stories

‘It’s just insulting’ The story of a woman who fled the war in Ukraine, only to become homeless as a refugee in Russia

Source: Meduza

Maria (name changed) gradually became homeless in July 2023. At first, it was just for one night. Kicked out of the St. Petersburg apartment where she’d been living for the past year and with nowhere to go, Maria wandered around the city. In the morning, she went back to the apartment to sleep, but when evening came, she was back on the streets again. After about a week, they stopped letting her into the apartment altogether. Maria says the police never “caught” her because she looks put together: her clothes aren’t tattered and she wears glasses. 

Maria’s over 60 years old. She left Kharkiv, where she’d lived since she was born, for St. Petersburg in April 2022 — the second month of Russia’s full-scale war against Ukraine. Two weeks later, her old neighbors called. Bombs had hit the third and fourth entrances of their building. Maria’s apartment was in the second.

Kharkiv

Maria never wanted to leave Kharkiv. She says she loves her home and speaks proudly of its scientific history. In 1932, scientists there were the first in the Soviet Union, and second in the world, to split an atom’s nucleus. “Thanks to this, they made the atomic bomb,” says Maria. “That’s the kind of city we have.”

Maria says she comes from a “family of intellectuals.” Her father was a mechanical engineer and her mother was a chemist. After school, Maria also decided to go into science and studied physics and engineering at the Kharkiv Polytechnic Institute. She stayed for graduate school, working at the institute while she studied. However, in the 1990s, against the backdrop of the economic crisis that followed the USSR’s collapse, Maria, like many of her colleagues, found herself without a job.

“To survive, I hung wallpaper and sold seeds at the market,” she recalls. She managed to get a job at a chemical plant as an operator. “The lowest rung of the profession,” she says.

Maria spent 10 years there. She retired in the early 2000s due to health issues caused by the working conditions. Even then, she didn’t stop working — what she got from the state wasn’t enough to live on.

“The last 16 years of my life, I sold goods in a small store: tobacco, chips, chocolate bars, wine, vodka, all kinds of alcoholic beverages,” says Maria. “And then the special military operation began. That’s a whole other story.”

The invasion

On the night of February 24, 2022, Maria was at work. She’d asked for night shifts; her feet hurt, and there were fewer customers then. Around five in the morning, she decided to check the news and saw that Russian President Vladimir Putin was giving a speech — he was talking about the start of a “special military operation” in Ukraine. When the broadcast ended, everything in the store shook and several bottles fell off the shelves. “At first, I thought they were building a subway,” she said. But half an hour later, people started running into the store and buying up everything: water, cigarettes, chips, cookies. “They were shouting, ‘War, war, war!’” says Maria. “Everyone was running. With children. With backpacks. They were running to the train station.”

She couldn’t believe what was happening. When she got home after her shift, she called her daughter, who had been living in St. Petersburg for many years. “They say there’s a war. But they didn’t announce anything, they said it was a special military operation. A special military operation isn’t a war at all, is it? What do you think,” she says she asked her daughter. “Should I go to my next night shift?” But the same day, Maria realized her question didn’t matter. A curfew was declared in Kharkiv, and most stores were closed.

Maria says that, for the first months of the invasion, everyone stayed home, calling each other. Maria tried to keep her friends calm. But despite her outward optimism, she says she felt terrible, hardly slept, and lost 20 kilograms (about 45 pounds).

Russia was constantly shelling Kharkiv. At first, Maria hoped to shelter in the basement. “They shut the elevators down right away, and my neighbor and I walked down from the 12th floor on foot,” she says. “The basement was damp, a pipe was leaking. […] I decided I was going to stay on the 12th floor. Well, if they bomb me, they bomb me!”

The apartments in Maria’s building emptied rapidly as people left. She still hoped that the war would end soon. The days were monotonous. Mostly, Maria tried to follow the news and keep a diary. “I tried to write, but I couldn’t, I couldn’t read anything,” she says. “Ninety-nine percent of the time I was smoking, drinking coffee, watching the news, and praying I wouldn’t get hit. If I’d been younger… The younger girls would drink vodka, get drunk, and sleep. I’d say, ‘How can you do that?’ I didn’t touch alcohol after February 24 because I was afraid I might fall asleep, a bomb would fall on me, and I wouldn’t wake up. I was terrified!”

Maria remembers the bombings in March 2022 especially clearly. They’d last from 10 in the evening to five in the morning. “Russia was bombing, then Ukraine was bombing in return. I didn’t know where to go. I ran out to the stairs, but I was afraid to go down to the basement in case I got bombed somewhere halfway. My daughter said to drink water to help with the stress. I drank three or four glasses. Well, I survived.”

Maria also remembers February 27, 2022, when Russian troops entered Kharkiv. She said she had tears of joy in her eyes; she thought the war was over, “the Soviet, the Russian troops have come!” The Russian military leaving the city the same day came as a shock to her. “Nevertheless, I haven’t changed my convictions,” she adds. “I’ll still support Russia. I’ll still support the Russian army.”

Ukraine

“There’s very little Ukrainian blood in me,” Maria constantly stresses. Her father is Estonian but came to Kharkiv from the Russian city Nikolayevsk-on-Amur. Her mother was from the Poltava region, “half-Russian, half-Ukrainian.” Maria had visited relatives in Russia’s Far East as a child. In the 1980s, she’d attended advanced training courses in Moscow. When her daughter moved to St. Petersburg, she visited her there. She says she considers herself Russian through and through. “My family is there, my closest relatives.”

Maria didn’t watch TV in the years leading up to Russia’s full-scale invasion, but while Kharkiv was being shelled, she decided to trust Russian news channels — channels under full state control that have become powerful tools of Kremlin propaganda. Broadcasting Russian TV has been banned in Ukraine since 2014, so Maria tried to find Russian sources on the Internet. But many channels had been blocked by then, especially those that were openly militaristic. “They turned off all the Russian channels,” she complains. “I started calling my daughter, and she was telling me everything over the phone.”

“Our Ukraine was saying we were winning, it will soon be over, that Russia was [full of] scumbags. And this is unacceptable to me,” explained Maria. But she believes Russian TV presenters. It’s Ukraine, she repeats after them, that “provoked the war.”

Maria says the Ukrainian government was busy making billions for itself; it doesn’t care about the people. She believes the Maidan Uprising took place “against the people” to enrich those who came into power and because “the U.S. wanted to put its bases near Russian borders.” But even though Maria didn’t accept the revolution or the new government, her life didn’t change much. She had like-minded friends and kept speaking Russian. “We had a lot of refugees from the Luhansk and Donetsk regions,” she remembers. “Later, some of them went to Russia, but after a while, when they didn’t get any help there, they came back.”

In 2014, Maria’s daughter suggested she leave Kharkiv. But Maria flatly refused, because “nobody in Russia wants refugees.”

Maria’s daughter

Maria was married and widowed twice. Her only daughter, Olga (name changed), was born during her first marriage. Maria and Olga’s father met at the institute. They married while still in school, and three years later, they separated. “He was a very handsome guy,” Maria says. “Very fond of the ladies, very fond of drinking. His heart gave out, he died at 40.”

In the 1990s, Olga left Kharkiv to study in St. Petersburg. There she got married, dealt with a cheating husband, got divorced, obtained Russian citizenship, and raised two sons on her own. In 2008, Maria’s second husband died, and she was left alone in Kharkiv. It was her daughter who insisted she leave Ukraine in April 2022.

It took Maria five days to get to St. Petersburg, traveling through western Ukraine and Europe. She took almost nothing with her — only her passport, pension certificate, spare underwear, and socks. On the road, she ate almost nothing. “A girl gave me coffee a couple of time,” she says, “and once a man bought me a cheese pastry because I said I was a refugee and I was hungry.” When she got to St. Petersburg, a 12-square-meter room (about 130 square feet) with three other adults and several cats awaited her. “I was a bit in the way,” she says. “But I thought, it’s no big deal, we’ll figure it out.”

Next, according to her, came “everything that happens to a refugee.” Numerous visits to the Social Protection Department and the Migration Center, rudeness and misunderstanding from the staff. A six-month wait for a refugee certificate and the accompanying payments — and even then, that was only after complaints to the president’s administration. “Only in Russia did I realize how Russia treats its own citizens,” Maria says, referring to herself.

Although at first Maria didn’t want to get a Russian passport — she was tired of dealing with government services — her daughter Olga thought it was necessary. “She promised she’d register me at her place and we would get in line for an apartment,” recalls Maria. However, in July 2023, when she finally received her passport, Olga changed her mind.

“My daughter said, ‘Come on, mother, try to find your own place to live,’” Maria says. “I was an embarrassment to them. But I don't want to blame my daughter for anything, I completely understand her. Let's not talk about it.”

Homelessness

“At night, they slept,” Maria says of her daughter and grandchildren, “and I wandered the streets. It was the White Nights, just dark for half an hour, young people walking around, old people, groups. The police didn’t stop me, nobody caught me. I was out for four nights; two of them I spent at the train station. When [my family] went to work, I came [to the apartment] and slept. I tried to stay out of sight. But this also came to an end when my daughter kicked me out with the words, ‘Now you’re a bum.’”

She tried to get a job in a company on the outskirts of St. Petersburg that provides worker housing, but the job, washing railroad cars, proved too strenuous at her age and with her health. Besides, she says, “the housing was terrible” and “we were treated like convicts.” Then, Maria ended up in a homeless shelter.

From her first day in Russia, Maria tried to get assistance with housing from the authorities. She says she called every number she was given, but “no one picked up.” When she finally did get through to an official, they told her “Ukrainian refugees have no place in St. Petersburg.”

One day, when she was smoking on a bench, a stranger sat next to her and they got to talking. When Maria told him about her situation, he recommended a charity that helps people in difficult situations. “It wasn’t hard for me to go there,” Maria says, “but it was very, very difficult for me to face the fact that I had to, when my daughter is alive and has housing, even if it’s in a communal apartment.”

She hasn’t spoken to her daughter or grandchildren since. Once, she saw happened to run into Olga on the street. “She told me, ‘You’re probably better off there,’” Maria recalls, immediately adding, however, that her daughter “will eventually come around.”

The charity the stranger recommended was able to give Maria accommodation for a few months, in a room with 12 other people. “I have a microwave, a stove, a shower. Everything is very clean and neat, everyone is polite.” The charity also promised to help her with her registration and her pension — she hasn’t received her Ukrainian pension in over a year. They also helped her find a job as a concierge, where she earns 800 rubles a day ($8.50). Before, she was always turned away because she was a refugee or because of her age.

Maria says she has regretted leaving Kharkiv “a thousand million times.” Now, she hopes to find another job that will allow her to rent her own place. But only until her hometown of Kharkiv is “liberated” by the Russians.

Why haven’t they taken Kharkiv yet?” she wonders. And then answers herself: “It takes a lot to rebuild such a city. That’s why Kharkiv is being protected. Putin is saving Kharkiv, you know?”

Maria thinks about Kharkiv constantly:

Maria began to worry about her apartment as soon as she left. With good reason — a few weeks later, in late April 2022, her neighbors called and said the building had been shelled. She doesn’t know what happened to her home or her belongings. She never spoke to those neighbors again, worried she’d expose them because Ukraine “had started strictly monitoring calls to Russia.”

“It’s just insulting,” says Maria. “Russia, my native country, my parents’ homeland, bombed my house. And here, I was thrown out on the street. It’s hard to imagine: giving up everything to support the Russian army and the Russian state, and as a result, getting spit in the face.”

When asked whether this war was necessary, Maria had no answer.