Oleksiy Selin has been living on the streets for five months. Every evening the 82-year-old takes himself to Kharkiv’s central railway station, finds a free seat in the waiting room and attempts to sleep until morning. His legs and feet have started to become swollen, but if a homeless person tries to lie down in the building, the police throw them out, and sleeping on the street is too awful to contemplate.
When Oleksiy was a young man, he worked at Kharkiv’s electrical engineering plant and was able to buy a plot of land near Belgorod, a town over the border in Russia. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, he moved freely between Russia and Ukraine: as a Ukrainian citizen he had a Ukrainian pension, but his house was in Russia.
However, on 1 March 2020, the Ukrainian government introduced a new law that requires Ukrainiancitizens to hold an international passport to travel to Russia (an ID document was previously sufficient). So, the next time Oleksiy received his pension and set out for Belgorod, he was stopped at the border. He applied for an international passport and lived at the station while he was waiting for it.
