was still there when Russia launched its full-scale invasion, which Ivan viewed as a rescue operation. “But locals had varied reactions,” he recalls. He believes that the war “divided people” in Ukraine.

Vasylivka soon fell under Russian occupation, but its proximity to the front means the city often comes under shelling. In the spring of 2022, Ivan tried to persuade his family to leave Ukraine, but they refused. In early May, he left alone — first hitchhiking to Crimea, then on to Krasnodar in Russia.

In Krasnodar, Ivan stayed briefly with his girlfriend before moving on. According to him, she started questioning his motives for coming back and saying that Russian prisoners were being tortured in Ukraine. “I realized it was pointless to keep talking and turned around and left,” Ivan says. “What kind of ‘our’ people and ‘their’ people [are there]? I have a completely different feeling about [the Ukrainian army].”

From Krasnodar, he returned to Rostov-on-Don. Initially, he stayed in a temporary accommodation center for refugees, where there were mostly families. One day, staff members came over and told him to leave, otherwise they’d “have the police remove [him].” Ivan says he doesn’t know why he was kicked out: “I didn’t break any rules, I kept quiet, didn’t even allow myself a beer. I went to work in the morning and came back late in the evening so as not to run into anyone. But someone didn’t like the look of me.”

After he was evicted, he stayed in hostels whenever he could afford it. His former workplace went out of business during the pandemic, but an acquaintance helped him get a job passing out fliers. When he didn’t have enough money, he’d sleep on the street. There, he met someone who told him about Nochlezhka. In July 2022, once he’d saved enough for a ticket, Ivan set off for St. Petersburg.

No documents

While Russian authorities have simplified the procedure for Ukrainian refugees to obtain Russian passports, the process didn’t work for Artur and Ivan. And document issues have led to both of them being unable to secure full-time employment in St. Petersburg.

Before the full-scale war, Artur trained as a fitter and worked on construction sites in Mariupol. However, his leg injury has left him unable to do that kind of labor-intensive work. While living in St. Petersburg, Artur says he tried to get work “at the post office taping boxes” and “pressing buttons as a security guard.” But, according to him, he wasn’t hired because he doesn’t have official documents outlining his disability, which employers require.

Ivan has been applying for a Russian passport in St. Petersburg for over a year. “When I was in Rostov-on-Don, I was just trying to find food and a place to sleep, I wasn’t thinking about paperwork,” he says. A social worker who’s been helping with the process explained that Ivan doesn’t qualify for the simplified application because Russian officials couldn’t confirm his previous registered address in Ukraine. Now, he likely needs to apply for temporary asylum in Russia. While waiting for a resolution, Ivan takes any odd jobs available. But sleeping rough has taken a toll on his health, and it’s becoming harder and harder for him to work.

Both Artur and Ivan still have family in Russian-occupied Ukrainian territories. Neither of them knows their relatives’ whereabouts or if they are even still alive. Artur says his aunt wanted to follow him but couldn’t leave her ailing husband behind. Ivan is trying to figure out what happened to his son.

An all-too-familiar story

Danil Kramorov, the director of Nochlezhka, says Ukrainian refugees often end up homeless the same way as anyone else. At first, they may go to temporary shelters, but then they might leave and head to a city to try to get a job. There, dishonest employers take advantage of them, and they fall into financial difficulties, explains Kramorov.

Sometimes, refugees in St. Petersburg don’t dare to move to Europe because they still have family in Russian-controlled areas of Ukraine. According to Kramorov, Ukrainians who come to Russia are often trying to earn money to support their families back home, but then they run out of money themselves and can’t go back. Kramorov notes that Ukrainians who come to Russia and “get papers” are often viewed as “traitors” back home. “This puts pressure on a person who ended up here, maybe not even by choice,” he says. “They can’t return to Ukraine because of this stigma.”

At the same time, Kramorov underscores that the most vulnerable Ukrainians in Russia right now are those who arrived before February 2022. They aren’t formally considered refugees, so they’re ineligible for expedited citizenship, and they can’t renew their Ukrainian documents or get new ones if they lose them. “These people are trapped: they can’t leave for Europe or return home,” Kramorov explains. “They’re at significant risk of ending up on the streets.”

* * *

Following his release from the psychiatric hospital, Artur stayed at another shelter for a few weeks. Then, in late February 2024, he headed to Izhevsk to stay with a cousin who unexpectedly agreed to take him in. Artur says there’s no way for him to get surgery in St. Petersburg anymore — the doctor with whom the volunteers had an unofficial agreement has left the hospital. He hopes his cousin will be able to negotiate with doctors in Izhevsk and that he’ll finally get the surgery he needs. “I want to get a Russian passport there and officially register my disability so I can find a job,” he says.

Ivan has been living in a homeless shelter in St. Petersburg for nearly two years. He says he sometimes thinks of going off to fight for Russia, but he’s stopped by the fact that “much of what’s happening [in the war] now” is still “incomprehensible” to him. He still sleeps poorly from the time he spent under shelling, and he’s “weighed down” by memories of the war. Although he didn’t consider himself a religious person before, he’s started attending church in St. Petersburg. He no longer makes any plans for the future because he believes it’s a futile endeavor “in this turbulent world.”

Story by Ekaterina Barkalova for Bumaga