The Invisible Commutes Connecting Occupied Ukraine to the Outside World
Travel to and from the Ukrainian territories occupied by Russia is difficult but possible. New research sheds light on the people who repeatedly undertake these arduous journeys, their motivations, and the routes they take.
The Russian occupation of Ukrainian territories has trapped hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians – in Crimea and parts of Luhansk and Donetsk since 2014 and in parts of the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions since 2022. In the eight years before February 2022 some forms of mobility were possible across the ceasefire line in Donbas. People were able to cross it to visit family members, access services, or conduct informal business on the other side. But Russia’s full-scale invasion and the radical russification of society in the occupied territories put an end to those accommodations. Nowadays, travel to or from the temporarily occupied territories is generally seen as a one-way escape from or, more rarely, a return to Russian-controlled Ukraine. Yet for some Ukrainians, mobility to and from the occupied territories is recurrent rather than final. Their convoluted commutes to support family members or visit their pre-war homeplaces show how people adapt to geopolitical fractures and prompt questions about belonging.
The ethnographic fieldwork I conducted in 2025 and 2026 in Warsaw and Athens, as well as online, shows what administrative data cannot: Thousands follow multi-border itineraries through Russia, Belarus, the Baltic states, or along the Black Sea coast despite danger, stigma and shifting legal regimes. In navigating these hurdles, they sustain invisible but real ties between Europe, free Ukraine and its temporarily occupied territories.
The practicalities: How people cross hostile borders
The journeys I studied reveal the persistence of logistical connections across geopolitical fractures and frontlines. The people who travel to or from destinations in the occupied territories have to cross at least three borders. In many cases they rely on informal transport operators as well as more established companies, originally from Ukraine and Russia, which advertise in Russian and Ukrainian on Telegram and Facebook. In occupied Mariupol or Donetsk, these companies promise a home pick-up and a smooth 40-hour trip to EU countries. Promotional reels praise the good music and frequent toilet breaks. Phone support in Russian, Ukrainian, and sometimes German or Polish guides travellers through cash payment, luggage limits, pets and shifting transit rules. In Warsaw – a popular departure point for Ukrainians from all over Europe and Ukraine to the occupied territories – minibuses or an occasional 42-seater coach, all with Belarusian number plates, leave from random locations at petrol stations and shopping malls that change at short notice. When leaving from Europe, non-Russian passport holders drive to Minsk and then fly to Moscow for an arbitrary security screening (filtratsia) at Sheremetyevo Airport by border patrols and Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) agents. Those who successfully pass this screening are met at the airport exit by Russian drivers who transport them to their final destination. Filtratsia does not, however, exclude further interrogations at other checkpoints en route to the occupied territories. And on their return trip to Europe, passengers face the same procedure.
The passport question and shifting border regimes
The passports one holds determine the cost, the route taken and the level of risk. Ukrainians who have both Ukrainian and Russian passports – under the pressure of forced passportisation – have diverse travel options because they can navigate EU, Ukrainian and Russian border crossings. Ukrainians without Russian passports who wish to travel to the occupied territories have to resort to costly flights through Minsk, Belgrade, Yerevan, or Istanbul and undergo filtratsia at Sheremetyevo Airport: questioning, provocation, and sometimes days of waiting under threat of deportation or prison. One young woman called it ‘psychological rape’.
Shifting EU and Ukrainian regulations also influence itineraries and travel conditions. For example, when Poland closed its borders with Belarus for several weeks in 2025, bus routes from Warsaw to Minsk airport were rerouted through the Baltic states. The return by Ukraine to Schengen-approved biometric passports that can only be issued in Ukraine or by Ukrainian embassies abroad, as well as a changes to travel rules for conscription-aged men, complicates entry for those coming from Ukraine’s occupied territories. Those without valid passports can only cross at the Mokrany-Domanove humanitarian corridor between Belarus and Ukraine. For a while after 2022, people from the occupied Ukrainian territories who only hold Russian passports could enter the EU via a number of crossing points on the border between Russia and the Baltic states, but the rules have since been tightened.
Complex motivations for travel
The commuters I met in Warsaw and Athens include teenagers, elderly women, women travelling alone, and whole families. Most are middle-aged women whose circular mobility reflects their central role in extended family networks, though their material, sentimental, and moral motivations are complex. Commutes of care in divided families dominate: One elderly woman fulfils her ‘duties as a grandmother’, alternating between her two daughters, one a refugee in Bratislava, another in an occupied village near Melitopol. Another travels to Kyiv from a village near Kherson twice a year to support both her children and parents. Others weave these journeys into ordinary routines, revisiting places associated with a pre-war past. A mother boarding a bus from Warsaw with her two teenage daughters asserts her ‘right to go home’ to Donetsk ‘for summer vacation’. Income and property concerns are another major driver of returns. For example, Russian procedures to expropriate the homes of Ukrainian owners who fail to re-register in person prompted a construction worker to drive from Athens along the Black Sea through Georgia and Russia to secure and repair his house in Mariupol two summers in a row in 2024 and 2025. Yet even travellers with very pragmatic reasons to stay in or travel to the occupied territories are often ambivalent about that choice. One pharmacist from Luhansk, now retired, says she remained under occupation to keep her ‘home’ but suffers under the regime. She travels back to Lviv once a year to ‘relax’ and enjoy ‘Ukrainian spoken on the streets’.
Commutes as practices of belonging
Such repeated, risk-laden journeys are not exceptional departures from wartime life but practices that travellers and transport operators have integrated into their routines. They reveal the ‘abnormal normality’ of life amid violent conflict. Through care provision, administrative and economic dealings, and embodied memories of home, commuters enact belonging across hostile borders, but are often judged for their choices, as if they were accommodating, exploiting or benefiting from both sides. Yet their readiness to face arbitrary Russian controls, unstable EU and Ukrainian border regimes, informal transport logistics and ambivalent social attitudes – not once but repeatedly – expresses a connection with occupied communities that are otherwise very isolated. By maintaining ties to Ukrainian institutions (passports), places and families, they express everyday citizenship and thus affirm a form of latent and vernacular Ukrainian sovereignty.
Dr Sophie Lambroschini is a researcher for the ExilEst project at CERCEC-EHESS in Paris.