‘It’s killing me’: Mother accuses Russia of expelling her son from Ukraine

Natalia Derish escapes the terror of being surrounded Mariupol last month.

But while she is currently relatively safe in the central Ukrainian city DniproShe was cut off from her 21-year-old son, Yuri, by the ongoing fighting as she fled.

Demish, 40, said Yuri has now been deported to Russiaand she worries that he will be forced to fight against his country.

Hers is just one story, but it adds to Kyiv’s accusations that while Russia attacked Ukraine from the air and on the ground, it also forced the deportation of large numbers of the country’s civilians. If true, these accusations could constitute War Crimes according to international law.

Kyiv accused Russia of blocking efforts to send humanitarian aid to Mariupol, or buses to evacuate civilians to Ukrainian-controlled territory. The city has been inclosed for nearly two months, and thousands of people were killed, according to local officials. The remaining residents have almost no food, water or electricity.

Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu on Thursday said more than 140,000 Mariupol residents had been evacuated through humanitarian corridors – the temporary demilitarized zone – in the past month.

Demish, a bookkeeper before the war, said she spent 34 days hiding in a basement in Mariupol with her husband, two daughters and his parents. After using melted snow to make drinking water, they finally had enough and seized the opportunity to flee to the central city of Zaporizhzhia in a convoy of cars on March 29.

But Yuri, who was living with her ex-husband in a neighborhood heavily damaged by shelling, was cut off from her at the time, without a phone or internet connection. So Demish leaves without him, believing that she has no other choice if she must survive, and has no way to reach her son.

Later that day, she finally received word from Yuri.

He said he and his father walked to the city of Novoazovsk, about 25 miles east, after their building was set on fire and the Russian military told them they had to go there if they wanted to survive. according to Demish. Novoazovsk was under the control of Russian-backed separatistswho have been fighting Ukrainian forces in the east of the country since 2014.

After that, Demish had no contact with her son, an engineering student, for several days. Then, on April 4, Yuri sent her a message (seen by NBC News) via the messaging app Viber, widely used in Ukraine, in which he said: “Today we forced to go to Russia”.

Demish said that when she finally met her son by phone the same day, he told her they had been put on a train and told they would be taken to Russia, but not given their final destination. .

Demish said she told him to run away and jump off the train.

“But he said, Mom, all the windows are closed. It’s not an option,” Yuri said.

Demish, speaking in Russian, told NBC News in a phone call from the city of Dnipro, central Ukraine, where she moved after fleeing to Zaporizhia: “I don’t know where my son is, he killed me.

After more than a week of silence again, Yuri finally called his mother on April 15 to say that after three days on the train, they had reached the village of Semyonovka in the Nizhegorodsky Oblast district of Russia, about 675 miles from Mariupol. northeast.

He told her that he and other evacuees were staying in wooden houses surrounded by a forest, and that Russian volunteers were helping them by providing food and medicine.

But he said his phone was searched and he was questioned about his family in Ukraine, as well as about any friends in the Ukrainian military.

Yuri told his mother that they were allowed to move around the area, but could not go out because they had already been cleared for asylum. Her son had travel documents with him and Demish said she was desperately trying to find a way to get him out of Russia, possibly through neighboring countries like Georgia or Turkey.

Demish said that the last contact she had with Yuri was on Monday, when he told her by phone he was fine, but they had been shown propaganda videos alleging that Ukraine as a being a country is an “artificial concept” – a line that has been touted by Russian President Putin for many years and was used as one of the preconditions for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February.

“He said that they told them that Ukraine never existed as a country and that it was part of Russia,” said Demish. “When he protested and said that history cannot be rewritten, he said two men approached him and he was questioned for two hours.”

They also questioned why he wrote to his mother that he had been forced to go to Russia, Demish said. He said he was never asked if he wanted to go to Ukraine, she added. “He was told that he would be recruited into the army in Ukraine if he did, and that he would become a cannonball, but now he is in Russia, a wonderful country.”

NBC News was unable to independently verify what happened to son Derish in Russia.

Last month, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that reports that Ukrainian citizens were forced from Mariupol to Russia were not true, although he said that the Russian military was helping civilians leave the city.

Earlier this month, Michael Carpenter, US Ambassador to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, said a fact-finding mission had found evidence of the forced deportation of Ukrainian civilians to Russia.

Carpenter said he could not confirm the numbers or details of what is going on with these deportees in Russia, but it is “something that will require thorough investigation and monitoring because it is not only the fading of not only civilized behavior but also the paleness of all behavior that we would consider normal. “

NBC News contacted the Russian Defense Ministry about the forced expulsion of Russia from Ukraine, but did not receive a response.

The more Demish resented her son’s plight, she said she also knew he might have died in Mariupol if he had stayed. “In the city, there is no heat, electricity, water. All the shops were looted. It was impossible to survive there,” she said. “I think people are willing to go anywhere just to be warm and have food.”

Her greatest concern was that her son might be forced to fight against his country.

“I was worried that they would arrest our Ukrainian men, put them in Russian uniforms, get on a bus and take them to Ukraine,” she said. “I fear there will be a brainwashing and they will force them to take up arms and they will say, if you want to liberate the city, go fight.”

But she hopes to get Yuri out of Russia soon and see him again, and that they can all return to Mariupol one day.

“I really want to go back,” she said, in a sad voice. “But only after it was released. I don’t want to live under the Russian flag”.

at Blogtuan.info – Source: nbcnews.com – Read the original article here