We were told we were going on a trip to the seaside – but we were kidnapped by Russia

On a freezing cold November morning, Russian officials turned up at the institution where Maksym lived and told everyone there they were going on a “trip to the seaside”.

President Vladimir Putin’s bloody invasion had been raging for months and the town in the southern Kherson region where Maksym called home had been swallowed up by Russian troops.

Unlike millions of non-disabled Ukrainians, he could not flee the violence and bloodshed on his own.

Unable to use his legs from birth, he had spent his whole life in this Ukrainian facility for people with disabilities. And at the age of 33, he was living alongside 180 other people aged between 19 and 90 who also needed constant care.

When the Russians told him they were going to be moved, none of them had a choice. Far from a trip to the sea, the whole group was being vanished into Russia.

Anyone who objected was locked in their room. And they were all prevented from speaking to family before being put on a train across the border.

While most of the group went one way, for some reason Maksym was separated from everyone he knew and sent 220 miles (360km) to the coastal Russian town of Anapa. There he was placed in a hospital-style institution. His wheelchair went missing in transit.

“We kept asking, where are we going? But everyone lied to us. We were terrified because I didn’t know where we would be taken, we didn’t know what was going to happen next,” Maksym said with desperation in his voice.

“We couldn’t do anything.”

After four harrowing months alone in Russia he successfully escaped, using a mobile phone he had hidden in his trousers from officials.

Enlisting the help of a Ukrainian charity, he was secretly smuggled out, escaping the Russian police by instigating a clandestine meeting at a nearby corner store.

Speaking from a European country we have chosen not to name, he said he only now realises he had been subject to a war crime: “I had to hide my phone because they were also confiscating the phones of people who had asked to go to Ukraine.

“We cannot protect ourselves – we have been forgotten. I feel like the world has forgotten us.”

‘How can you make any decision to help when there are soldiers with guns?’

Just a few weeks before, in a different facility also in occupied south Ukraine, Russian officials had also turned up with talk of a “trip to the seaside.”

This time they had entered an institution housing 500 Ukrainian women with intellectual and physical disabilities – among them was Inna, 46 who has Down syndrome and, like Maksym, had lived in the facility all her life.

Armed men escorted a total.