"The body in Tisza has not been found yet". How the schemes of trafficking men abroad work

Since the first months of the ban, a wide “service market” has developed offering to leave. The choice is up to the “clients” to try to pass through the checkpoints with fake documents or, hiding from border patrols, to walk through the forests and mountains or swim down the river along the borderline.

The difference is in price and risk. Forgery of documents can lead to criminal charges. But an attempt to swim across a river or hike through the mountains will only result in administrative liability. However, no one can guarantee that the “client” will survive.

As of March 23, 15 men had drowned in the Tisza River, which divides the Ukrainian-Romanian and Ukrainian-Hungarian borders. Three more died in the mountains.

If you do manage to get to the other side of the border, you don't have to be afraid. Nowadays, in European countries, regardless of gender, you can apply for asylum as a fugitive from war.

To find out about popular border crossing schemes, hromadske went to Zakarpattia to visit the Mukachevo border guard detachment. This 320-kilometer-long section of the border is the most frequently attempted to be crossed illegally.

“Children miss their father — Where is the father? — On the other side. In Romania”

Mariora, a young woman with an unusual name, stops shyly when we ask her to tell us how the ban on men leaving Ukraine has affected her family. We are standing at the Solotvyno international checkpoint. Most of the people crossing the border here are residents of the border area.

Mariora has passed the document check with Ukrainian border guards and is heading toward the Romanian border crossing. She has a handbag on her shoulder and a full black bag in her hand.

“Of course, it is bad that men are not let out. Families are being destroyed. Children miss their father,” shesays.

“And where is their father?” I ask.

“On the other side. In Romania. I'm going to see him,” she replies.

The woman admits that her husband works abroad and is hiding from the draft. At the beginning of the war, he was able to leave accompanied by his father, who has a first-degree disability. It is difficult to constantly transport the patient back and forth, so the man has not been home for more than a year.

Mariora visits him once or twice a week, either alone or with their children. She doesn't want to move in with her husband because “there is a household here, the children go to school”.

Liliana's husband, who is driving a Ford car in a queue to cross into Romania, has been unable to find a legal way to leave. Before the war, they used to travel to work together every day. He worked in Romania as a construction worker.

At home, Liliana says, her husband cannot find a job. So she supports the family and the children, and she also travels abroad every day to work.

“My daughters and sons-in-law are in the Czech Republic. I'm here alone, it's hard, and my legs are sore. My sons-in-law used to come here, this is their home, and now I'm managing their household,” explains an elderly woman named Yevdokiia, who cycled to Romania to get medicine.

She says she misses her grandchildren. She sometimes travels to Karlovy Vary to see them.

A boy tried to run away to dance in Germany with his former partner

They want to go to their wives and children or earn money. According to Lesia Fedorova, a spokesperson for the Mukachevo border guard detachment, these are the reasons most often given by men who are detained by border guards.

She recalls an unusual story. They detained a 19-year-old boy who was planning to swim across the river. He explained that it was for the sake of dancing and a girl. He said that before the war he ballroom danced, and his partner went to Germany. She was going to perform there and insisted that the boy dance with her.

“His parents did not know that he had gone into such water. When he was detained, he did have dancing shoes and a costume. He tried to convince them that he would return immediately after the performance because he was studying in Ukraine,” says Lesia Fedorova.

What documents are they trying to leave with

During the year of the full-scale invasion, border guards detained more than 11,000 people on the so-called green section of the border, bypassing checkpoints. More than four thousand more violators were detected at checkpoints with forged documents.

If you enter keywords in the search, telegram channels find ads offering documents for “legal” departure. A certificate from the military medical commission, which exempts you from military service for health reasons, is offered for $1300. To leave as a volunteer costs from $800.

Sometimes, under the guise of a charitable foundation, the dealers advertise services as a “special offer”, i.e. with discounts. They say that by selling seats, “volunteers” are urgently raising money for cars for the Armed Forces.

“Sometimes we enter a certificate from the military medical commission into the system, and a person is missing an arm or a leg. There was even a case when a man was ‘exempted’ from military service because he was pregnant,” says Ivan Tomashuk, a border control inspector at the Solotvyno crossing point.

Forgery of pension disability certificates is also popular. And as long as there was permission for Ukrainians who studied in foreign institutions to leave, the documents of “students” were falsified on a massive scale.

They still forge birth certificates for their children to leave as a father with many children. Lesia Fedorova recalls how 12 forged certificates were found in one group of men.

They don't hesitate to bury the mother of their children alive when they show fake death certificates of their wife to leave as the sole guardian.

Most men with falsified documents try to go to the checkpoint at a time when public authorities are not open. This is so that border guards cannot call the territorial recruitment centers (formerly military enlistment offices — ed.) to check the certificate or quickly contact consulates if the documents on permanent residence in another country are suspicious.

“Then we look at our databases. If we see that a person has lived in Ukraine for the last ten years, how did they get the right to permanent residence in the Czech Republic or Germany? To do this, they would have to have lived there for ten years,” explains Ivan Tomashuk.

“Fictitious” children are exposed by surveys when the registry office is closed. The pseudo-parents get lost in the details when asked about the third child.

Legends for border guards

For those who plan to cross the border using the “green line”, that is, bypassing checkpoints, mediators ask them to think of a legend — why they are coming to the border area. After all, on the way there, there are mobile border guard checkpoints where non-local men are questioned in detail about where and why they are going.

A man whose story was found in an open telegram channel described his legend and experience of crossing the border across the Dniester River to Moldova. Now he offers his services to others.

The fictitious purpose of his trip to the border village was to buy a car and go fishing. He actually found an ad there through OLX and called the seller. He took fishing rods. He showed all this at the border post on the way to the village.

Then, according to his version, he inspected the car with the seller and went fishing. A border patrol found him there, but with a fishing rod dipped in the water, so they didn't seem to have any questions for the man.

“In the evening, when the curfew began, as agreed with the carrier, I hid in the bushes, 30 meters from the shore. Around one o'clock in the morning, border guards passed by, shining a flashlight at my feet. I squatted down. An hour later, I heard a buzzing sound, a drone was flying along the shore, and I was waiting for it. It was the carrier checking if there were any border guards nearby. Then a flashlight flashed on the river, and I answered with the flashlight of my cell phone. In five minutes I was in the boat, and in 15 minutes I was on the Moldovan shore,” theauthor of the telegram channel describes his experience.

The veracity of the story of the “fishing” on the Dniester is frankly questionable. Swimming and fishing are prohibited on the border itself, especially for non-locals. As well as the sounds of a drone, which, on the contrary, can attract the attention of the border guards. The story is probably written in such a way as to find overly gullible customers.

At the same time, darkness is indeed the most convenient time to sneak to the shore and board a boat. Especially for Zakarpattia, the only region where there has been no curfew since the beginning of the full-scale invasion, and it is not a violation to move around at night or dawn.

Risks that people are not warned about

But the dark time is an additional danger, especially for people who have no understanding or experience of what a mountain river is.

According to the border guards, in order not to lose their “clients”, intermediaries often do not talk about all the risks. They don't always even offer boats or wetsuits.

“They are simply being fooled. The intermediaries don't even go near the river to avoid being caught. They bring (clients — ed.) closer to the shore, say: you need to run another 130 meters past the bushes and there will be a river where the water is supposedly knee-deep, but for insurance, here is a children's inflatable circle,” says Bohdan Dudka, head of the Tiachiv Border Guard Service Inspectors Department.

We go down the steep bank to the Tisza, which forms the border with Romania.

“The river used to come here. The water rose to the bridge, to the gully,” Dudka shows the water level during floods.

Then the depth of the river reaches seven meters. Usually, it is up to three meters deep and up to 50 meters wide in some months.

Underfoot on the slope, there is wet ground after the rain, plastic bottles, and the remains of plastic bags. This is the garbage that the Tisza took from the shores of settlements where people throw away their trash near the river. And when the water level dropped, the bottles and bags remained.

“In the dark, you can get caught in some sharp debris. That is, you can get injured at the very beginning of the adventure or fall off a dam or a cliff,” says Bohdan Dudka.

Another danger is that large stones on the bank and at the bottom of the mountain river are slippery and sharp.

“You can get your foot stuck in the water between stones. That's how we pulled people out. You don't know what awaits you in this river, perhaps trees have been washed away, and there have been cases of people swimming and getting stuck on branches,” the border guard adds.

Border guard spokesperson Lesia Fedorova emphasizes that people from other regions of Ukraine often “have no idea what obstacle they will have to overcome” and simply do not know that the mountain river is very cold. Especially if they have never been to the Carpathians.

But despite this, some unicums agree to cross the border on foot in the mountains without any hiking experience, even though even professional hikers have completed the routes in three days.

Fugitives who went missing

On March 23, in the morning, near Solotvyno, border guards saw the body of a man in the river, brought by the current. The drowned man had a foreign passport and driver's license attached to a plastic bag.

Usually, the “swimmers” attach documents and currency to themselves with tape. However, sometimes intermediaries advise not to take documents so that in case of detention, border guards do not have any evidence of the intention to cross the border.

“The organizers instruct these people not to tell anyone where and how they will cross the border. Therefore, it is very likely that the relatives of the victims do not even know where they are. And if they (undocumented bodies — ed.) are found on the Romanian side, and there is no request for a missing person from the Ukrainian side, then Romania is not likely to look for this person,” adds Lesia Fedorova.

The body of a man who planned to swim across the Tisza to the Hungarian shore on March 14 has not yet been found.

When the border guards spotted two men running with a rubber boat to the river, one hid in the bushes, and the other jumped into the water out of fright. But he immediately began to drown and call for help. He could not be rescued, and the rapid current carried him away.

“The body has not been found yet, but a second man has been detained. He is from Zakarpattia. And the second one, who probably drowned, is from Mykolaiv Oblast. They met before the intermediaries brought them together to cross the river,” the spokesperson said.

How the scheme works, what are the tariffs, and what does it have to do with tobacco smugglers

According to the surviving man, he communicated with the organizers only by phone. They gave him instructions on where and when to wait for the person who would instruct them.

An unknown masked man approached them, brought and inflated a rubber boat. He showed them the direction to the river, where to run.

The men had to pay the smugglers 3,500 dollars each.

“Some people pay in advance, but most agree that they will pay after the transportation. There are either accomplices abroad or relatives in Ukraine give money to the organizers,” clarifies Lesia Fedorova.

In the first months of the full-scale invasion, the rates were much higher — 7-8 thousand dollars per person. Now they range from 2.5 to 5 thousand.

In addition to three or four organizers (some search for and correspond with “clients”, others coordinate their arrival in a particular locality), the scheme also involves local residents, such as Roma children who live in camps near the shore.

For a fee, they provide information on the movements of border guards along the river. Sometimes they have to wait several days in hotels or with their hosts for a convenient moment to escape.

According to Lesia Fedorova, the schemes are led by the same people who organized cigarette smuggling across the river or mountains before the war.

“They make much more money on smuggling people, and less effort. You have to buy cigarettes, deliver them to the border, find people to carry them, and those who will pick up the 'goods' on the other side and deliver them somewhere. You need to find where to sell it,” thespokesperson says about the re-profiling of dealers.

However, the risks for the organizers of the schemes are now higher. There was no criminal liability for cigarette smuggling. But organizing an illegal border crossing can result in three to nine years in prison.

But their “clients” are issued an administrative report in case of detention. If the court upholds it, it means a fine of 8.5 thousand hryvnias. However, it is not certain that the judge will side with the border guards.

Intention to cross the border is not an attempt

On the day we were in the border town of Tiachiv, the local district court was considering four cases on administrative reports of illegal border crossing or attempted illegal border crossing. None of them were satisfied — the judges saw no signs of an offense in the men's actions.

Judge Liliia Sas heard three cases, one after the other, with an interval of 10 minutes. This time was enough. Moreover, none of the defendants came to court — such cases can be considered without the defendant's presence.

In a commentary to hromadske, Liliia Sas explained that in none of the three cases did she find any elements of a crime, because the men were detained not on the borderline, but at a certain distance from it. One was detained one kilometer away, the other five kilometers away.

The administrative protocols about these men say the same thing: they tried to change direction when they saw the border patrol, were nervous, and could not explain the purpose of their stay in the border village. In the end, both men admitted that they wanted to cross the border illegally. They had foreign passports and currency.

However, the judge clarified that the intention to cross the border is not an attempt. Moreover, during the detention, there was no convincing evidence, such as the prepared wetsuit.

In the third case, the judge also sided with the defendant. He was detained 200 meters from the border. But he had previously sent the court a receipt for a bus ticket from Tiachiv to Yasin. Part of this route lies in the border zone, and it was there, according to the man's explanation, that he was taken off the bus at the checkpoint and an administrative report was drawn up.

The material was created with the support of Mediaset