Abdurrahman (right) and Abdullah pray in the tree farm where they found work in the summer. Now both will be unemployed throughout the winter. John Wendle

Borinya, Ukraine — Abdurrahman swept a small pile of breadcrumbs into his hand. Then he picked up the blanket that serves as prayer rug, dinner table and playground, shook it out at the window, and laid it again in the dorm room. He straightened the corners, readying it for the evening prayers he would soon perform with his son and two friends with whom he had settled with in western Ukraine after fleeing Crimea in March.

The men, recent converts to a devout practice of Sunni Islam, live with their wives and children in some rooms at a boarding school in the village of Borinya, deep in the Carpathian Mountains, near Ukraine’s border with Poland — and the European Union.

With their bushy beards and wives in headscarves, they stand out in the tiny village, but the mostly Catholic farmers here have accepted the refugees from Russia's annexation of Crimea, allowing them to settle and start new lives.

“People cannot tell me how to live, here. If people tell me how to live, I’ll pick up my suitcases with my two hands and keep walking until I find a place where I am allowed to practice my beliefs,” Adbdurrahman tells Al Jazeera, sitting in his cramped kitchen, drinking strong Tatar coffee the next morning. “The only difficulty comes when people tell others how to live.”

So far, he has not had to think about moving.

Currently, there are nearly 473,000 internally displaced people in Ukraine, up from 275,000 just two months ago, the UNHCR reported on November 21.

Of that number, around 19,400 come from Crimea, which people fled after Russia annexed the peninsula in March. Unlike the new arrivals in Ukraine’s war-torn east that have mostly fled the violence, those in Crimea are escaping repression under the pro-Russian government.

“In the past eight months, the de facto authorities in Crimea have limited free expression, restricted peaceful assembly, and intimidated and harassed those who have opposed Russia’s actions in Crimea,” reads Human Rights Watch’s November report on Crimea.