The Russian military aggression against Ukraine, which began two years ago, lacerates the population of the invaded country, its infrastructure and its future, in multiple dimensions. A distressing chapter, often forgotten, is that of the thousands of Ukrainian civilians imprisoned in Russia or in territories occupied by Russia in formal or informal prisons, where they suffer mistreatment, torture, mock executions, psychological terror, forced labor and, in In the case of women, sexual violence as well. This has been documented, crossing various sources, by the Government of Ukraine, by Ukrainian NGOs and by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.
Ukrainian Olena Yagupova, 51, faced that terrible experience for six months, and recounted it in an interview with La Vanguardia during her visit to Berlin for a meeting of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation (KAS). When Vladimir Putin launched the invasion on February 24, 2022, Yagupova worked in the City Hall of Kamianka-Dniprovska, a city of half a million inhabitants about 70 kilometers from Zaporizhzhia capital, in the southeast of the country. Already in March, the Russian army occupied the city, which remains occupied to this day.
“In October they came to look for me at home. They were armed, and when someone is armed they don’t need to explain why. But later they did tell me that someone had informed them that my husband is in the army of our country, and that therefore I am pro-Ukraine,” he explains. Her husband had joined the armed forces in 2019. “They took me to the police station, which was already a Russian police station at that time. “I spent four months in a pretrial detention center, where I was tortured, and another two months in a forced labor camp, where I had to dig trenches for the Russians.”
Olena Yagupova speaks with a mix of serenity and resolution. “For two days I was tortured in different ways. They pressed my neck with a wire; They put a plastic bag over my head and covered my nose so I couldn’t breathe. They also pretended to shoot me dead. And they threatened me with sexual abuse. They beat me until I suffered open head trauma; “The blood was running down my back.” These are just some examples of what she suffered, she points out, but she prefers not to give more details: “I trust that these examples are enough to understand the situation of civilian prisoners.”
Then he sighs and adds: “I want to emphasize that many cases of sexual harassment occur in forced camps. Sexual violence is very common in these places; Sexual abuse and rape happen constantly. We are talking about all aspects of sexual harassment. It’s not just about being naked; It’s about physical contact, it’s about sex. “If they order you into the trenches and there is a naked commander telling you to get naked, and it all happens while they point a gun at you, then there is no choice but to do what they want, or you will be killed.”
Olena Yagupova never knew how many people were held in her pretrial detention center: “There were six or seven rooms full of people. They forced us to learn the Russian anthem and sing it, and when someone did not do it correctly, they were beaten and tortured, and there was also sexual violence.” She does know that her captors planned to transfer them to Russia, but “for some reason they could not launch the operation.”
It is difficult to elucidate the number of Ukrainian civilians held captive by Russia. Dmytro Lubinets, Human Rights Commissioner of the Ukrainian Parliament, estimates that there are about 28,000, assuming that arrests began in 2014 in Crimea and in the self-proclaimed republics of Donetsk and Luhansk in the east, and increased greatly after the invasion. of 2022.
International law is slippery when it comes to addressing these abuses in war. The 1949 Geneva Convention prohibits the taking of hostages and regulates the treatment of military prisoners, while regarding civilians it says that they can be detained “in accordance with the laws and regulations of the occupier” and with the guarantees of all judicial process, with access to a lawyer and his family.
Arbitrary detention of civilians is illegal. In practice, Russia preventively detains Ukrainian civilians without bringing charges, beyond the generic verbal accusation of going against the “Russian special military operation.” Without charges, trial or court – even an unfair court – it is almost impossible to invoke rights for these people or negotiate their release, explains the Ukrainian NGO Media Initiative for Human Rights (MIHR).
Furthermore, since May 2022, a special unit of the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense has been in charge of negotiating the exchange of prisoners with Russia, whose priority is the release of military personnel, which is why civilians are rarely included in the exchanges. One was made in January, in which Russia freed 230 Ukrainians, only six of whom were civilians. According to Kyiv, the number of Ukrainian military prisoners of war was 3,574 last November.
For civilians trapped in captivity in Russia or Russian-occupied territories, ill-treatment, torture or forced labor are the norm. After four months in the pre-trial detention center in her city, Olena Yagupova was assigned to hard labor. “They were preparing the second line of defense. We dug and built trenches for the Russian soldiers, and we also had to clear the fields that the Russians had mined before; those were the two activities connected with the army. The majority of prisoners in the camp were men; women, there were only three of us. We also worked in the trenches, but we also had to clean the Ukrainian houses that the Russian soldiers had occupied, and wash and iron their uniforms.”
Salvation for Yagupova came through a stroke of fortune. “It was because of the human factor. One of the prisoners asked many times to be able to make a phone call; Finally, they gave him a phone. As I understand it, he managed to contact someone in Ukraine, who in turn contacted someone in Russia; “We don’t know how it happened exactly, but someone with some influence ordered our group to be released.”
Once outside, she managed to leave the city thanks to trusted drivers, who took her through the occupied zone to Russia. She crossed into Latvia, Lithuania and Poland, and from there she returned to Ukraine. She now lives between two cities, Zaporizhzhia and Kyiv, and works for Ukrainian organizations. “I want to help find those criminals,” she says. “I can be very useful, because I remember their faces well.”
