Envylike

Not really, I'm afraid I had no point of contact yet precisely cause it's nearly impossible for me to tell apart scammers and legit traffickers, but I heard the numbers were similar to that.

Not really, most of our borders are flatlands and steppes, while the few forests we do have on the borders are often in difficult to pass terrain and are patrolled.

Thank you very much, this is indeed of great interest to me. I would really appreciate it if you could get in touch, and I understand that this is a shot in the dark rather than a guarantee. I will also look into the org thing, if there's a snowball in hell's chance I'll take it.

Thank you, I honestly didn't even consider satellite images as a way to research this, so this advice might come in handy. Unfortunately, I don't have the money to rent a car quite yet but if my situation changes that is a valid option. As for finding out about checkpoints - eh, they aren't always set in stone and they periodically open up new ones, so I wouldn't count too much on that.

Thank you, and yeah - I'm taking any and all advice with a grain of salt since I've seen far too many vids of patrol laughing at defector-attemptees. Solid advice!

Thank you, and don't worry, you're not giving me any false hopes - I and many of us here have heard enough "the war is ending soon!!" to have a strong sense of hope for that anymore. When the war ends it'll surprise us, not cause nobody expects it to end but cause many of us can't imagine not living in this regime anymore.

Border patrol looooves making example out of people who try to swim through the river so that's one of the last resort options really.

Thank you, I actually haven't heard much of people running from the south, mostly just attempting to swim across a river in the west (and get caught). Now that I think about it, I prolly don't hear about it cause they have no problem leaving the country lmao. One more direction to look at.

Oooooh I didn't know about the Belarus effort. I'll need to set up a vpn to access .ru domains again. While I live in the south (Odesa to be exact) I think it would be worth it to travel north to try this way should it be fruitful, though I gotta learn how to properly look for smugglers. By the way, regarding locals warning of ICE - we have telegram groups warning people of kidnapper busses so the ghouls have to hide and cover their buses to blend in all the time. Different countries, same concept effectively. Thank you, this has been most helpful, actually.

As for moving - there are a lot of checkpoints everywhere so not that easy. Possible, but risky with a train. I don't have a car sadly so I have to rely on external methods to get me around if I need to.

The thing is that I'm a trans woman, which means jack shit to them. I tried to go through the process of legal recognition for my gender. The problem is that I have to be diagnosed with gender dysphoria for that and then go through a loooooong procedure. also if the doc thinks you don't have gender dysphoria you get the generic "personality disorder" diagnosis and back to the 6 month queue you go. Which is the exact thing that happened to me. I still hope I can get the recognition but I'm not betting on it.

There certainly are, but you have to know them and know where to find them. Also, there are crackdowns on them all the time to tighten the screws and bleed out the least amount of fresh blood possible.