Trapped in the basement at the border. Expelled by Russia and rejected by Georgia, Ukrainian exiles refuse to return home for fear of the draft

In mid-August, heavy rains and the threat of mudslides forced Georgian authorities to evacuate the Dariali border checkpoint. After warning systems sounded, staff were evacuated, and all traffic through the crossing was halted.

The 17 Ukrainians, who have been confined to the checkpoint’s basement since 2025, were also evacuated. Given just an hour to pack their belongings, they were loaded into a van and taken to a nearby monastery. It was the first time they had left the checkpoint in months—though the reprieve lasted only a few hours. Once the danger passed, they were sent straight back to the basement.

For 36-year-old Andriy, the journey to the border basement began after serving nine years in a Russian penal colony for a drug offence. He was due to be released in February 2025, but was instead transferred to an immigration detention centre alongside other foreign nationals who had violated Russian residency rules. Four months later, Andriy and several other Ukrainians were escorted by guards to the Verkhny Lars border crossing. They cleared Russian passport control without issue and walked across to the Georgian checkpoint at Dariali.

“They kept us waiting for a very long time, and then they just told us to go down to the basement. We’ve been waiting ever since,” Andriy says wearily, speaking in the summer of 2026. He cannot enter Georgia because he does not have a valid passport.

Ihor, originally from Odesa, has a slightly different story. He had a passport, but it expired while he was locked up in Russian immigration centres. He had lived in Russia since 2015, dutifully renewing his work permit until December 2024, when he decided to leave for the EU via Georgia. However, he was stopped by local police in the Kabardino-Balkaria region of Russia just as his residency lapsed.

A Russian court fined Ihor and ordered his deportation. Instead of allowing him to leave on his own, authorities detained him in a holding centre in the North Caucasus for six months, before moving him to Moscow. He refused an offer to leave via Belarus, and in June 2025, he was flown under armed guard to Vladikavkaz and taken to the border.

“The Russian customs officers told me I’d get through because I wasn’t an ex-convict and had a passport. But it had expired during those six months,” Ihor recalls. “When I got to Georgia, they took me into a separate room and said, ‘You’re not coming in.’ Why? Well, they tell me, we need to verify the identity. I said, ‘Here is my passport, there is the embassy.’ But they said the passport had expired, they wouldn’t let me in, but would take me to the basement while the embassy verified my identity. They herded me into the basement with HIV-positive ex-convicts who had serious criminal records. I have never done time in my life, and I ended up in the same place as them,” he says.

A long goodbye. How Ukrainians have become stuck at Dariali

During the first three years of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Georgia generally allowed Ukrainian citizens to enter with relative ease, even if they lacked the correct documentation. For example, in 2023, dozens of former Ukrainian prisoners from the Kherson region—whom retreating Russian forces had taken with them—were deported to Georgia after finishing their sentences in Russia. Once in Georgia, they could obtain temporary travel documents (often called “white passports”) to return to Ukraine via Moldova.

However, this route slowly closed. In the summer of 2024, Russia halted the deportations. When deportations resumed in the spring of 2025, Georgia had already tightened its entry requirements. The two countries were acting entirely out of sync.

Dozens of people, including Andriy and Ihor, were caught in the middle of this. At one point, Andriy recalls, nearly a hundred Ukrainians were crammed into the Dariali basement. With only one mattress for every three people, they had to sleep in shifts. The floor was often flooded, and the room lacked proper ventilation. “There isn’t a single hole in the wall. No fresh air comes in,” Andriy says.

In this confined space, with no clear timeline for their release, tensions inevitably flared. “We are all human, and given the circumstances, everyone’s nerves are completely frayed,” Ihor admits, though he notes that most disputes were resolved peacefully.

“One man got an infection in his eye, and they didn’t take him to the hospital until the eye had completely rotted away,” says Daria Samodurova, a Georgian lawyer representing the Ukrainians. “Even in the hospital, he was treated with total indifference. For two days, he wasn’t given food or water. The man was left permanently disabled, and the authorities just accepted it as a given.”

Among those trapped were men with HIV and hepatitis who were left completely without access to their therapies, she adds.

Initially, in the summer of 2025, the Ukrainians protested through hunger strikes and self-harm. Eventually, their conditions slightly improved: they were allowed to use the toilet freely and access a ventilated balcony. However, there are still no shower; the men are forced to wash using a bucket.

Samodurova says she hasn’t even met with the Ukrainians, not once.

Survival has relied heavily on Georgian volunteers who crowdfunded to buy food and supplies. They handed these over to the Ukrainian embassy, whose staff delivered them—albeit inconsistently—to the border.

According to Ihor, Ukrainian diplomats occasionally visited to discuss departure options. In August 2025, 65 people (including 10 women) were flown on a special charter flight to Moldova, and from there to Ukraine.

Lawyer Samodurova says consuls assured the men they would be given at least six months to adapt and see their families before facing any military obligations. The reality was starkly different.

From the basement to the frontline. Why Ukrainians refuse to go home

“They got landed in Moldova, went straight to Odesa, and from there, directly to a military medical commission,” Ihor claims. “Even guys with missing fingers were deemed fit for service. The only ones they didn’t take were a man with stage-four tuberculosis and another on crutches.”

Within weeks, those who had left reported being sent straight to military training camps without seeing their families.

There were 25 men left in the basement; eight more accepted the offer to return to Ukraine. “From those, only Slavik, a disabled guy, still contacts us,” says Ihor. “The message is clear: if you have any way to stay put, stay put. They will pack you off as combat units.”

The 17 men remaining in the basement are now terrified of returning. When they tried to raise awareness of their plight through the media, a local official allegedly gave Ihor an ultimatum: “Either you go to Ukraine, or you go to prison.”

Meanwhile, wolunteer resources are now running dry. A representative from theApus project, an NGO assisting Ukrainians, says donations have plummeted. “We are now sending food and basic necessities only once every few weeks. Lawyers still can’t get the necessary medications for those with HIV and active tuberculosis,” she explains.

Maria Belkina of Volunteers Tbilisi notes that helping the Ukrainians has been made harder by a broader crackdown on Georgian NGOs and the introduction of a controversial “foreign agents” law. Many volunteers have left the country entirely.

Belkina acknowledges the tragic paradox: Ukraine wants to repatriate its citizens, but those citizens refuse to go. Still, she stresses, keeping people indefinitely in a basement is “inhumane, horrific, and disgusting”. “It’s a massive legal dead end, and it’s unclear what can be done,” she says.

Applying for proper passports to enter Georgia legally is impossible. Georgia has no branch of the Ukrainian passport service that operates in several EU countries. According to Andriy, diplomats initially claimed they could issue passports at the border, but later backtracked, insisting the documents could only be processed inside Ukraine.

The Georgian Ministry of Internal Affairs explains the refusal to let the Ukrainians into the country by their criminal records, emphasising that it is continuing negotiations with Kyiv and international organisations regarding their “organised, safe, and voluntary return to their homeland.”

Human rights defenders tried to find another way out—to secure international protection. In July 2026, the men stuck in the basement submitted applications and underwent interviews, but received a refusal—first from the migration authorities, and then from the court. According to lawyers, the counterintelligence department of the Georgian State Security Service opposed granting them protection.

Lawyer Daria Samodurova points out that previously the Georgian Ministry of Internal Affairs explained the refusal to let the Ukrainians into the country partly by their criminal records. “We asked: what about those without criminal records? After all, out of the 17 people, seven do not have a criminal record,” she recalls. Now an answer to this question has also emerged: during the trial, representatives of the Georgian intelligence services stated that the Ukrainians should not be admitted to the country due to a threat to national security. What exactly this entails is unknown to the human rights defenders: this information is classified.

A statement by the Apus project says that following the refusal of protection, the applicants lose their asylum-seeker status and the guarantee of non-expulsion from the country. “This means that legally they can be deported from the country at any moment,” the human rights defenders explain.

It is no longer possible to appeal the decision within Georgia. Now, Samodurova intends to seek protection for the Ukrainians in international institutions. Exactly how, she will not yet say: she fears that doing so will allow the authorities to prepare counter-tactics in advance, which means the men kept in the basement will ultimately have to go to the front.

Editor: Maria Klimova