Thousands of Ukrainian Refugees Flee to Russia for an Uncertain Future

Rancor Among Refugees in Russia Shows Challenges Facing Kiev

DMITRIADOVKA, Russia—When the neighbor's dog was killed by artillery fire, it was time to go.

Oksana Vasilieva was in the kitchen of her home on Comintern Street in the Ukrainian city of Slovyansk in late May as the shelling of her neighborhood began. She screamed for the children to run outside and then herded them into the cellar.

When they emerged, the neighbors' house had been hit. So had their sandy-brown dog, its dead body mangled in the remnants of a destroyed metal fence. She boarded an evacuation bus and fled to Russia.

"I'm not going to return," Ms. Vasilieva, 36 years old, said outside the one-room bunk she has been sharing with her mother and daughter in a refugee facility at a summer camp on the Azov Sea. "It's a dead city."

Ms. Vasilieva is one of tens of thousands of people from Ukraine's southeast Donetsk and Luhansk regions who have fled to Russia in the 2½ months since fighting between pro-Russia separatists and Ukrainian forces started.

Many of them, feeling alienated, resentful and afraid, are vowing to build their lives anew in Russia, despite the dread and uncertainty of starting over with next-to-nothing.

According to the United Nations, 110,000 Ukrainian refugees have gone to Russia since the start of the year and 54,000 more have left their homes and moved elsewhere in Ukraine.

The rancor among those fleeing to Russia is palpable, and shows the broken nature of Ukrainian society even if the government manages to retake control of the separatist-held areas.

Many in southeast Ukraine feel alienated from the country's western half, which is oriented more toward Europe, culturally and economically. Russian propaganda has reinforced that division and suggested that as Russian speakers, they were only Ukrainian by an accident of history.

President Vladimir Putin himself has adopted some of the language of the separatists, using the tsarist term Novorossiya (New Russia) in April to refer to regions such as Donetsk and Luhansk, which were given to Ukraine in the 1920s by the Soviets. "Why they did that, God knows," he said on Russian television.

Ukraine's new pro-Western government has failed to persuade the locals otherwise or win their trust.

As a result, some refugees traversing the Russian border expressed a conviction that Ukrainian forces had moved in not to neutralize separatists but to force people like them out. Chistka was the word on their lips, the Russian term for purge that has become a buzzword in reports by Russian state news.

"To them, we have always been Moskaly," said Ms. Vasilieva, using the Ukrainian slur for Russians.

She and others looked on with envy when Russia took control of Crimea, hoping that their region, too, would become Russian. "We always considered ourselves Russians," she said.

Those who feel otherwise generally have fled in the other direction. Ukrainian cities such as Kiev, Kharkiv and Dnipropetrovsk are also coping with an influx of refugees. Polls conducted before the insurgency showed a bulk of the southeast's residents wanted toremain part of Ukraine.

Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko is guaranteeing amnesty for those who put down their weapons and haven't committed grave crimes, but many refugees don't believe the promise.

Some of those arriving in Russia expressed worries that Ukrainian authorities, should they regain the territory, would hunt down locals who voted in a May separatist referendum or punish friends and relatives of rebel militants.

Ukraine has accused Russia of inflating the number of refugees—the speaker of Russia's upper chamber of parliament last month cited a figure nearly four times the U.N. estimate—and of sparking the crisis by supporting the separatists in the first place. Russian officials have shot back by criticizing Ukraine and its Western allies for turning a blind eye to a humanitarian crisis they blame on the Ukrainian military.

Nowhere in Russia has seen a more dramatic influx than the Rostov region, which borders the heaviest conflict zone.

According to the local branch of Russia's Ministry of Emergency Services, the region had registered 15,802 displaced people from Ukraine as of June 26, more than 6,000 of them children. There are likely many more who haven't registered.

Most are living with friends, relatives or volunteers, but more than 3,600 are staying in government-issued facilities such as college dorms and the Dmitriadovka summer camp where Ms. Vasilieva landed.

Many of the summer facilities aren't winterized, so they will have to move come autumn, but they don't know where.

Ukrainians technically can stay in Russia only for 90 days at a time. Russia has announced plans to modify the rules, but the new regulations have yet to become clear.

The biggest worry among many, apart from finding jobs, is where they can enroll their children in school in the fall given the mass influx of children.

Russian officials already are dispatching them to other regions, including the restive north Caucasus.

Many of the Ukrainian refugees have lost hope that their hometowns can be restored.

"If it is possible, I don't know how many years it would take," Ms. Vasilieva said of Slovyansk, where she lived her whole life. She is intending to take her 14- and 6-year-old daughters as well as her mother to start over somewhere in Russia. Where—she doesn't know.

Months ago, she was picking out clothes for her younger daughter to start first grade and planning for the other's higher education. Now she says she's thankful for a bed, water and a working toilet. She shrugged. "Who knew that life would take this kind of turn?"

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