At a recent U.N. Security Council meeting, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the U.S. Ambassador to the U.N., said that Russia’s program of filtration and mass transfer was being closely overseen and coördinated by the Kremlin. She also noted that Russia was “imposing its educational curriculum in schools, and trying to get Ukrainian citizens to apply for Russian passports.” She said that the impetus for all these measures was clear: “to prepare for an attempted annexation.” Vasily Nebenzya, Russia’s U.N. Ambassador, dismissed Thomas-Greenfield’s remarks as a “new milestone in the disinformation campaign unleashed by Ukraine and its Western backers.”

Seven months into the war, Russia’s broader plans for Ukraine are now in more disarray than at any time since the start of the invasion. Recently, after a protracted stalemate, the Ukrainian military recaptured more than a thousand square miles of territory in the country’s northeast. “The reality check around Kharkiv makes the situation extremely volatile,” Hubertus Jahn, a scholar of Russian imperial history at the University of Cambridge, told me. Last week, Russian-installed administrations in Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia proceeded with referendums. According to Russia’s Central Election Commission, the results in favor of joining the Russian Federation ranged from eighty-seven per cent, in Kherson, to ninety-nine per cent, in Donetsk.

Absent a dramatic change of fortune on the battlefield, or the deployment of unconventional weapons—which could draw NATO forces into the war—Moscow’s most realistic endgame may now be to solidify its hold on the gutted regions, some forty thousand square miles containing rich farmland and immensely valuable mines. At a recent news conference, Putin said that this was his “main goal,” making no mention of “demilitarizing” or “de-Nazifying” the entire country, as he had previously declared. The next week, he ordered a “partial” mobilization of as many as three hundred thousand reservists. On Friday, during a ceremony at the Kremlin, he announced that Russia had acquired “four new regions,” welcoming residents of those territories as “compatriots forever.” The four proxy heads were in attendance; at one point, they huddled together and clasped hands with Putin, chanting, “Russia! Russia!”

Stephen Biddle, a defense analyst at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs, told me, “Putin could withdraw to whatever positions he finds defensible, dig in, and protract the war, betting that his political position can survive long-term suffering. If U.S. Republicans win in the fall and in 2024, he might be right—a President Trump would quickly abandon Ukraine, and a Trumpy Republican Congress might abandon them before that.”

Whatever the Kremlin’s ultimate objectives, Lokshina, of H.R.W., said that it’s clear that the Russians are also using filtration and population transfers for propaganda purposes at home: “Their response to seven million Ukrainians fleeing to the European Union is, well, we received four million, so they’re not only running your way, they’re also running our way.” On Russian state television, groups of refugees conveyed by train to their assigned destinations have been greeted with fanfare by large crowds and television crews. In Tula, an industrial city a hundred and twenty miles south of Moscow, a local official told state reporters, “The displaced people will be provided with comfortable living conditions and get everything they need.”

Shcherbau, of the U.N. Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine, cautioned against extrapolating too much from the experiences of survivors. “We must be wary of survivors’ bias,” he said. “What is the statistical risk of being subjected to torture? What is the average length of detention? What happens to the individuals who don’t pass filtration? We don’t have clear answers to these questions. The worst cases are not yet known.”

Nearly three weeks into his captivity, Taras was desperate. He spent hours each day scrolling Telegram channels dedicated to covering the war, hoping for any information that might help him escape. At one point, he found the page of a Russian opposition journalist named Eduard Burmistrov, who was now living in exile in Tbilisi. On May 3rd, Taras threw a Hail Mary. Just before midnight, he wrote to Burmistrov, “Good evening, I am from Mariupol. After everything we have experienced, now we have been taken to some village against our will and our documents have been taken away.”

Burmistrov had been on the staff of TV Rain, Russia’s last independent television channel. On March 1st, the Russian government blocked the station, for broadcasting “false information” about Russia’s special military operation in Ukraine. The TV Rain staff, unable to call the war a “war” without risking long prison sentences, aired their final broadcast from Russia on YouTube and shuttered their offices indefinitely. Most of the staff fled within days, to Istanbul, to Yerevan, to wherever they could book flights. Burmistrov had flown to Serbia, then Turkey, before arriving in Tbilisi, which was quickly becoming one of the largest hubs for exiled Russian dissidents.

Burmistrov pressed Taras for more details. Taras wrote, “I ask for anonymity, but our situation needs to be made public.” He began sending photographs and short videos from inside the Kozatske camp. “To put it mildly, the conditions are not for humans. . . . They feed us just enough so that we don’t die. . . . We sleep on old rolled mattresses in classrooms and corridors. . . . We are guarded by three military police with machine guns. . . . Without our passports and filtration papers, we are nobody and nothing.”

Taras sent a flurry of messages to Burmistrov: “One person had a mini-stroke. . . . We are all getting sick. . . . Everyone is coughing. We go to the toilet in the field. We eat with spoons that are no longer being washed. There is no running water. . . . There are no answers to our questions about why we’re being held and when we’ll be released.” With Taras’s permission, Burmistrov planned to publish aspects of the account. “This cannot be delayed,” Taras wrote. “If something happens to us, the world should know about it!!!!!!!” Then, for fear that his phone might be inspected, Taras deleted the entire exchange.

A few hours later, Burmistrov contacted two former colleagues from TV Rain who were broadcasting from exile in Tbilisi, on a YouTube channel they’d started under their own names, Borzunova-Romensky. Under the “About” section on their page, they wrote, “They can shut down all the media, but we still have something to tell you.” The following morning, they posted a short segment featuring Taras’s leaked videos and photos, along with an anonymized text message he had sent recounting his ordeal.

Burmistrov asked Taras if it would be O.K. to share his story with a “good organization run by guys from Russia,” called Helping to Leave. “They work with Ukrainian organizations and help refugees get to Georgia,” Burmistrov wrote. Taras said yes.

Helping to Leave had its regional headquarters in an office a couple of blocks off Shota Rustaveli Avenue, Tbilisi’s main thoroughfare. When I dropped by one afternoon in June, a half-dozen volunteers, mostly Russian exiles in their twenties, were outside waiting for me. One of the volunteers was married to a Ukrainian man who was delivering humanitarian supplies to the front lines. She had “NO” tattooed across one eyelid, and “WAR” tattooed across the other; it occurred to me that showing her face in Russia was now a crime. It was pouring rain, and we sat on plastic chairs under the roof’s overhang. Everyone smoked.

The volunteers had started the group on February 24th, the day Russia launched its invasion. In the past seven months, they’ve aided or facilitated the safe passage of tens of thousands of Ukrainians out of active combat zones and Russian-controlled territory. Their operators work around the clock, supplying information about evacuation corridors and arranging housing, medical care, and psychological and legal support for people hoping to get out. Most of the work is done remotely, via Telegram, by a network of more than four hundred vetted and trained volunteers based all over Europe, as well as in the United States, Canada, Israel, and Thailand; the organization also coördinates with sympathizers inside Russia.

After connecting with Taras, the group got to work on a plan to rescue him and the other men in the camp. Polina Murygina, a Helping to Leave attorney, asked Taras for the names of his fellow-detainees. “We will send a list of the specific individuals whose safety we are concerned about to the authorities of Ukraine, Russia, and the DPR,” Murygina wrote.

“I’m a little worried,” Taras wrote back. “Could it not get worse for us?”

“In conditions of war and uncertainty, it is difficult to predict what is the right thing to do,” Murygina responded. “But, from my experience, if the authorities know that we know who exactly is being held, that lowers the likelihood that something terrible will happen.”

The next day, Taras sent the names of twenty-two of the nearly two hundred men at the camp. “I’m sure of these,” he wrote. “But collecting more names is very difficult. People are afraid and don’t trust anyone.”

Taras began to correspond with a Helping to Leave volunteer named Anna, a Russian woman who lives in Stockholm. He had learned that two men from the nearby camp at Bezimenne, where he initially underwent filtration, had disappeared after leaking three videos to the mayor of Mariupol. The mayor’s office had posted the videos on Telegram, with a description: “Footage from the middle of a filtration camp. A real ghetto!” Taras texted that the leakers “were taken away by the military to an unknown location. If someone knocks, that’s it, I may be taken away.”

Researchers for H.R.W. tracked down and interviewed the wife of one of the missing men. “He sent me a copy of that video that same day. I did my best to talk him out of publishing it,” she told them. “I saw that video on social media and it also got picked up by the press. . . . My husband stopped getting in touch. Our neighbor’s family also stopped hearing from him.” She later heard that D.P.R. security officials had taken the two men to the notorious Olenivka penal colony and that they were being accused of making an unauthorized recording and spreading false information about D.P.R. authorities. “Their fate and whereabouts remain unconfirmed,” the researchers wrote in a recently published report on the camps in the occupied territories. “They should be treated as presumptive victims of enforced disappearances.”

At Kozatske, guards started to press detainees about the leaks. “Why the fuck are you filming?” Taras heard one guard shout, to a man who had been pointing his cell phone at his food. “You’re only making things worse for yourselves.”

Taras quickly texted Burmistrov, “Eduard, please remove the post from Telegram. I wanted the world to see, but people are disappearing.” Burmistrov deleted his post, but it was too late—the photos were already being shared widely.

Burmistrov followed up the next day, texting, “How are you over there?”

“Men with balaclavas showed up,” Taras wrote back. “They look like real thugs. . . . They walked around the perimeter of the school with our passports,” which were kept in a cardboard box. He added, “I will check in with you so you are aware of all my movements, in case suddenly I disappear from communication.”

Another week went by without any news. “I’m still there,” Taras texted Anna. “Sick for several days.”

When Taras awoke on May 24th, it had been forty-one days since he and the other detainees had been taken. Shortly after a breakfast of cold macaroni, they were summoned outside. A D.P.R. police officer was standing with a Russian soldier, and Taras and the other men gathered in a circle around them. “We’ve received an order,” the officer said. “We are releasing you.” The guards started calling the men’s names, one after another, and handing back their passports, along with the filtration receipts. The men were hugging, crying. “Taras!” one of the guards bellowed.

At 1:03 P.M., Taras texted Anna, “They’re letting us go.” He sent a meme of Elon Musk with tears running down his cheeks, and wrote, “We don’t believe it.” Why now? Taras wondered. Was it on account of his leaks to Burmistrov? A back-channel intervention by Helping to Leave? The maneuvering of a sympathetic local administrator? The men were being released just as they had been apprehended—without explanation. Six minutes later, Taras sent Anna a voice note. “They gave back our passports,” he said. “Those who can leave on their own can leave.” He managed to reach an acquaintance who had cell service, who agreed to come pick him up. “Within a week I’ll try to get out of the country,” he told Anna. “Don’t write to me for a few days. Just write O.K. now and I’ll erase everything. I’ll be in touch.”

When Taras was taken away, in April, the trees were bare. Now everything was green, blossoming. After nearly six weeks of captivity, he was reunited with his family. They sat in the back yard, over a meal of bread, soup, and fresh green onions. His relatives couldn’t stop crying and poured him round after round of samohon, Ukrainian moonshine. It was apparent to all of them that Taras could not stay for long. There was no predicting when the men in camouflage would return. Three days later, he was on the road, driving a car left behind by a friend who was already out of the country.

Volunteers at Helping to Leave assisted in coördinating Taras’s route. Travelling west wasn’t an option; Russian forces had effectively blocked all evacuation corridors. He remembered how the roads had looked in March, when every third car heading in that direction returned riddled with bullets. He had observed one van coming back with all its passengers covering their mouths and noses. One of the passengers was dead, shot as they tried to make their exit. The Georgian border was more than four hundred miles southeast of Mariupol. To get there, Taras would have to pass through a sliver of southern Russia.

He went through eighteen military checkpoints. Even with his filtration receipt, he was questioned and sometimes made to undress. A drive that in peacetime takes about fifteen hours took three times as long. At one point, a Russian Federal Security Service official examined Taras’s phone, finding nothing of interest except a photograph of his girlfriend. He zoomed in and out on her features. “This your girl?” he asked Taras, without looking up. “Yes,” Taras replied. The official ogled her for a minute or so before handing back the device. “Why are you all running away?” the official inquired. “Who will defend the motherland?”

Taras had no rubles, and his Ukrainian bank cards didn’t work at any Russian A.T.M.s, so Helping to Leave arranged two pickups. Taras would arrive at a designated location, and someone would give him enough cash to fuel up and make it to the next stop. This was a risk to both parties, requiring faith and trust between complete strangers, citizens of enemy nations, but Taras had no other choice. After the first exchange, he stopped for the night at a roadside motel, and sent Anna a final voice note. “Thank you for your help and moral support,” he said. Lying there in a clean bed, with a full stomach, he said, he was overwhelmed with guilt. “I’m eating, taking showers, going to sleep on white sheets—living like a human being, while my family is still there. I feel so guilty for all this. . . . I’m sorry.”

In June, I met Taras at a hotel where he was staying, on the outskirts of Tbilisi. He is tall and gangly, and wore a soccer jersey with the Mariupol Football Club logo, looking less like a recent prisoner of war than like someone’s kid brother. Except for a bit of sunlight entering through a thin curtain, the room was dark. In a corner sat an overstuffed black suitcase. We found a table downstairs, in the hotel cafeteria. A light breakfast had been laid out, but Taras wasn’t eating. “There’s macaroni here,” he said. “I’m sure it’s good macaroni, but I can’t even look at the stuff.”

At the border with Georgia, Taras said, he had undergone one last round of hostile questioning by Russian officials. Finally, after passing through customs, he exhaled deeply. “I just broke down,” he told me. He cried as he drove, feeling a swirl of sorrow and relief and guilt and gratitude. Occasionally, he’d pull over, sit on the hood of the car, and just gaze at the Caucasus Mountains. “In the camp and at the military checkpoints, I had to choose my words with so much caution,” he said. Every utterance was a risk. “Now I don’t need to filter my thoughts. I don’t need to hide.”

A young woman was eating alone at a nearby table. Taras looked over at her periodically. I asked him if he knew her. He smiled. She was his girlfriend from Mariupol. Until a week ago, they hadn’t seen each other for a hundred and one days. For about half that time, each didn’t know if the other was still alive. After her apartment building was bombed, on March 20th, she and her family fled the city. On his way out, Taras drove past her block. “It’s all destroyed,” he said. “They erased her entire street—just rubble everywhere, a nightmare.” She first went to Bulgaria, then came to Tbilisi to be with Taras. “Last night, we were walking in the old city and we heard two guys walking behind us speaking Russian,” Taras said. Without any discussion, he and his girlfriend found themselves walking faster. “It was like a reflex. I know it’s not right. They’re probably normal people who themselves are running away from Putin, but right now I can’t help it.”

Taras said that they had both been having terrible dreams, assailed in their sleep by visions of armed soldiers, interrogation rooms, and the wretched ruins of their home city. Just about every night, he found himself back in the filtration camp. He’d wake up in a cold sweat, thinking of the untold number of men still being held by Russian forces. “These are permanent memories,” he said. “You just live with them and that’s it. You try to distract yourself, you try to live your life.”

Taras excused himself. He had to pack the car. Since the start of the war, about twenty-six thousand Ukrainian refugees have entered Georgia, but there is little work to be found and even less government support. On August 1st, the Tbilisi municipal government discontinued a program, in place since early March, that offered free hotel rooms to Ukrainian refugees. Many had moved on to the European Union. Taras and his girlfriend planned to drive to Poland, where they had friends who could help them make a new start.

The next time we spoke, by video chat over Telegram, they were in a suburb a few miles northwest of Gdańsk, a Polish port city on the Baltic Sea. Taras proudly showed me their two-bedroom rental. He stepped out onto the balcony to share a view of the quiet residential street. “It’s very nice,” he said. “There are areas like this in the U.S., right?” He pointed his phone toward a long, paved driveway. “These crazy parking spaces.”

During our conversations, Taras expressed a mixture of resignation about the current situation and hope for the future. He and his girlfriend could now access their bank accounts, but their savings were meagre; he aimed to find work soon, in human resources, or cars. “Tomorrow we will go to the U.N. office,” he said. “Maybe something will work out.” The air suddenly hummed with the sound of a plane flying over Taras’s new home. He looked up, then let out a brief, nervous laugh. “There’s an airport right next to the neighborhood,” he said. “I still get this feeling . . . I’m expecting an explosion.”

Two days earlier, Gdańsk city officials had changed the name of one of the city’s main plazas to Heroic Mariupol. “We will return to our city,” Taras said, “but only when it is Ukraine again.” After all the death and destruction he and his girlfriend had witnessed, they were eager to bring new life into the world. “Our children will have Ukrainian names,” he said. “They will be Ukrainian citizens.” He was confident that after the war the E.U. and the U.S. would help rebuild his city.

At times, Taras spoke of Mariupol not as a real place in the world, under temporary occupation by the Russian Federation, but as a memory or a dream, a phantom city situated somewhere in the distant past. “I would really like to return there, but Mariupol doesn’t exist,” Taras said. “There’s nowhere to return to.”