Maria Belkina, head of Volunteers Tbilisi, with Ukrainians who had crossed the Georgian border. Photo: Novaya Gazeta Europe
The head of a support group for Ukrainian refugees has told Novaya Gazeta Europe that the stranding of 17 undocumented Ukrainian men on Russia’s border with Georgia was due to the ongoing Ukrainian military incursion into Russia’s southwestern Kursk region.
Maria Belkina, head of Volunteers Tbilisi, said that backlogs had begun at the border when Russia started deporting former Ukrainian prisoners who had been incarcerated in Russia without the proper documentation.
“We write to the Ukrainian authorities, asking them to speed up the paperwork process. But they don’t always have time, for obvious reasons,” Belkina said, noting that until the recent closure of the Russian-Ukrainian border at Kolotilovka, just 40% of released Ukrainian prisoners were being extradited from Russia to Ukraine via Georgia, but that “the flow through Georgia has increased”.
Some 2,500 imprisoned Ukrainians are believed to have been transferred to Russia by occupying forces retreating from Ukraine’s Kherson region following its partial recapture by the Armed Forces of Ukraine in November 2022, an act that constitutes a war crime under the Geneva Conventions.
Last week, Volunteers Tbilisi took four people from the Russian-Georgian border to the Ukrainian Embassy in the Georgian capital Tbilisi, where they were able to obtain the temporary documentation they required to return to Ukraine, Belkina said.
On Thursday it was reported that 17 Ukrainian men, some of whom had been there for as long as two months, were trapped in legal limbo on the Russian-Georgian border, due to the failure of the Russian authorities to return their confiscated passports.
