The first stop for Ella Fyodorova after she fled her home in eastern Ukraine was a windblown tent camp just across the Russian border, part of a mass evacuation effort that observers fear may become the pretext for Russia to launch a formal intervention in Ukraine.
“I wanted to stay, but my husband came home, and said: ‘Get your things together, we’re going,’” she said as she wrestled her two-year-old son into a blue snowsuit to walk to the public toilets nearby.
The recent escalation in fighting had not touched her home city of Starobesheve, she said, but warnings from the Russian-backed separatist government of an imminent attack by Ukraine had driven many families to gather their children and flee. Her husband, who dropped her at the border, had to turn back.
Now she sat in the dim light of a medical tent alongside other mothers holding their children, all waiting for the next bus to take them further into Russia. Many left carrying just the basics: clothing, medicine, some food.
“I don’t know where we’re going,” she said. “I don’t know anything. Tomorrow we need to start searching for a place to live.”
Other evacuees who spoke with the Guardian during a recent trip to the Rostov border region said they left because of the resumption of heavy artillery fire that reminded them of the most dangerous phase of the war in 2014.
“It’s dangerous – I live by the airport so I heard salvoes all night… until four in the morning I couldn’t fall asleep,” said Natalia Klimchuk, 35, who was there with her three-year-old daughter. “I got my daughter and said, ‘It’s time to get out of here.’”
There is evidence suggesting that the sudden evacuations of the Russian-controlled areas of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions were planned and likely to have been designed to set the stage for a formal Russian intervention in the country’s east. The leaders of the Russian proxy states in eastern Ukraine filmed their announcements of the evacuations days before they were made public, according to video metadata.
But for the women, children, and others who are being evacuated, the result is undeniably real and traumatic, as they arrive by the hundreds in a neighbouring region that appears unprepared for the tide of evacuees.
In the early chaos of that effort, some said they felt like pawns in a larger game.
“Maybe they’ll shoot and then it will quiet down,” said Viktoria from Donetsk, who was also at the tent camp on the border. “I think it’s a farce, though. Like when there’s a fuss and then that’s all … a staged event.”
More than 300 evacuees were sent to the Krasny Desant sanatorium just 20 miles from the border. Inside, children ran through the hallways as their parents filled out intake forms and received small handouts such as sim cards. The grounds were patrolled by police, including at least one officer with an automatic rifle (they forced a Guardian correspondent to leave the sanatorium).
In a nearby church, Natalia Chetveryakova, 61, said the seaside camp had housed evacuees in 2014 when the war began in eastern Ukraine and had even hosted refugees in 2008 after the Georgian war.
Some said they were happy to be placed so close to the border and were thankful for the stipend of 10,000 roubles (£95) that the Russian government has promised to give to evacuees. Others expected better conditions.
Beckoning us into her room, where she was staying with her daughter and granddaughter, Sonya, seven, Lyudmila Barskaya showed off the spartan but liveable conditions with an air of resign. “Here are the beds, and that’s all there is,” she said. “All you can do is cry. I understand that it’s like this for us. But nothing more for the children?”
Organisation has been a problem. A day earlier, 150 evacuees from Donetsk arrived at a nearby sanatorium only to be told there was no space for them. “We made a mistake when we chose to leave,” one told a reporter for Meduza. A similar scene unfolded at the Congress hotel in nearby Taganrog, where buses full of stressed and tired evacuees arrived only to be turned away.
Other residents in the Russian-controlled territories have decided to ignore the evacuation order and stay at home. “We have been hearing about Ukrainian attacks for years – I don’t think it is different this time,” said Tamara Fomina, 64, a pensioner from Donetsk, the largest city in the region.
Almost half of the prewar population of 3.8 million left the separatist-controlled Donbas areas after the unrest in 2014, and those who stayed appeared to be numb to the separatist warnings of a Ukrainian invasion.
“This is my home; we have been through a lot. If I die, I die, so let it be! But I am not leaving this house to go to live in some tent in Rostov,” Fomina said in a telephone interview.
But many are taking steps to prepare for an uncertain future. After the mass evacuation announcement, photographs showed people standing in long lines to use a cash machine in Donetsk.
On Saturday, the central bank of the self-proclaimed Donetsk republic announced a maximum withdrawal limit of 10,000 roubles a day from ATMs.
“There are lines everywhere. Lines for gas, for money, for food. People are worried shops won’t buy new supplies,” said Donetsk local Vlada Vologina, 34. Vologina also claimed that public transport in Donetsk was paralysed because authorities used the city’s buses as part of the mass evacuation operation.
Some men in Donetsk expressed worry after receiving call-up papers ordering them to report to the headquarters of the local militia on Sunday.
“When I came back from work last night, I saw the paper in my mailbox. This is all moving very fast,” said Vadim, who asked for his last name to be withheld.
“I don’t know who is at fault for all of this, but I don’t want war. My wife is pregnant and fighting a war was never in my plans,” he added, saying he was still undecided whether he would go to the militia headquarters.
Meanwhile, there are signs that Russia is ramping up the evacuation efforts: a local sporting facility has been converted into a makeshift centre for more than 300 evacuees and buses are taking more to a local train station, where they were put on a train destined for Nizhny Novgorod on Sunday. Some of those arriving at the station did not realise they were being sent hundreds of miles north.
Some said they believe the latest events will force Russia to step in and officially recognise or even annex the territories that it has run as proxies since 2014.
“All of us who left are thinking and hoping that this is the last time,” said Elena Kravchenko, a post office worker from the Starobesheve district. “That [Russia] will come in and clean them out.”
