'Say your goodbyes': the Ukrainian civilians being held hostage in Russia
Why Russia is holding 2,000 ordinary Ukrainians, and what do we know about what’s happening to them in captivity?
By Anastasia Golubeva.
Around 2,000 Ukrainian civilians are currently being held as prisoners in Russia and in occupied parts of Ukraine. Many are in pre-trial detention centres and penal colonies with no contact with the outside world and no hope of release any time soon. Why Russia is holding so many ordinary Ukrainians, and what, if anything, do we know about what’s happening to them in captivity.
Bucha: ‘say your goodbyes’
On 18 March 2021, three weeks after the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Natalya Kulakovskaya and Yevgeny Guryanov were at home in the small town of Bucha, in Kyiv region, when a group of Russian soldiers in an APC tried to drive straight through the closed gates into their front yard.
“My husband ran out to meet them shouting ‘there’s no need to break anything, we will let you in’. But, they waved him out the of the way and smashed the gates down anyway,” Natalya says.
The soldiers pushed Natalya up against the fence at gunpoint, dragged Yevgeny to one side and shouted something at him.
“It looked like they were threatening him that if he refused to co-operate and provide them with information, they would do something to me,” Natalya continues.
After that, Natalya was held outside while the soldiers, marched Yevgeny into the house and began searching it. While they were waiting Natalya got her first glimpse of the Russian worldview as the soldiers accused her of “selling herself to the Americans for food”, accused Ukrainians of “beating up Second World War veteran on Victory Day”, and told her firmly that life was better in the USSR. When she attempted to argue, they told her she needed to study history better.
After some time, Natalya was brought back to the house, to find her husband on his knees with a gun held to his head as the Russians carried equipment and belongings out of their house. One of the soldiers told Natalya: “Say your goodbyes.”
“We were all dumbfounded. I knelt down, hugged him, he had gone cold,” she says. “No one could say anything. We couldn’t believe this was happening to us. I hugged him, touched him gently and they told us, ‘That’s enough’”.
With that her husband was taken away.
In the months that followed Natalya tried frantically to find out what had happened to Yevgeny, reaching out to various officials in Russia with the help of Russian and Ukrainian human rights groups.
In August 2022, she received confirmation from Russian authorities, that Yevgeny was still alive. She was told he was being held at an undisclosed location in Russia on suspicion of ‘acting contrary to the interests of the special military operation’.
She was also sent a small hand-written note from Yevgeny that simply said that he was alive and well.
As other Ukrainian civilians captured by the Russians during the early months of the war began to return home, Natalya learned that Yevgeny was probably being held in pre-trail detention centre number 2 in Bryansk region about 500 km from the Ukrainian border.
However, the detention centre itself denies holding what it called “special contingent prisoners”. The documents with this response are in the possession of BBC Russian.
Yevgeny is not the only person in the family to be taken prisoner by the Russians.
On 7 March Natalya’s brother-in-law Sergei Lyubich left Bucha to drive back to his home town of Hostomel with supplies of water for friends and neighbours. He didn’t come back, and it was only the following month, after the Russian withdrawal from Kyiv region that Natalya and her sister found out what had happened.
Local people told them that Russian soldiers had stopped Sergei’s car, and taken him away to the military base at Hostomel airport. When the Russians left, local people told them, they took all the prisoners with them.
Natalya has no idea why Sergei and Yevgeny were taken prisoner. Trying to make sense of it, she wonders if her husband was taken because the Russians wrongly thought he had some connections to the Ukrainian army. When the soldiers searched their house, they had found some green sleeping bags, used for camping,
“They must have thought that if the sleeping bags were green, it must mean the military,” she says.
The soliders also asked Yevgeny to show them his hands.
“He has been working as a mechanic for 20 years, his hands almost never looked clean, he worked with diesel fuel. When they checked men’s hands, if they were black, that meant they worked with gunpowder,” she says.
Her sister’s husband, Sergei, may have been singled out by the Russian military on account of his physique, says Natalia.
“[He was taken away], maybe because he is a big man, tall with broad shoulders”.
Russian lawyer Leonid Solovyov, who acts on behalf of Ukrainian civilians taken prisoner by the Russians says he has seen several similar cases.
Nikita Shkryabin, a student at Kharkiv University, was taken away in March and hasn’t been seen since.
“Russian soldiers lined up all the students to see who was tall and athletic and could be capable of holding a gun in their hand, and then took those people away”, says Solovyov, who is now acting for Shkryabin.
Since the summer, Solovyov has been trying without success to get access to his client. The Russian Ministry of Defence has not disclosed where the prisoners are being held. Solovyov suspects that Shkryabin is somewhere in the Rostov region, but the Russian authorities have not allowed any contact with him.
Kherson – suspected saboteurs
After Russian troops occupied Kherson on 2 March, Maria Volkova and her husband Ivan Kozlov decided to take their two young children out of the city and get away to safety in Georgia.
On April 21 they boarded a bus at the start of a long journey which would take them across Russian territory and down into the South Caucasus.
At the first checkpoint on the administrative border with Crimea, Ivan – an IT specialist - was pulled off the bus and taken away for questioning by Russian Federal Security officers.
A few hours went by and Maria was told -- ‘You go on, your husband will catch up with you later’.
It was the last time she saw him.
Maria and the children travelled on but they were stopped again at another border crossing – this time as they tried to enter Abkhazia, the breakaway Georgian region which Russia recognises as an independent state.
After several rounds of questioning, the family were kept overnight in a police station, their belongings and documents confiscated. It was clear, Maria says, that the police suspected she and her husband were Ukrainian agents, and were using their children as cover to enter Russia on a sabotage mission.
The following day the police let Maria and the children go, and they were able to complete their journey to Georgia. It was there, a week later, still with no news of Ivan, that Maria heard from friends in Kherson that Russian troops had searched their flat and taken away computer equipment.
It would be another few months before news finally came that Ivan was being held in a pre-trial detention centre in Simferopol (the administrative centre of Russian-annexed Crimea).
Mariupol – a former soldier
Diana Khotsevich and her husband Sergei were living in a village on the outskirts of Mariupol, when the Russians invaded.
Sergei was a former soldier and had been working in a local factory.
On 10 April, five weeks before Mariupol was occupied by the Russian army, paramilitaries from the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic came to the house and took Diana’s husband away.
“They said they would sort things out and let him go,” she says. But instead Sergei was taken to a penal colony near Donetsk, where he is still being held.
Diana says she recognised one of the men who came to arrest her husband. He was the son of a neighbour, and had been working for the authorities in the Donetsk.
She is still waiting for news about Sergei.
Undefined status
Ukraine’s Centre for Civil Liberties estimates that there are at least 2,000 Ukrainian civilians being held prisoner in Russia and in the occupied parts of Ukraine.
The centre has confirmed the names of 800 people. They piece together information passed on to them by relatives of people who have been taken, from eyetwitnesses, and also from other Ukrainian prisoners who have subsequently been released and allowed to go home, bringing with them news of other detainees.
One of the problems with getting access to civilian prisoners is that Russia does not make a distinction between soldiers and ordinary civilians.
Both can be held on the charge of “acting against the interests of the special military operation”.
“The [Russian] Ministry of Defence clearly states that there is no war and, therefore, there can be no prisoners of war. Consequently, these are just ‘detained people’”, says lawyer Leonid Solovyov.
In written responses seen by the BBC, the Russian Defence Ministry claims that Ukrainian civilian detainees are being held ‘in accordance with the Geneva Conventions’.
But their continued detention is in itself a breach of the conventions, says human rights activist Mikhail Savva.
“Yes, an occupying power can detain a civilian if it suspects them of something. But as soon as the reasons that caused the detention are gone this person should be immediately released without any exchanges,” he told the BBC.
“They are not prisoners of war. But Russia does not release them.”
According to Savva, about half of the total number of civilian prisoners currently being held by the Russians, were detained in the Kyiv, Chernihiv, Sumy and Kharkiv regions of Ukraine.
As these areas are no longer under Russian occupation, there should no longer be any reason to keep holding people. But in reality, only a few civilians taken from these areas have actually been allowed to go home.
One possible reason is that Russia sees civilians as useful bargaining chips in prisoner exchanges.
Although it’s prohibited by the Geneva Conventions, Russia is ready to exchange civilians for POWs, and some such exchanges have taken place, says Mikhail Savva.
Taken to Russia
The fate of detained Ukrainian civilians depends to a large extent on exactly where they were captured.
People detained on the territories of the Donetsk People’s Republic and Luhansk People’s Republic generally remain there. But civilians captured in areas occupied after February 24, 2022 (when the Russian invasion started), usually end up being transferred to pre-trial detention centres or penal colonies in Russia.
The main problem faced by human rights activists and lawyers is that the Russian authorities rarely reveal exactly where a person is being held and they do not allow any contact with them.
In its replies to prisoners’ relatives, seen by the BBC, the Russian Ministry of Defence says that it is possible to contact the prisoners through the International Red Cross. In reality, letters to prisoners rarely reach their addressees.
Roman Kiselev, a Russian human rights activist who helps Ukrainians looking for their relatives, says that Ukrainian prisoners are not officially the responsibility of the Russian prison service and as a result they don’t even have the rights given to ordinary prisoners.
“Human rights lawyers have tried to make contact and were told, ‘We don’t have them’. As we understand it, prisoners are under the jurisdiction of military police. They are in a dedicated, special section so that no one sees them or hears them”, says Kiselev.
According to him, these prisoners may be deprived of the right to exercise, to receive parcels, or to have access to the prison shop or other facilities.
“This is a significant problem,” says Kiselev. “Ordinary prisoners and those under investigation are at least able to read. They have a library, they can receive parcels or letters. But they [Ukrainian prisoner] don’t receive letters or books, or anything at all.”
Ukrainian prisoners are also periodically moved inside the prison system, which makes it very hard to track them down.
After her husband was detained at the Crimean checkpoint, Crimea, Maria Volkova was able to find out he was being held in Simferopol. Her mother spent several months in the city trying to make contact with her son-in-law.
“She went there and asked for a meeting, or a transfer, or at least a letter. Everything is forbidden and they give various excuses, even to closest relatives with documents to prove it”, says Maria.
“I wrote a regular letter by hand, sent it by mail, but God knows whether they gave it to him or not.”
According to Maria, staff at the pre-trial detention centre initially told her mother that Ivan was in quarantine. Later they refused to give out any information at all. In October, six months after he was arrested, Maria received a reply from the Russian authorities saying Ivan had been transferred to a different centre in the same city.
Held in the self-proclaimed republics
If a person is detained on the territory of the self-proclaimed LPR or DPR, they remain under the control of these ‘republics’, says Roman Kiselev.
“The DPR has special legal rules for prisoners that allow detaining a person for up to 30 days, but in reality people are kept for much longer” he explains.
Subsequently, a criminal case can be opened against a person and they can be given the status of ‘prisoner’ which becomes enshrined in law in the self-proclaimed republic. The problem with laws in the DPR is that many of them are not published and there is no way for outsiders to know or understand them.
“The State Defence Committee of the DPR has issued a decree providing for the status of a prisoner but it has not been published. We do not know what it consists of. We only know that there is a legal status of ‘prisoner’ and it is assigned to people for a period of 10 years”, says Kiselev. There are no details on what this status means, how it might be removed or how it might be appealed.
The self-proclaimed DNR authorities do share some information with prisoners’ relatives about where prisoners are held and even allow correspondence. But it’s more difficult in the self-proclaimed LNR, where human rights activists know very little about the situation with prisoners.
Diana Khotsevich’s husband, Sergei from Mariupol, is in a penal colony near Donetsk. Since July, the odd letter has arrived from him.
“Understandably, he doesn’t write anything about the conditions but he said was alive and healthy. In terms of food and illness: I don’t know, he doesn’t write much”, she says. According to her, her husband is allowed to shower and to go on walks once a week.
After the arrest, her husband was charged with criminal charges under three articles of the criminal code of the DPR: on the planning and conduct of an aggressive war, terrorism and the forcible seizure of power. However, a few months later, the criminal charges were dropped and Sergei was transferred from the pre-trial detention centre to a colony.
Legal challenges
Human rights activist Kiselev says there are big legal challenges for prisoners both in Russia and in the self-proclaimed DPR.
Prisoners held on the territory of Russia are given the formal status of ‘detained for acting against the interests of the Special Military Operation’, but no Russian laws provide for such a status.
“All state bodies are trying, in various ways, to avoid the question of whether and how this status corresponds to the law. The Prosecutor General’s Office, the Military Prosecutor’s Office and human rights commissioners; they all try to avoid explaining what this status is”, says Kiselev.
Captured Ukrainians can be kept in custody on the basis of pending court decisions and there are no time limits, lawyer Leonid Solovyov confirms.
“There is no time limit”, he says. “These are the actions of an extra-legal regime. The logic is that wherever it is easier not to follow the law, they do not follow it.”
With prisoners in the DPR there is another legal contradiction. For Russia, this is no longer a self-proclaimed republic but an annexed region of Russia. Therefore the laws there must also be Russian. Nevertheless, the old laws continue to be used there says Roman Kiselev.
“The status of a prisoner in the DPR does not really abide by the Russian constitution. The Russian Constitution clearly states in black and white how restrictions on fundamental human rights are allowed: they must be provided for by federal laws. Here there is no federal law, only some kind of regional law and even that is in an unpublished state”, explains Kiselev.
However, neither of the two statuses – ‘detained for acting against the Special Military Operation’ or ‘prisoner’ – in the DPR abide by the Russian Constitution or international standards. For example, the Fourth Geneva Convention requires a distinction to be made between civilians and combatants. This is not done with prisoners in the DPR. The convention also gives prisoners the right to correspondence and appeal to the court. This convention is also not respected.
“Personnel of the current Russian regime are so weak, so unprofessional that they make mistakes [with wording] at literally every step. In the current situation, what they are doing with civilian Ukrainians every day, every minute, constitutes a gross violation of international humanitarian rights,” says Ukrainian human rights activist Mikhail Savva.
Deliberate detentions
Since the start of the Russian invasion on 24 February there have been two waves of mass detentions of civilians.
The first was in March and April when the Russian army was in the central regions of Ukraine.
The second came in August and September just before the ‘referenda’ in Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporozhye regions.
During that second wave, the occupying authorities formed election committees and looked to involve local deputies, journalists, and teachers says human rights activist Mikhail Savva. Those who refused were detained.
According to the Ukrainian Centre for Civil Liberties, over half of the Ukrainian prisoners were detained in their own homes. That means that these people were specifically sought out by the Russians.
“The occupiers gained access to lists of the participants of counter-terrorism operations, lists of police officers and lawmakers. These are the people they came after,” says Savva.
There have also been cases where locals are informed on to the Russian military by their own neighbours or acquaintances.
People of high standing in local communities, teachers and lawmakers, immediately came to the attention of the occupiers.
This is how the head of the Melitopol District Council, Sergei Priyma, spent a month and a half in captivity. On 13 March they came to his house with a search warrant.
“They told my father to pack his things and come with them,” says his son Vlad. “My mother asked, ‘Where are you taking him?’. They replied, ‘Don’t worry, we just want to ask him some questions and will return him soon’. They put a bag over my father’s head and led him away in handcuffs, put him in a car and took him to a military office.”
After this, Sergei Priyma’s wife went every day to the commandant’s office, to the military office, to the police and to the occupational administration, to try and find out where and how her husband was and what was happening to him. Priyma’s family did not receive a response for a month and a half. Then, at the end of April, Priyma was brought home in the evening and for three days was forbidden to talk about his release.
According to Vlad Priyma, his father was detained in order to make him resign and hand over official documents. When he refused he was moved to the basement.
“In the first week, my father had to sit on a chair in the military office building. His arms and legs were tied, they kept a bag on his head and gave him just one glass of water each day. On the seventh day they transferred him to a room in the basement where there was just a single table for him to sleep on. They either fed him once every 24 hours or they starved him for days at a time”, says Vlad.
According to Priyma, the Russian military tortured his father with electric shocks and beat him during interrogations.
“They had him read the Krasnaya Zvezda (Red Star – the official newspaper of the Russian Ministry of Defence). It read that Kyiv had been taken by Russian troops, that Kharkov was surrounded, that the armed forces of Ukraine had been defeated, that Zelensky has fled to Poland. When he was released my father had a very inaccurate picture of the actual state of affairs”.
Rare returns home
Almost a year since the start of the war, several thousand Ukrainian civilians are still being held in Russia and in occupied areas. In most cases there is no contact with them.
In December, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) reported visiting ‘a number of prisoners of war’ and helping them get letters to their relatives. However, the Red Cross has not reported how many prisoners they visited and where. The Red Cross did not respond to a request from the BBC Russian Service for statistics on prisoner visits.
On what basis the Russian authorities allow contact with certain prisoners is not known, however human rights activists say that these cases are extremely rare.
“When you talk to the Red Cross they say ‘You see it is already very difficult for us to work in Russia. If we overstep and become very active, they will deprive us of the small amount of work we are currently allowed to do’. I understand them, however we must do our duties”, says Mikhail Savva.
In order for any sort of systematic return of civilian prisoners to take shape, the ICRC must, in accordance with the Geneva Conventions, appoint so-called ‘protecting powers’. These would be countries that have no part in the war but work to guarantee the rights of the civilian population. The ICRC has not yet initiated this process, says Mikhail Savva.
“By my assessment, the situation is very bad. Even those mechanisms currently in place for the protection of international humanitarian law are insufficient and even those are not being adequately followed. And this war is very cruel, and very bloody”, he says.
However, Savva does believe that there are ways to pressure the Russian government and demand the release of Ukrainian citizens. As an example, he cites how over a hundred Ukrainians were held in the Moscow detention centre in Sakharovo during the first months of war. Russia wanted to deport them under the pretext of various administrative offenses, but all border crossings were closed due to the outbreak of war.
From the start of the war, human rights activists and foreign politicians demanded that the Russian government release these people. As a result, says Savva, almost everyone was released from Sakharovo, except for ten people suspected of extremism.
Even in the current situation, human rights activists are conducting ‘an international campaign in various forms’ to try and increase the pressure on the Russian government.
“Let’s put it this way, when the Russian authorities find themselves facing reputational losses, they are forced to act,” concludes Mikhail Savva.
Back in Bucha, Natalya is feeling helpless to do anything to bring her husband Yevgeny home.
“I don’t like to admit it, but we are now dependant on Russia,” she says.
“We can’t just pick up a pitchfork and turn up at the detention centre to set our loved ones freed,” says Natalia.
“If only. I so wish that we could.”
All pictures ©BBC Russian Service.
Read this story in Russian here.
Translated by Danny Booth.