Earlier this year, Serhiy Serdiuk was deported fromRussia, along with his wife and daughter. He was given a 40-year ban from re-entering the country.
Serdiuk’s home town of Komysh-Zoria, in Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia region, was part of the territory occupied in the first weeks of Russia’s full-scale invasion in spring 2022. According to Moscow, it is now part of Russia. And because Serdiuk, the headteacher of a local school, refused to work for the new authorities, they decided he had no place living there.
“I was born there, I’ve lived my whole life there, in the same place,” said Serdiuk, in a recent interview in the city of Zaporizhzhia, the regional capital still controlled by Kyiv, where he now lives. “Now I am kicked out of my own home and told I didn’t live in the country I thought I lived in? How is this possible?”
The deportation of Serdiuk and his family is part of a continuing “cleansing” operation of the occupied territories, which may accelerate if US-led attempts to push Russia and Ukraine into a peace deal result in the freezing of the current frontlines, solidifying Russian control over the territory Moscow has seized over the past three years.
In the early months of the invasion, Russian forces used lists to identify potentially troublesome pro-Ukrainian members of society in the occupied territories. Many werekidnapped, tortured and held in Russian jails. Perhaps wary of the cost and resources required to jail thousands more people, authorities have now employed a new tactic.
“There were cases when they just came to people and said, ‘It’s in your interests to disappear from here, or we’ll have to take you to the basement,’ and then people left by themselves,” Serdiuk recalled.
But in his case and some others the authorities did not leave it to chance. Ivan Fedorov, the governor of Zaporizhzhia region, estimated that “hundreds” of people had been deported from the occupied part of the region in recent months. Vladimir Putin signed a decree in March that stipulates “Ukrainian citizens who have no legal basis for living in the Russian Federation are obliged to leave” by 10 September, or take Russian citizenship.
Serdiuk was born in Komysh-Zoria, a small town home to around 2,000 people, and had lived there his whole life, except for a few years studying in nearby Berdiansk. He started working at the local school, which had about 240 pupils, in 1999, beginning as a maths teacher and in 2018 being made headteacher.
Komysh-Zoria was occupied, without major fighting, in the first days of the full-scale invasion, and by April 2022, the new Russian authorities called a meeting of the school’s 30 teachers, demanding that they open the school and teach the Russian curriculum. Serdiuk refused, and most of the teachers followed suit.
In the ensuing weeks, Russian soldiers came to Serdiuk’s home and tried to persuade him to open the school. First, they were polite. Then, the threats started: “If you don’t want all your employees to have house searches, tell them to go to work.” One PE teacher agreed to work for the Russians immediately, but most of the others held out, he said. His school remains closed, and students now attend schools in one of two nearby towns.
“I told them I’d never work for them and I kept to that,” said Serdiuk. For three years, he sat at home, unemployed, as Russian control solidified over the region.
At the end of 2023, Serdiuk was told that he and his family would be deported. They were given three days to prepare, and packed their possessions into a few suitcases, but then were left waiting for more than a month. Their passports had been seized so they could not leave of their own volition. Eventually, at the end of January, they were driven to the regional capital of Melitopol and then put in a minibus with another family. Each deportee was sat on a pair of seats, handcuffed to a guard sitting beside them.
The minibus drove for 20 hours until it reached the mountainous border between Russia and Georgia. Two drivers took turns at the wheel. At the border, the Ukrainians were handed back their passports and told to cross to the Georgian side. Serdiuk and his wife were given a 40-year ban from Russian territory; his 21-year-old daughter was given 50 years.
From Georgia, they flew to Moldova, then back into Ukraine and all the way to Zaporizhzhia, to arrive at a spot around 90 miles (140km) away from their homes. Serdiuk is now teaching private maths lessons in the city, and plans to find a job at a local school. “At least here I can talk normally and not be scared of every passing car,” he said.
But the forced deportation brings with it a lot of pain, most notably that he had to leave behind his mother, who has advanced dementia, in occupied territory. Before 2022, she had been taking medication to slow the progression of the condition, but after the invasion the family was unable to get the pills and the effect was swift and devastating.
“She can talk and walk but she can’t look after herself. It required constant vigilance, otherwise she would slip out of the house and walk back to the house where she was born,” said Serdiuk. When notice of the deportation came, Serdiuk drove his mother to his sister’s house and bade her farewell. He does not know if he will ever see her again.
During a long interview, Serdiuk used humour and sarcasm to offset the depressing reality, but the one time he became visibly emotional was when asked for his thoughts on possible plans to freeze the frontlines as part of a peace settlement.
The idea is something being pushed by the US, and many in Ukraine also support this, feeling that a temporary respite would be better than continuing the grinding, bloody fight. For Serdiuk, however, it would mean an unacceptable sacrifice. “How could I support this? How could I say that it’s fine that I was pushed out of my home and can’t go back?”
He also fears for his former pupils. While Russia has sent in new teachers to the occupied areas, Serdiuk said this mainly concerned bigger cities. In the small settlements of his district, most of the teachers remained local, he said, and might be trying to avoid some of the harsher aspects of the new Russian curriculum. However, he said that with the pressure to conform to the needs of the new authorities, the respite would only be temporary.
“They are demanding that there are portraits of Putin on the walls, that the children draw pictures and write wishes for their soldiers,” he said. “This all breaks the psychological balance of a child. A year ago we lived in Ukraine, and now Ukraine is bad and we are drawing pictures of our liberators? If we freeze this conflict, then in two or three years these children will already be lost.”