SUMY, Ukraine (AP) — Whenever 52-year-old Anna is agitated, she senses the chilling touch of a gun barrel between her brows — a haunting reminder of an encounter with a group of Russian soldiers on her street about a year ago.
On that day, amid tears and screams, the soldiers threatened to kill her and her husband, fired bullets on the ground between their feet and then dragged her brother-in-law to an unknown location, apparently furious that he couldn’t guide them to where they could find alcohol.
Two weeks later, Anna’s husband, who himself had been hospitalized previously because of heart problems, found his brother’s body in the forest, not far from the village where they lived, in a Russian-occupied area of Ukraine’s southeastern Zaporizhzhia region.
Allowed to move freely through Russian-controlled zones, most take buses to the corridor from homes throughout the country: Zaporizhzhia and Kherson in the southeast, Donetsk and Luhansk in the northeast, and Crimea, the southern peninsula that Russia annexed in 2014.
More than 15,500 people have passed through the Pluriton shelter since it opened in March, said Arisoi, herself a refugee who fled her home in the eastern city of Bakhmut after it was reduced to rubble and taken over by Russian military forces in May.
When the time came, she silently packed her things, grabbed a walking stick, and embarked on the challenging journey: a full day’s bus ride through other occupied territories and into Russia, where she set out on foot along the corridor.
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