An elderly Ukrainian is wheeled into Ukraine from Russia at the only open border crossing between the warring neighbours, in the Sumy region of northern Ukraine . Photograph: NGO Pluriton.As a teenager in the dying days of the Soviet Union, Timur Shutenko travelled from the port city of Mariupol to communist Cuba via an eye-opening stopover in Ireland, which gave him a first glimpse of the capitalist West.
“Then I got a train to Moscow, then to the city of Belgorod, then a bus to a little provincial town and then a taxi to the village on the border,” he says. Russia besieged Mariupol in late February 2022, subjecting the Azov Sea port to indiscriminate shelling from land, sea and air, as regular troops and militias from Chechnya and the so-called Donetsk People’s Republic seized parts of the city.
“You could look out of your window and see a tank battle. A Chechen tank, a DNR tank and a Ukrainian tank playing something like hide-and-seek among residential buildings, just a few metres from a school.” “This situation makes a barbarian out of you. You are, in a way, happy when a bomb hits a neighbouring building and not yours. Then you realise, of course, that there are people in that building too,” he says.
Wherever he was, interrogations were frequent, with questions revolving around what he may be plotting for Kyiv or spying on for Washington. One FSB officer asked him to reconnect with his old scientific friends in the US and glean their secrets for Moscow. I said if there’s somewhere you can use me , maybe using my education, then put me there, he says“I think half the Russians I met support the war. They believe that truth or God or whatever is on their side,” he says. “And this was one of main reasons for me to come back to Ukraine. Long-term, I could not survive in a society where half the people thought it was right to destroy Mariupol, Kharkiv, Kyiv and so on.
Shutenko’s mind and education have already taken him far. As a 16-year-old in 1991, just months before the Soviet Union collapsed, he flew to Havana for the International Physics Olympiad in which schoolchildren from dozens of nations competed over theoretical problems and experimental tasks. He won a gold medal and the overall first prize.
Before Russia’s full invasion, Shutenko was a maths and physics tutor in Mariupol. Now he is jobless in Sumy, looking for work as a teacher or lecturer.“The people arriving here need to begin their lives again. It’s as if they are now at zero,” says Kateryna Arisoy, a founder of the Pluriton aid group that helps people at the border and then transports them to a shelter in Sumy, where they can sleep, eat, shower and get medical supplies, clothes and advice on what to do next.
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