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Six Weeks of ‘Hell’: Inside Russia’s Brutal Ukraine Detentions


KHARKIV, Ukraine It was a particularly dangerous time for a man of military age in Russian-occupied northern Ukraine, where the Russian military was losing ground to a fierce Ukrainian counteroffensive this past spring. . That’s when soldiers from the occupation forces arrested a young auto mechanic while he was walking in the countryside with his wife and a neighbor, blindfolded him, tied his hands and pushed him into a bus.

It was the beginning of six weeks of “hell,” said Vasiliy, 37, who, like most of the people interviewed for this article, declined to give his last name for fear of reprisal. Fleeing from one place of detention to another, he was beaten and repeatedly electrocuted during interrogation, without understanding where he was or why he was being held.

He’s not the only one. Hundreds of Ukrainian civilians, mostly men, have gone missing during the five months of the war in Ukraine, detained by Russian troops or their proxies, held in basements, police stations and camps. filtered in Russian-controlled areas of Ukraine and eventually incarcerated into Russia.

Thousands of people have gone through this special screening system, spread in a war zone, but no one knows exactly how many have been sent to Russian prisons. The UN Human Rights Watch in Ukraine has documented 287 cases of Russia’s forced disappearance and arbitrary detention of civilians and says the total is almost certainly more, but could be hundreds. , not thousands.

Vasiliy is one of the few Russian detainees who have returned to Ukraine. He was released after about six weeks and eventually came back on a long, winding journey after a total of three months. Returning to work at an auto repair shop in the northeastern city of Kharkiv, he said he was glad he survived.

“It was embarrassing, horrifying, but I came out alive,” he said. “It could get worse. Some people have been shot.”

The interrogators asked for information about Ukrainian military positions and groups, he said, but the interrogations were often pointless, as the next blow came before he could answer a question. “They don’t believe anything you say, even if you tell the truth,” he said. “You can’t prove your innocence.”

Other families, less fortunate than the Vasiliy family, are still searching for their missing loved ones, anxious to know where they are or even if they are still alive.

Olha, 64, her son who was detained and beaten unconscious by the Russian army but released after three days, and whose grandson they heard from the International Committee of the Red Cross. , is being held in a Russian pre-trial detention facility.

Their village, Vilkhivka, on the outskirts of Kharkiv, was overrun by Russian troops in late March. Fighters were bombing the village, and Russian soldiers told residents they had one hour to evacuate, she recounted in an interview. “They said that Vilkhivka would be eliminated,” she said.

Olha and several family members hurried with other villagers within five miles of the field to where they were informed that a Russian military truck would take them to a convoy of buses. waiting available. Her son and grandson did not return in time, so her husband returned to look for her. As she sat on one of the buses, Russian soldiers pulled out two bandaged young men who she thought might have injured Ukrainian soldiers.

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

Her grandson, Mykyta, 20, has not been seen since. Olha and her daughter-in-law evacuated to Russia, where they were put in a boarding house. She returned home in July and reunited with her husband, who had survived on his own. Her son managed to join them in Russia, and he and his wife are still there trying to locate Mykyta.

They don’t know if he will face charges, Olha said, because they can’t reach him, even by phone. The Red Cross could only tell them he was in custody, she said.

Most civilians held by Russia in a war zone are men with military experience or of combat age. In occupied areas, Ukrainians with leadership qualities – activists, local officials and journalists – are more likely to be detained, human rights officials say. But many ordinary civilians have been caught up in what is often a chaotic and arbitrary rotation.

Vasiliy, the mechanic, said he was picked up by accident as he was walking down a street in Tsyrkuny, northeast of Kharkiv, when members of the security forces were conducting a raid. size. His wife and a neighbor woman were told to go home, but his hands were tied with duct tape and he was shoved into a bus when men dressed in balaclavas stormed a house nearby. then fired a weapon, forcing the four men to the ground. Those men were then thrown into the same bus as Vasiliy.

Among them is Vadym, 36, a welder and mechanic who lives in Tsyrkuny with his wife and young son. According to Darya Shepets’ sister, 19-year-old Vadym, Vadym ventured out to buy diapers and baby food but he had no ties to the military. .

Those arrested were taken to the basement of a village house, where they were beaten and interrogated, Vasiliy said. They were then transferred to another village, where they were held in a group of about 25 people. After about three weeks, he was taken with a dozen men to a detention facility on Ukraine’s northern border.

“It is difficult to understand who was detained and for what,” he said. “They brought this man in, who didn’t understand why he was being held. He was cycling with a bag of corn.”

He added: “A little boy was brought in. He was just cycling to his grandmother.”

The detainees were hauled apart for questioning, which involved severe beatings, including some to the head and electric shocks. “It’s as if your whole body is pricked by a needle,” says Vasiliy. Human rights officials have recorded similar accounts of electric shocks being used.

“We were given food and water once a day,” says Vasiliy. “Sometimes we can go without food for two or three days. There are no toilets; they gave us bottles to use. We slept together on car tires. There are no sanitary standards to speak of.”

He said Russian interrogators were obsessed with eliminating members of Nazi groups – the main reason Moscow gave for the military campaign against Ukraine.

“They said they came to free us from the Nazis, from the Ukrainian government, so that we could live better,” he recounts. “I told them: ‘I worked all the time at the service station. I don’t see the Nazis. Everything was fine.'”

His answer infuriated his interrogators, he said, adding: “They started messing with me again. ‘You’re lying. You have the Nazis here. The entire group has been created. All of your people have tattoos. ‘”

The four men arrested in the home raid, Vadym and three of his friends, were taken away in the third week. They haven’t been seen or heard of since. Vasiliy thought they were released and even told Vadym to talk to his wife in the village, saying she would help him feed his toddler.

But when he got home at the end of June, he was shocked to find that he was the only one to return.

He got lucky when the leader of the unit holding his smaller group changed and the captives were suddenly moved to the streets. Because of the fighting, they had to go to Russia, where they were detained again, this time by officers of the Russian spy agency, the FSB, who Vasiliy said offered him money and a job to do. job for them.

He refused, and after three days, they let him go. “They may realize that we are useless to them,” he said. Looking like a homeless man, with a bushy beard and tousled hair, Vasiliy managed to borrow money from a friend of a friend in order to obtain new documents and travel across the Baltic countries and Ba Lan to return to Ukraine.

Shepets, Vadym’s sister, tried to find any information about her brother’s whereabouts, writing letters and scouring the internet. Eventually, she learned from a Ukrainian government agency that he was in Russian custody. Then a friend who found what appeared to be a mug in prison shot him in a Russian online chat room.

“Honestly, I’m hysterical, because he’s only half of my brother,” Ms Shepets said. “He is very skinny in the picture. You can see the hollow under his eyes and collarbone.”

The photo was later removed from the social media group. “Now we know nothing – there is no connection; nothing at all,” she said and wiped her tears.

Kamila Hrabchuk Reporting contributions from Kharkiv and Zaporizhzhia.



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