The back rooms of the local communist party headquarters near the Belgorod airport are crammed with supplies.
There are sacks of onions, meat propped against the garage doors to keep it frozen, plastic bags filled with rice and dry goods, and a large cabbage, enough to feed a family for a week or so, though heavy to carry around. here to the bus stop.
There are diapers and cleaning products and lots of toys in a corner for the children who are going to spend their first New Year, the great celebration of this part of the world, away from home.
These are donations from all over Russia, and Evgeny Bakalo proudly displays them. His day job is installing glass, but for the past eight years he has spent his spare time doing what he can to help people in the Ukraine whose sympathies are with Moscow, not Kyiv.
After Russian-backed separatists rebelled against Kyiv in 2014, Bakalo would travel to Donbas to bring supplies for the children, including teaching materials.
I ask him if he removed Ukrainian books from schools, as allegedly happened in the Kharkiv region when it was under Russian occupation earlier this year.
“We only add books, we do not deny Ukrainian literature, it is part of Russian literature. We do not deny the Ukrainian language. But textbooks that distort history are of course not welcome,” he said.
In Belgorod, her focus is finding what she can for the refugees on this side of the border. He runs an organization called ‘The Tenth Circle’, a reference to Dante’s Inferno and his nine circles of hell. Mr. Bakalo is something of a philosopher, as well as being an ardent Sovietophile.
evgeny
‘I can’t be against my homeland’
“I was born in the Soviet Union, I got a great education there,” he says. “I can’t be against my country even if I don’t approve of some of the government’s measures.”
The refugees we meet at their center are not willing to come forward. Kharkiv is only 50 miles southwest of Belgorod and most have fled the Kharkiv region.
For almost half a year they were under Russian occupation. Then, in August, the Ukrainians fell back in a lightning offensive that brought the Russian army to the rear. Most have pro-Russian sympathies and are not ashamed to say so.
But they are afraid of what they have heard about hunting down pro-Russian collaborators at home.
The hunt for pro-Russian collaborators in Ukraine
“Neighbors who support the Ukrainian army denounce them and take them away. People disappear,” says a girl from Izyum, impeccably made up, her oversized winter hood pulled up to hide her face.
“They say they kill taxi drivers who were taking people to the Russian border. And many people who were cooperating with the Russians, were going to work for the administration, as teachers, in the gas or electricity services, they were all sent to jail. “
Individual rumors are difficult to verify and it is rumors and information, false or not, that exacerbate the ideological gulf between the majority in Ukraine who see Russia as the aggressor and those who have absorbed Moscow’s messages and think it had no more remedy to invade .
The effect on generational lines
Ukraine is actively tracking collaborators and there is a 15-year jail term for those found to have aided and abetted Russian forces. Even just being in Russia can make life difficult for family members across the border, and the decision to flee in this way divides families, often along generational lines.
“My own daughter could hand me over to the SBU (Ukrainian Intelligence),” says Olga (not her real name), a former teacher in the Kharkiv region who, like Bakalo, has a deep nostalgia for Soviet times.
“She told me, ‘Mom, people like you have no place in a school. I’ll hand you over to the SBU.’ I deleted the mail.”
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Ukrainian intelligence has good reason to be concerned. In a shopping center in Belgorod we are introduced to a young man who left Kharkiv and now works for Russia on defense matters. Both he and Bakalo are on an infamous but unofficial Ukrainian blacklist, Myrotvorets, which names people considered enemies of the Ukrainian state.
Myrotvorets ironically translates as ‘peacemaker’.
‘A person cannot blame himself for his own problems’
“Everyone who is on the territory of the Russian Federation is ‘discarded people’ for Ukrainians now,” this man tells us. “They are afraid that the knowledge they have will be used against Ukraine.”
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“People must have an enemy, psychologically,” he says. “A person cannot blame himself for his own problems.”
Unlike him, there are tens of thousands of other Ukrainians who fled to Russia because they had no other choice. Shifting fronts are difficult to cross. Many have moved across Russia and into Europe, eager to spend as little time as possible inside the country that is bombing theirs. Others are trying to make peace with their new reality.
“Yes, I stay here in an aggressor state. Yes, I am ready to receive help from Russian hands. Yes, I can be deprived of my job, my home, my reputation because staying here and not going to Europe is I agree with the fact that I stay in a state of aggressor. But I can not explain to everyone the reasons why I stayed, “he added.
A messy engagement
Nika Karakonstantin fled to Russia with four of her children in March from a village in the Kharkiv region. She now runs a children’s day center where she cares for Ukrainian refugee children, teaching them in both Ukrainian and Russian.
It’s a confusing compromise, but in Belgorod she’s just across the border from where she used to live, with food, heat and supplies and a degree of certainty about what tomorrow will bring. Her children can grow up in security.
Nika Karakonstantin runs a day center for children in Russia
However, his eldest son was left behind.
“All he says is ‘Mom, I love you, I understand you had no choice. But I can’t get close to you. I can’t get over the feeling of anger, disgust, hate. I won’t cope like you have. I can’t forgive'”.
