‘Unbearable’: Ukrainians deported by Russia, stranded at Georgia border | Russia-Ukraine war News
Warning: This story contains references to suicide
In a damp, crowded basement at the southern entrance of the Dariala Gorge, the mountainous no-man’s-land between Georgia and Russia, more than 90 Ukrainian deportees from Russia are being held.
The deportees at the Georgian border checkpoint can only step outside when they need the toilet, and they must go in pairs under the watchful eyes of Georgian border guards.
They are here because they can’t cross the border directly from Russia to Ukraine due to the war, and Georgia refuses to let them in because many have criminal backgrounds, so they are stranded. Some have now been living in the basement for nearly two months.
Most of these men – along with a handful of women – are former prisoners in Russia who have been deported after serving their sentences, but some have been expelled for other reasons, such as problems with their immigration documents.
On Sunday night, July 20, they mounted a protest.
“We’re not allowed outside!” one of the men shouted as they were surrounded by security personnel on the premises.
“We’re being tortured here,” called another.
“It’s damp, there’s [disabled people] here without medical attention, there’s nothing here at all,” he added.
A video sent by the deportees to Al Jazeera shows one man very seriously harming himself during the Sunday night protest.
“He’s been here more than a month,” 45-year-old Nikolai Lopata, one of the other detainees, told Al Jazeera by phone.
“He was promised twice [that] he would be taken away. He bought [travel] tickets twice, and both times no one returned the money,” Lopata said, noting that the man, who suffers from anxiety, has repeatedly been denied permission to travel through Georgia to Ukraine.
An ambulance arrived after more than an hour, and paramedics bandaged his wounds, then left without him. The man, who appeared in the video to be in his late 30s or early 40s, was not hospitalised and remains at the checkpoint, volunteers at the scene who are in contact with Al Jazeera said.
‘They won’t let us in or out’
The detainees, who have arrived from Russia or territories occupied by Russia and have been released from prison in recent months, are now stuck in limbo in this buffer zone, Lopata explained. In total, approximately 800 deportees are thought to be stuck in Russia or at Russian-Georgian border points, experts say.
“They [Georgian border officials] took our documents. They won’t let us in or out of Georgia. They keep telling us ‘tomorrow, tomorrow’. Some people have been here for more than a month and a half in terrible, unbearable conditions,” Lopata said.
Originally from Dnipro in central Ukraine, Lopata said he had been living in Russia, where he has a Russian wife, two children and a sister, since 2005. But in 2010, he was convicted of murder. When he completed his sentence in 2024, he was sent to a deportation centre for another year. By then, the full-scale war between Russia and Ukraine was raging, so getting a one-way flight to Kyiv was impossible.
“Last summer, they [the Russian authorities] promised to send me to Georgia. Then, in winter, they promised to send me to Ukraine through Belarus. Then, we were taken to the border of Georgia, which supposedly accepts us, but Georgia is not accepting,” Lopata said.
Instead, when he reached the border on July 4, Lopata said, he was photographed, fingerprinted and had his documents confiscated by Georgian border officials before being taken to a cellar.
“We don’t do anything. We sit in the basement,” Lopata continued, explaining that the men sleep in shifts because there are only 40 beds.
The men are provided with very little and lack reliable medical assistance, instead having to rely on emergency care.
“An ambulance comes almost every day, sometimes twice a day, because there are disabled people, there are sick people,” Lopata said, adding that there is someone with epilepsy, a person with HIV, and another with tuberculosis. “But they don’t offer anything besides immediate help. Yesterday, for example, they made an injection of painkiller, then said, ‘That’s it, we can’t help with anything else.’”
Activists and volunteers try to bring essentials to the detainees each week.
Food, household items and personal hygiene products are delivered by Volunteers Tbilisi, an organisation helping Ukrainian refugees in Georgia.
“There is no access to fresh air, there is a lot of heat and the cellars are closed,” organiser Maria Belkina told Al Jazeera.
“These are not conditions you can live in at all.”
Route through Moldova cancelled
Anna Skripka, a lawyer for the NGO, Protection of Prisoners of Ukraine, told Al Jazeera that this problem has been mounting for the past two years of the war in Ukraine: “This humanitarian disaster started in 2023.”
Skripka said some people have become so desperate they have tried to kill themselves. “They didn’t understand what was going on,” she said.
“The conditions there are terrible.”
According to Skripka, there are 84 men and seven women currently being detained, and while the women are held in a separate room, their conditions are also poor.
“The women complain to me that they’re not being taken to the toilet,” Skripka said.
“They asked us to buy them a bucket with a lid to go to the toilet.”
Previously, deportees at this border crossing were transferred by bus to Tbilisi Airport to fly to Moldova and then on to Ukraine. That’s how Ukrainian activist Andriy Kolomiyets, considered a political prisoner by the Russian human rights group Memorial, returned home earlier this month after serving 10 years on drug and attempted murder charges.
Skripka explained that 43 detainees managed to leave between early June and July, landing in Moldova and then getting a bus to Ukraine. But four of them got off the bus and stayed in Moldova, prompting the landlocked Eastern European country to halt cooperation.
“They’re already back in Ukraine,” Skripka said about the missing four, which Al Jazeera could not confirm, “but Moldova said, ‘Stop, we do not want to risk it.’”
As a result, since mid-July, Moldova has refused passage for Ukrainian deportees from Russia.
While Georgia was cooperative at first, it has also begun refusing to allow deportees through on the basis that many are ex-convicts who have served prison time in Russia, seriously limiting the options for Ukrainians trying to return.
“Most of these individuals have a serious criminal past and have been convicted numerous times for grave or particularly grave crimes,” the Georgian Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a statement.
But Skripka said that it is unfair to smear them all as hardened criminals. Some were expelled from Russia for lacking proper paperwork. Others have had their Russian citizenship revoked.
Their treatment, Skripka argues, goes beyond bureaucratic injustice; it raises serious legal and moral questions.
“They were beaten, pushed from another country by the barrel of a machinegun … they are victims of war crimes,” Skripka said.
Further complicating things, many of the deportees lack the proper documentation.
Ukraine has been issuing “white passports” – emergency documents to allow citizens to travel home – but these only last for 30 days.
Some Ukrainian politicians have spoken out.
Writing on X, formerly known as Twitter, Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha accused Russia of “weaponizing the deportation of Ukrainian citizens through Georgia”.
Russia is weaponizing the deportation of Ukrainian citizens through Georgia. We propose that Russia transport them directly to the Ukrainian border instead.
Since June, Russia has significantly increased the number of deported Ukrainian nationals, mostly former convicts, to the…
— Andrii Sybiha 🇺🇦 (@andrii_sybiha) July 19, 2025
“We are actively working with the Georgian and Moldovan sides to get the rest of our people transited to Ukraine,” he wrote.
“To avoid further complications, we publicly offer Russia to send these categories of Ukrainian citizens directly to the Ukrainian border. We will be prepared to take them on from there. There are relevant parts of the border where this can be done.”
A matter of national security
Once detainees have returned to Ukraine, they must undergo a thorough security check.
“They were in Russia for a long time. Everything is possible. They could have been recruited [by Russian intelligence]. This is a matter of national security for Ukraine,” Skripka explained.
There are also fears that the number of deportees will soar in the coming months as there are hundreds of Ukrainians who are still waiting in Russian deportation camps.
“According to our calculations, there are about 800 people. And if they are all brought to Georgia, it will be a disaster,” Skripka warned.
Meanwhile, in March, an edict issued by Russian President Vladimir Putin demands that Ukrainians living in the territories claimed by Moscow must either leave or accept Russian citizenship by September 10. This could potentially lead to mass deportations.
Lopata, meanwhile, can’t wait to leave, although not necessarily home.
“My house in Ukraine has been bombed. My parents have been killed, and I don’t know where to go,” he said.
“I just really want to get out of here any way I can.”