Six weeks of “hell” in brutal Russian prisons in Ukraine

This spring, there was a particularly dangerous time for a man of military age in Russian-occupied northern Ukraine, where Russian troops were losing ground. before a fierce Ukrainian counterattack.

It was then that soldiers of the occupation forces captured a young car mechanic walking around his hometown with his wife and a neighbor, they blindfolded him, tied his hands and put him on a bus.

It was the start of six weeks of “hell”, said Vasiliy, 37, who, like most of the people interviewed for this article, refused to give his surname for fear of reprisals. Transferred from one place of detention to another, he was repeatedly beaten and subjected to electric shocks during interrogation, with no idea where he was or why he was being held.

It was far from the only one. Hundreds of Ukrainian civilians, mostly men, they disappeared in the five months of the war in Ukraine, detained by Russian troops or their delegates, detained in cellars, police stations and filter camps in Russian-controlled areas of Ukraine, and eventually imprisoned in Russia.

Thousands of people have passed through this ad hoc control system in the war zone, but nobody knows exactly how many were sent to Russian prisons.

The United Nations Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine documented 287 cases of enforced disappearances and arbitrary arrests of civilians by Russia and says the total is almost certainly higher, but likely to be in the hundreds, not thousands.

Vasiliy is one of the few inmates in Russia who have returned to Ukraine. He was released after about six weeks and was able to return after a long journey with countless detours and three months of absence. Back at work at an auto repair shop in the northeastern city of Kharkiv, he said he was glad he survived.

to survive

“It was humiliating, maddening, but I got out of it alive,” he said. “It could have been worse. Some people have been killed“.

The interrogators asked him about Ukrainian military positions and groups, he explained, but the interrogations had often been futile, with the next shot coming before he could answer a question. “They don’t believe anything you say, even if you tell the truth,” he explained. “You can’t prove your innocence.”

Other families, less fortunate than Vasiliy’s, continue to search for missing relatives, torn by the anguish of not knowing where they are or if they are alive.

“I go to bed crying and wake up crying”said Olha, 64, whose son was detained and unconsciously beaten by Russian troops but released after three days, and whose grandson, the International Committee of the Red Cross learned, is being held in a Russian pre-trial detention center. .

His village, Vilkhivka, located on the outskirts of Kharkiv, was overrun by Russian troops at the end of March. Warplanes were shelling the city and Russian soldiers told residents they had an hour to evacuate, he said. “They said Vilkhivka would be razed to the ground.”

Olha and several members of her family, along with other residents, rushed through 8 kilometers of countryside to where they were told about a Russian military truck. he would take them on a fleet of buses.

Her son and grandson weren’t arriving, so her husband returned to look for them. While she was sitting on one of the buses, Russian soldiers unloaded two young men with bandaged body parts, who she thought might have been wounded Ukrainian soldiers.

crimes

In front of the other passengers, Russian soldiers beat the men and then they were shot in the head. “They were left in the woods,” she said. “I closed my eyes and cried.”

Her 20-year-old nephew, Mykyta, has not been seen since. Olha was evacuated with her daughter-in-law to Russia, where they were placed in a hostel. She returned home in July and was reunited with her husband, who had managed to survive on his own. Their son managed to join them in Russia and he and his wife stayed behind to try to locate Mykyta.

They don’t know if there are any charges against him, Olha said, since they have no contact with him, not even by phone. The Red Cross could only tell them that he had been arrested.

Most of the civilians detained by Russia in the war zone are men with military or fighting age experience. In occupied areas, Ukrainians with leadership qualities – activists, local officials and journalists – are more likely to be detained, according to human rights officials.

But many ordinary civilians they were caught in a raid chaotic and arbitrary.

Vasiliy said he was accidentally seen walking down a street in Tsyrkuny, northeast of Kharkiv, as members of the security forces were carrying out a raid.

They told his wife and a neighbor to go home, but they tied his hands with duct tape and was loaded onto a bus when men in balaclavas broke into a nearby house firing guns, forcing four men to the ground. Those men were thrown on the same bus as Vasiliy.

Among them was Vadym, 36, a welder and mechanic who lived in Tsyrkuny with his wife and little son. Vadym had gone to buy nappies and food for the boy, his second sister, Darya Shepets, 19. You said some of the detainees had been border guards during hostilities with Russia in 2014. but that he had no ties to the army.

The inmates were taken to the basement of a village house, where they were beaten and interrogated, Vasiliy said. They were later transferred to another city, where they were kept together with 25 other men. After about three weeks, he was taken with a dozen other men to a detention center on the northern border of Ukraine.

“It is difficult to understand who was stopped and why”, She said. “They brought a grandfather who didn’t understand why he was arrested. He was riding a bicycle with a sack of wheat.”

He added: “They brought a little boy. He was riding a bicycle to his grandmother’s house.”

The detainees were taken individually for questioning, which involved severe beatings, some to the head and electric shocks. “It’s like they prick your whole body with needles”Vassili said. Human rights officials have recorded similar reports of the use of electric shocks.

“They gave us food and drink once a day,” Vasiliy said. “Sometimes we ran out of food for two or three days. There were no toilets, they gave us bottles to use instead. We slept together on the tires of the cars. There are no applicable health regulations.”

missing

He said Russian interrogations were obsessed with hunting down members of Nazi groups, the main reason given by Moscow for its military operation against Ukraine.

“They said they came to free us from the Nazis, by the Ukrainian authorities, so that we could live better, “he said.” I told them: ‘I worked all the time in a gas station. I didn’t see the Nazis. Everything was fine'”.

That answer infuriated the interrogators: “They started harassing me again. ‘You’re lying. There are Nazis here. Whole gangs have been created. All your people have tattoos.'”

The four men arrested during the raid on the house, Vadym and his three friends, were taken away in the third week. They have not seen or heard from each other since.. Vasiliy thought they would be released and even told Vadym to talk to his wife in the village so that she could help him with food for their baby.

But when he returned home in late June, he was surprised to learn that he was the only one who returned.

He was fortunate that the direction of the unit holding his small group changed and suddenly put the inmates out on the street. Due to the fighting they had to enter Russia, where they were arrested again, this time by agents of the Russian spy agency, the FSB, which, according to Vasiliy, they offered him money and a job to work for them.

He refused and after three days he was allowed to leave. “They probably realized we weren’t useful to them,” he said. Looking like a homeless man with his long beard and tousled hair, Vasiliy managed to borrow money from a friend of a friend to obtain new documents and cross the Baltic states and Poland to return to Ukraine.

Vadym’s sister Shepets searched for months to find any information about her brother’s whereabouts, writing letters and searching the Internet. She eventually learned from a Ukrainian government agency that she was being held by the Russians. Then a friend found what it appeared to be a photo of your mugshot in a Russian chat room.

“I got hysterical, actually, because he was only half my brother,” Shepets said. “He is very thin in the photo. He has hollows under his eyes and his collarbones are visible.”

The photo was later removed from the social media group. “Now we don’t know anything anymore: there is no more contact, there is nothing left,” she said, wiping her tears.

New York Times

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