The teenager distracted the guard so that the man could slip past. The story of the escape from Russian exile

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An aerial bomb hitting a high-rise building, weeks in the basement next to the Mariupol Drama Theater, deportation and escape to Estonia… It seemed that Anatoly Oleksandrovich should have a lot to remember, but it was the 70th year that was the most difficult. Now he and his family are safe in Khmelnytskyi. A year ago, the daughter and son-in-law had to plan a special operation to “kidnap” a relative from Kazan, where the Russians tricked an elderly man into taking them from Mariupol. *** Anatolii Oleksandrovych lived in Mariupol for more than thirty years, where he worked as a factory worker. “In 2014, dad delivered buns and apples from his own garden to our defenders at the checkpoints,” daughter Angela tenderly says, “A yellow and blue ribbon hung on his moped. Dad was constantly worried that the pro-Russian townspeople would tear the ribbon, because they always mowed down him”. Anatoly Oleksandrovych grew up in a Belarusian village on the border with Russia. Now he remembers how he constantly fought with boys who came from the Russian Federation to visit relatives. “Them [росіянам, – ред.] we constantly had to make fun of the Ukrainian or Belarusian language,” the man recalls. When the Great War began, knowing his father’s political position, the fact that it was difficult for him to communicate with the pro-Russian residents of Mariupol, his daughter and son-in-law – Angela and her husband Andrii Gladkovy, who lived alone in Khmelnytskyi, they persuaded him to leave Mariupol. “But he categorically refused to go,” says Angela, “You see, everyone thought that it was like back then in 2014, they would shoot a little and everything would be over.” Andriy says that he simply began to demand from his father-in-law , so that he would leave the city, because of which they quarreled. On February 26, 2022, Anatolii Oleksandrovych stood in a long line and managed to withdraw a pension at a working ATM on the left bank of Mariupol. He lived in one of the most dangerous areas of the city. Shelling intensified, notifications of there were no evacuations or green corridors in his area. On March 2, the Hladkovs lost contact with their father. “We looked through all the lists of the living, dead, and wounded, hung up the phones of all institutions in the hope of establishing the whereabouts of Anatoly Oleksandrovich. Everything was in vain,” the children recall. Anatoliy Oleksandrovych spent a week in a cold apartment with no electricity on Ukrainskyi Kozatsva Street. After the explosion occurred near his entrance, the windows in the apartment were blown out. The man asked to spend the night with a neighbor, and for about 10 on the th of March, a high-rise building was attacked from the sky. Anatoly’s ruined house. Neighbors from other entrances to the house say that the attack was carried out from airplanes. Indeed, in March, the intensity of Russian airstrikes on residential areas was impressive. Anatoly Oleksandrovich himself is hard of hearing. He says that he saw airplanes and felt the vibrations as he walked through the city, but almost never heard them hum. Residents of the damaged house continued to cook outside, fetch water and warm themselves by the fire. But after the airstrike, the man and several neighbors decided to walk to the center of the city in the hope of finding protection Without contact with relatives, in informational isolation, people did not talk much with each other. They were just trying to survive. While the Gladkovs did not find a place for themselves from their worries and searches, Anatoliy Oleksandrovych set out on the road. Having covered ten kilometers on foot under bullets, the man and several of his neighbors ended up on Theater Square. First, they went to the shelter of the Drama Theater. “Someone told us that there was no more room there. And we went to another shelter, nearby. God saved us,” says Anatoly Oleksandrovich. “We were not in this bomb shelter for a short time, because the doors were constantly shaking from explosions, and there was practically no food.” A radio receiver was working in the shelter. Young people had mobile internet from time to time, and it became clear that Ukraine was not lost, it was fighting, and the unoccupied territories of Zaporizhzhia were nearby. “Yes, someone said that they were evacuating to Zaporizhzhia on the way out of the city. So we decided to go there,” the man recalls. When they reached the “PortCity” shopping center on the outskirts, people saw buses and Russian soldiers. Anatolii Oleksandrovych claims that he asked the Russians whether the buses were heading in the direction of Zaporizhzhia. Received a positive response. When the bus started, the man realized that they were going to the village of Nikolske, which is 20 kilometers from the city to the west. “I still thought that if they started taking us to Donetsk, I would jump off the bus. But I saw that we were going to Nikolske and calmed down. I have relatives there and I planned to stay with them,” the man says. But a few hours after arriving in the village, at night, the new arrivals were hurriedly put on another bus and headed for Taganrog without stopping. “It’s hard for him to remember,” says his son-in-law Andriy. “It was chaotic, at night. He was already in shock, exhausted. Russians are just animals, in Nikolskyi they said that we had to wait for the documents to be processed and specially arranged this deportation at night so that people still became more disoriented.” Anatoly Oleksandrovych assures that when he got on the bus at night, he asked a woman in civilian clothes several times whether the bus was going to Zaporizhzhia, and he was assured that it was. In the morning, when he was in Taganrog, the man was even more shocked. “He is vulnerable, he began to be afraid,” says Andrii. “In Taganrog, they were brought to the station almost immediately and put on a train. He did not know exactly where the train was going.” Angela continues: “Dad only had a push-button phone, he doesn’t know how to use a smartphone. It was lucky that a neighbor’s teenager was nearby. When they gave him a Russian SIM card, dad called me for the first time from the boy’s phone.” Andriy remembers that the call rang around April 2 – a month after the family started searching. Anatoly Oleksandrovych called from the train. “He was extremely confused, scared. He was afraid to ask the guides something. He told me that they were being taken to Krasnodar,” recalls Angela. At first, the Hladkovs thought that Krasnodar was not so far away, and calmed down a little. However, the deportees were taken to Kazan, the capital of Tatarstan, one and a half thousand kilometers away. “Probably, my father didn’t hear at first. And when he found out that they were going to Kazan, he became even more despondent. He cried,” says Andriy. Andriy gave instructions to his father-in-law by communicating through the smartphone of a teenage neighbor: “I ordered him to hide his passport securely and tell everyone that he has no documents, as if they were burned in the apartment. That’s what he did, which eventually helped to get him out of there.” In the end, Ukrainians were settled in one of the temporary detention centers in Kazan. Thanks to the teenager’s smartphone, Andrii established the exact address where they were, and also found out that people were only allowed out of the so-called hotel without documents to go to the store, the person had to leave the passport with the security guard. “Such surveillance scared my father, but we already sent Estonian volunteers after him and waited for the right moment to escape,” Andrii recalls. The family did find volunteers who were to pick up Anatoly Oleksandrovich. The car arrived, and the man only needed to leave with things and documents. “He was afraid of this, he felt like he was in prison, as if he would be caught like a criminal. We had to hook up a teenage boy to distract the guard, and in the end, the father-in-law slipped out,” Andrii recalls. The man was taken to Estonia, from where the Gladkovs received the long-awaited photo: Anatoly Oleksandrovych on his way to Ukraine. The pensioner’s “journey” was more than five thousand kilometers. Anatoly (left) with a volunteer in Estonia “He cried, rejoiced like a child and asked us for forgiveness all the time that he disobeyed and did not leave then, in February,” Andriy recalls meeting his father-in-law. “Now we are treating him. An ambulance was recently called. Of course, these events had a great impact on my father’s health. He always gets upset when he has to remember all this,” Angela shares. Currently, an elderly man is waiting for the victory of Ukraine, daily reviews the report of the General Staff, counts the killed Russian soldiers. He lives in the hope that he will be able to return to Mariupol in the summer. The material was created within the framework of the “Life of War” project with the support of the Laboratory of Public Interest Journalism and IWM.

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