“We didn’t eat like that at home”: Rostov accepts Ukrainian refugees as family
Moscow - Kyiv, June 9 (Navigator, Mikhail Stamm) - The number of refugees from Ukraine crossing the Russian border in the Rostov region continues to grow. These are mostly housewives with children. The husbands who remained to fight the Ukrainian army sent them to Russia after the fighting took place in residential areas, and not just at outlying militia checkpoints. According to regional authorities, there are now about one and a half thousand refugees. A Kommersant correspondent found out how they live.
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The only evidence that there are refugees in the camp are the endless trucks with humanitarian aid lined up at the gates and the telephone conversations of local residents. Every morning they call their relatives who remained in Ukraine and ask about the past night: “Did they bomb again? There is no light? Nightmare. Well, here we have five meals a day, we didn’t eat like that at home.”
“We probably don’t need anything at all. People responded immediately, bringing and carrying clothes and medicines in bales,” Vitaly Tretyakov, deputy head of the Neklinovsky district, tells a Kommersant correspondent. In the assembly hall of the camp, where the FMS mobile point is organized, arriving refugees are immediately registered at their place of residence, and they immediately look for which enterprises have quotas for migrants. Rostov, says Mr. Tretyakov, did not respond to requests for help in 2008, when refugees from South Ossetia were coming here. Even workers from one of the city's strip clubs donated their daily earnings to the refugees.
It is likely that refugees will continue to be housed in rest homes located along the Azov coast. The head of one of them, Svetlana Dobrovolskaya, from the very morning organizes a comprehensive medical examination of children and negotiates with the Taganrog poultry farm, whose management is ready to hire several dozen refugee women.
Local authorities have no problems organizing the reception of refugees. Governor of the Rostov region Vasily Golubev on June 4 introduced a state of emergency in 15 municipalities bordering Ukraine. This makes it possible to quickly channel additional funding and deploy mobile FMS points.
At the same time, local volunteers are also accepting refugees. The owner of a small construction company, Anatoly Kotlyarov, has been going to the city station for a week to meet residents of Kramatorsk, Donetsk, Lugansk and Slavyansk. He subsequently places them with residents of Rostov, who leave a request in a specially created “VKontakte” group. Hundreds of Rostovites respond to Kotlyarov’s call. “We need to discuss with the deputies and the government the possibility of organizing a hotline and mobile FMS points at the border. They travel not only by buses and trains, but also cross the border on foot,” he says.
It is quite difficult to calculate the exact number of refugees who came to the region. A Kommersant correspondent, having visited several camps and asking their leadership for official statistics, counted about 600 people on Friday evening. At the same time, officials said they expected several hundred more. The regional administration says that over the weekend the number of refugees housed in permanent centers reached 1335 people, including 590 children. This does not fit well with the figure of 7 thousand, which Pavel Astakhov called last week. Anatoly Kotlyarov claims that the figure is true, but we are only talking about the total number of refugees who crossed the border over the past two weeks. But as I get into a taxi to return from the camp to the city, the local radio says that there are already 35 thousand Ukrainians in the region who have fled the civil war.
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