The taxi driver stops three hundred meters away from the prison (“you can walk from here”) for fear that the soldiers at the gates will give him a recruitment letter. Petro Yatsenko gives instructions to the group of fifteen journalists and interpreters: you cannot tell the location, you cannot show the guards’ faces or talk to them, and you can talk to all the prisoners who want to talk. Yatsenko is a writer, and is press officer of the Coordination for the Treatment of Prisoners of War. He concludes with a recommendation: “There are many prisoners, you have many stories. You don’t have to all throw yourself on top of the first one you see.” Which is more or less what will end up happening.
In the yard, Russian prisoners stand in two queues before being searched. After the checkpoint, they stand back in two rows, all with their hands behind their backs, many with their heads bowed. In the west of Ukraine, a former Soviet prison has been converted into a camp for Russian prisoners of war. It is the largest in Ukraine, and the prisoners will later say that it is the best, and that is why they teach this one. The atmosphere is gray and silent, but not very oppressive.
There are three walls of about five meters, with double spiked wire on top of each one. The guards do not carry weapons openly and the prisoners are not handcuffed. “That is not a prison, it is a camp for prisoners of war,” says Yatsenko; Besides, we are far from Russia, it wouldn’t make much sense for them to try to escape. They are hoping to be traded soon. Their conditions here are good, and their needs are covered.” The tour goes through one of the bedrooms. There are forty beds and the windows do not have bars. There are no prisoners now, but there are some books on the nightstands. Among others: Stories from Sevastopol, by Tolstoy; Jesus, our destiny, by Wilhelm Bush, and three bibles.
The infirmary. Stanislav sits on one bed and Vladislav lies on the other. Stanislav is 38 years old, and he was captured four months ago: “They ordered us to assault the Ukrainian positions and they wounded me. I couldn’t move, I lost a lot of blood. Later, some Ukrainian soldiers found me and took me to the doctors.” A shot hit him in the abdomen and pierced his intestines, and now he has a colostomy. Vladislav, 25, says he doesn’t really feel like talking: “I have a lot of broken bones, I was hit by shrapnel. “I’m doing rehabilitation to at least have the strength to sit.” On the table there are three books: a collection of stories by Georges Simenon, another by Chesterton’s Father Brown, and a biography of Audrey Hepburn. In the next room, another prisoner reads Ivanhoe, by Walter Scott. He has all his toes amputated: they froze. A Ukrainian journalist and her camera enter, they get in the middle and, after listening to what the bedridden prisoner tells her, she looks at the camera and says that everything is a lie.
Most have all four limbs, but there are those who do not. Depending on where you look, it’s devastating. In any case, the fact that the alternative to captivity was dying in the mud must be a relief for everyone, even the mutilated. There are two who run with wheelchairs: one has both legs amputated below the knee, the other only one, but the other seems to be missing a foot. There are a couple who have lost an arm, and some with amputated toes. The injured, in case there was any doubt, are identified because instead of the blue overalls they are wearing one with vertical stripes.
In the corner is a man with his arm in a sling from a gunshot wound. Like all the interviewees except one, he explains that he was forcibly recruited: “If I did not accept the mobilization, I would go to prison.” He continues: “They promised us that they would not send us on any missions. But they sent us to a forest in Kupiansk, and said that on our return we would go home. Before reaching the forest, they attacked us from the air. Me and my lieutenant survived. He was able to escape two days later, but I was injured and I was hiding in the shelter for five days.” Until some Ukrainian soldiers found him. He has a wife and two children, and last month he spoke with them for two minutes.
Yatsenko said at the beginning of the visit that each prisoner has five minutes a month to talk to whoever they want: “The Geneva Conventions don’t say that, it is our will. We expected the same from the Russian side, but it is not happening and now we are considering stopping doing it ourselves.” On the other side of the courtyard is the only interviewee who says that he enlisted voluntarily, but his motivations are vague or strange: “When I was young I went to Afghanistan. And now that my children have grown up, I decided to come to Ukraine.” He is from Ossetia, he is 56 years old and his back is peppered with shrapnel.
The working day. They take off their caps and wash their hands. They eat at tables of four, in silence. In fact, they are almost always silent, not even in the courtyard did they raise their voices much. First there is borsch (a Ukrainian soup) and secondly corn porridge with a meat ball, and they have a piece of bread and a dish with onion salad. When they finish the meal, all four of them get up from the table at the same time, one counts to four in Russian and everyone at the same time says, in Ukrainian, “Thank you for the food.” One says that today, since there is press, they have given them more. The food is good. It is a group of prisoners who cook, serve the food and clean the dishes.
Everyone who is healthy works eight hours a day. Most make furniture (especially wicker) and Christmas trees. Given the nature of these jobs, they use all types of utensils that could be used as weapons. The journalists squeeze between dozens of them while they work the wicker. They have more to lose than to gain, but given the circumstances, it would not be entirely strange if one of them fantasized about sticking the chisel into the eye or neck of one of the journalists who have been looking at them and photographing them as if they were some monkeys in the zoo.
