Olena’s voice breaks when she talks about her father, Vitali Atamantxuk. “He is 70 years old and paralyzed, the younger prisoners change his diapers. He can hardly walk, he should have been released long ago. I’ve been fighting for five years, I can’t do it anymore,” she says, broken by pain. “My mother, Olena Fedoruk, has been detained since 2017, and her health is very fragile. A commission has been created for prisoners of war but not for civilian prisoners, how much longer do I have to wait to see it?” pleads Dà ria, in her twenties, looking into the eyes of the representative of the Office of the Ombudsman. “They say that there is money to seek legal support, but I have tried and I have not succeeded, what should I do to get someone to look for my son?”, asks a desperate father at the end of a conference held this week in Kyiv with associations working with civilians detained in Russia.
Since February 24, 2022, Moscow has cut off the few channels of communication that existed, and relatives of prisoners and missing persons are consumed by the lack of news and progress. Prisoners are often taken from one place to another and know that they can lose track of them at any time. In many cases, they report inhumane treatment and torture, and there has been talk of sexual abuse.
“My family was captured on September 4, 2018 in Donetsk for their pro-Ukrainian positions. They entered the house and took my father, mother and brother”, explains Olena. A lawyer contacted her and – in exchange for a large sum of money that she prefers not to reveal – secured the release of her mother and brother, who died a few days later “as a result of the torture” suffered . For a year, they heard nothing from their father, Vitali. In October 2019, he was sentenced to seventeen years in prison for espionage, his daughter explains before explaining the long list of medical problems he suffered from before his arrest.
“I do not know what to do. He’s been there for five years, we don’t know how long he’ll be there, but we can’t wait for the war to end, they have to release him. He is 70 years old, he is not a danger to anyone”, insists Olena, who fears that, in the current complex situation, cases like hers will be forgotten. “The Government is focusing on prisoners of war. We do not forget them, but we feel that there is a lack of attention towards them”, he says shyly.
“Only the international community can help us. Our Government listens to us, but unfortunately it cannot do everything we ask because there are not enough resources and Russia is blocking everything”, says the father of ValentÃn Vihivski, taken in Russia, who will turn 40 this summer. An aviation enthusiast, he was arrested in 2014 in Crimea and taken to Moscow. It took months to track him down and understand what had happened. “Intelligence agents beat him throughout the flight. Then they took him to a forest and simulated an executionâ€. Russia accused him of “possession of confidential information†and then of espionage. He is sentenced to eleven years in prison. He can no longer communicate with them by letter, now he depends on a Russian mediator.
The figures are, by definition, approximate, but according to the oenagé Media Initiative for Human Rights, which has identified 60 detention centers, in April there were 948 civilians held in the hands of Moscow, either in Russia or in occupied Ukrainian territories. “When the Russians arrive on Ukrainian territory, they first practice military terror and commit murders and arrests that can only be described as crimes against humanity. Then there are the actions of the special services and the espionage agencies. It is a policy of systematic repression”, says Ãhor Kozlovski, co-founder of the platform for the release of political prisoners in Ukraine, organizer of the symposium held this Friday.
“I have spoken to people who fled the southern and eastern regions and have seen how they work. They have created a system of informants, have lists with names and practice arbitrary arrestsâ€. Russia, Kozlovski continues, is trying to “break” the prisoners “by telling them that no one is looking for them, that Ukraine is losing the war and that it is better for them to collaborate.” They are under enormous psychological pressure.”
Finding lawyers in Russia is a challenge; they fear being persecuted and few lawyers take on such cases. Despite the lack of media, languages ​​and contacts, many relatives have knocked on the doors of European Foreign Ministries, community institutions or the United States Administration. Now they have proposed to involve the EU and systematize their efforts. “Perhaps we can start by creating a group of European and Ukrainian experts, and then prepare an agenda to help those affected,” suggests Olga Hrib, whose brother, Pavló, was illegally detained in Belarus in 2017. when he was visiting a girl, and taken to Russia, where he was accused of terrorism. He was 18 years old and had several health problems. The EU and other bodies reported his case, and in 2019 he was released in a prisoner exchange. Marked by captivity, he now fights in his country’s army.
“On an international scale, there is talk of the deportation of children but not of prisoners or detained civilians. We need to talk more about it”, advises Irina Herashchenko, former vice-president of the Rada. “They are heroes, we can’t tell the world that we fight for anonymous prisoners, we have to say out loud the names of those we know”.
