We went to the first Ukrainian checkpoint after Russian-held territory in Zaporizhzhia. All the men we spoke to said they were fleeing mobilisation into the Russian army. A few things:
As of Thursday, men between 18-35 are banned from leaving Russian-held Zaporizhzhia to Ukraine OR to Russia / Crimea. Some still managed to bribe their way out.
Even neutral / pro-Russian people we spoke to by phone inside the occupied territories said they would try to escape mobilisation. Not pro-Russian enough to die, as one person put it.
Zaporizhzhia and Kherson have only been under occupation since this spring. The situation is different to Donetsk and Luhansk. People still have Ukrainian TV and, while internet connections are bad, they can get information from outside the Russian state media universe.
Almost everyone we spoke to estimated (this is obviously very vague) that around 60% of people still in occupied Zap/Kherson are pro-Ukrainian, 20% don't care, 20% are pro-Russian. But again: not pro-Russian enough to die.
Nataliya, a young woman we met at the checkpoint, told us that the men in her village had decided that if the Russians were stupid enough to mobilise them and give them guns, they'd turn them against the occupiers.
Bravado or not, clearly these guys would not be a fighting asset for the Kremlin. You hear stories like this in the liberated territories. In Izyum, we met a psychologist who told us that the "Russian" soldiers at the checkpoint by her house were (cont)
Actually pro-Ukrainian. They were miners from Luhansk who had been called off their shift and sent to become soldiers. They told her that they planned to drop their weapons and run away as soon as they heard the Ukrainians were coming. And they did. 🤷♀️
In occupied Zaporizhzhia now, Nataliya said, the Russian soldiers were violent, drunk and lecherous. She knew a couple of women who had left their husbands for them. But this did not always turn out well for the occupiers.
One Russian soldier, mad with grief after his Ukrainian mistress left him, shot himself in the head outside a greengrocer’s.
“I walked by and thought: one down,” she told us.
“I walked by and thought: one down,” she told us.
Full piece in @thetimes tomorrow with pictures by @azavallis and additional reporting by Viktoria Sybir and Oleksii Kulyuk thetimes.co.uk/article/racing…
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