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Donetsk Oblast: News

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Investigation: How scammers exploit Ukraine’s occupation to deceive foreign men

Since 2022, the non-profit Helping to Leave has received thousands of requests to rescue people from Russian-occupied territories. Some of those requests were to rescue women who may have never existed at all. The charity has helped thousands of people flee occupied areas, and its team was used to urgent pleas for evacuation. But over time, a different kind of request began arriving. Foreign men started writing to Helping to Leave asking to rescue Ukrainian women they had met online, women the

About Donetsk Oblast

The Kyiv Independent's news and on-the-ground reporting from Donetsk Oblast, covering 26,517 square kilometers (10,239 square miles) in Ukraine’s East with a pre-war population of approximately 4.1 million. The administrative center is Kramatorsk, as Donetsk city has remained under Russian occupation since 2014. Donetsk Oblast has been the scene of intense fighting, for example, around the cities of Bakhmut, Avdiivka, and Vuhledar, as Moscow attempts to capture the entire region.

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