Lost and disoriented, Olena Primak stood at Belgorod’s train station, holding tightly to her young daughter’s arm. The scorching summer heat and the long journey had left the Ukrainian refugee on the brink of collapse. Primak had been told to wait for a Russian volunteer called “Alexander” who would help her get back to Ukraine, Ednews reports via The Guardian.

“Suddenly, a man with the most generous of smiles appeared at the station,” she recalled. With a gentle countenance, warm eyes and grey hair, the 61-year-old Alexander Demidenko approached Primak, offering to take her bags.

After living over a year under Russian control in the southern Ukrainian town of Novaya Kakhovka, Primak, a former shopkeeper, decided in June 2023 that she could no longer bear foreign occupation. “We had to endure a series of long, cramped train rides through Russia, trying to hide that we are Ukrainians so we wouldn’t get in trouble,” Primak said, describing a journey that also included a “nightmare” passing through one of Russia’s notorious filtration camps.

To get back to Ukrainian-controlled land, she had to now cross the Kolotilovka checkpoint, the only passage for Ukrainian citizens returning to their homeland. “Thank God Alexander [Demidenko] was there to help us at the end of it.”

Since the start of the war over two years ago, a discreet network of unofficial Russian volunteers like Demidenko has sprung up that have helped tens of thousands of Ukrainian refugees displaced by the war to get out of Russia. Many of the Ukrainians were forcibly deported to Russia or ended up in the country after finding no safe way to travel west into Ukraine. The volunteers, often ordinary anti-war Russians looking for ways to express how they feel about the conflict, operate largely through word of mouth and groups on the Telegram messaging app.

On the drive to the border, Demi­denko distracted her “with anecdotes about life and history of the towns we passed,” Primak recalled. “It was something extraordinary. This man I have never met before made me feel at ease. His love of life was infectious.”

Upon reaching the border, the two bid farewell to each other. Demidenko gave his number, telling Primak her family was always welcome once the war was over. But Primak was never able to thank him for his help. Demidenko died last Friday in pre-detention custody in Belgorod where he had spent six months awaiting trial on charges of illegal gun possession, which his family and friends say were politically motivated as retribution for his volunteer efforts.

People who knew Demidenko, fellow volunteers and Ukrainian refugees whom he has aided, portray him as a man of unwavering commitment to helping those in distress, despite the risks faced in wartime Russia.

A staunch pacifist, he started working in the rocket design industry before turning to teaching history and geography at school, a job he loved. To make ends meet from a meagre salary, Demidenko sold foreign language textbooks on the side, a job through which he met his wife, Natalia Vishnevskaya, in 2014.

“I considered myself lucky to have met him. I couldn’t believe there could be that many good qualities in one man,” said Vishnevskaya. “He was well-read, intelligent and wrote beautiful poems. But he was also a man of the land who loved to get his hands dirty.”

His adult son, Oleg, who lives in the Czech Republic, described his father as “stubborn to the extreme”, who would always put his principles above his safety or personal relations. When Russia adopted the controversial foreign agent bill aimed to tackle independent media and NGOs, Oleg recalled how his father hung up a note on his car in solidarity that read “I am a foreign agent.”

Together with Vishnevskaya, Demidenko bought a house in Gremyachi, a sleepy village near the Ukrainian border, envisioning a quiet future together. But their plans, like the faiths of millions of people in both Ukraine and Russia, changed abruptly when Vladimir Putin ordered his troops to invade Ukraine in February 2022.

On the day of the invasion, Demidenko staged a one-man protest in central Belgorod against the war. Soon after, the couple decided that they would aid Ukrainian refugees. “And we never doubted the decision once,” said Vishnevskaya.

Their home quickly transformed into a stopping point for hundreds of Ukrainians. As Russia occupied more of Ukraine, more people came. “We lost count of how many people have stayed with us,” said Vishnevskaya, who estimated that in total Demidenko had helped over 900 Ukrainians. The couple saw their biggest influx of refugees in the summer of 2023 when occupied regions of Ukraine became flooded by the destruction of the Kakhovka Dam.

When the house got too crowded with refugees – at one point the family hosted as many as 27 people in their two-storey house – Demidenko slept in the small wooden banya adjacent to the main house.