When Russia occupied her hometown near Donetsk in eastern Ukraine in 2014, Tia was still a nine-year-old girl. In kindergarten and primary school, everything is in Ukrainian, but after that she was overtaken by the aggressive propaganda of the so-called "Russian world", from which she cannot escape even at home: "My family lives under Russian occupation and supports the regime that is in power there," she told German public media ARD.
However, the young woman does not want to become like them, she keeps to her native Ukrainian language and decides to break with the system: "If you live in a crisis for ten years, you either break or become stronger,", she says.
Influenced by the democratic movement in Belarus
Tia was 16 years old when she was deeply impressed by the democratic movement in Belarus against the electoral fraud of Alexander Lukashenko's regime. So she discovered independent media and began to identify with people she considered Russian oppositionists. "I realized that my home has become completely dependent on Russia".
Despite pressure from the Russian occupiers, she continues to speak Ukrainian, including in public places. She makes great efforts not to endanger her relatives and friends with her behavior and sees how her hometown sinks more and more into lawlessness, arbitrariness and corruption, says ARD. He also sees how more and more people become unemployed and how they begin to mobilize Ukrainian men en masse for service in the Russian army of occupation.
Unveiled threats and denunciations
The full-scale Russian invasion in February 2022 is another turning point in the life of the young Ukrainian woman.
"Stop the war", she wrote on social networks as an 18-year-old student who was studying Russian philology at the time. "I was threatened by the people around me, including with court," Tia told ARD. "Whistleblowers are not a relic of the Soviet era, they can have serious consequences even today,", she assures.
In October 2023, she flees through Russia and ends up in Kharkiv, where she begins a humiliating odyssey through the Ukrainian bureaucracy. Due to her age, apart from her Ukrainian birth certificate, she only has documents from the self-proclaimed "Donetsk People's Republic". Russia has already annexed this occupied Ukrainian territory in violation of international law. Tia must surrender her documents when she arrives in Ukrainian-controlled territory.
Long struggle for Ukrainian identity documents
Without a Ukrainian passport, the young woman is practically without rights. This means he cannot go to the doctor, work legally, study or rent a home, explains the German public-law media. In addition, she does not have the status of an internally displaced person and therefore cannot count on social benefits.
A human rights organization from Kharkiv came to her aid, but the grueling struggle to obtain valid Ukrainian documents took a whole year. This is also due to the fact that Tia cannot prove her identity as required by law, for example with witnesses. She cannot ask for such a thing from her pro-Russian parents and she does not know anyone in her new place.
"I wasted valuable time"
Recently, the migration service nevertheless issued Tia a Ukrainian passport. Now she can finally see a doctor and do everyday things like banking. The young woman wants to study in Kiev or Kharkiv, but she can't get rid of the thought that she has wasted valuable time: "I spent almost a year without documents," she says.
More than ten years after Russia occupied her hometown near Donetsk, the once little girl has become a strong and independent woman for whom origins are still important. She does not hide that people from her native Donbas are not well spoken of, but she assures that her people are smart and last but not least - they are Ukrainians.