Olena's voice cracks as she names her father, Vitaly Atamanchuk. “He is 70 years old and he is paralyzed, the younger prisoners change his nappies. He almost can't walk, he should have been released long ago. He's been fighting for five years, I can't take it anymore, ”she says, broken with 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 Daria, in her twenties, looking the representative of the Ombudsman's office in the eye. "They say there is money to seek legal support but I have tried and I have not succeeded, what do I have to do for 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 detained civilians in Russia.
Since February 24, 2022, Moscow has cut off the few communication channels that existed and the relatives of prisoners and disappeared are consumed by the lack of news and progress. They denounce that Russia presents fictitious charges against them and that they are often taken from one place to another, making it easy to lose track of them. In many cases they denounce inhumane treatment and torture, and sexual abuse is known. Some, even after serving their sentences, cannot return to their loved ones, the authorities of the occupied territories force them to remain in the region because they may be called to the front.
“My family was captured on September 4, 2018 in Donetsk for their pro-Ukrainian positions. They entered the house and took my father, my mother and my brother”, explains Olena. A lawyer contacted her and – in exchange for a large sum of money that she prefers not to reveal, partly because it is a practice that the authorities advise against – she obtained the release of her mother and her brother, who died a few days later “as a consequence of of the tortures” suffered. For a year, they didn't hear from her father, Vitaly. In October 2019, he was sentenced to 17 years in prison for espionage, his daughter explains before recounting the long list of medical problems he suffered before his arrest.
"I don't know what to do. He has been there for five years, we don't know how long he will be there but we cannot wait for the war to end, they must 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 fall into oblivion. “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, ”she 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 Valentyn Vyhivskyi, who will be 40 this summer. A Maidan activist, he apparently fell into a trap set by a girl to travel to the Crimea for humanitarian purposes (help pay for a medical operation) and was arrested at the end of 2014. It took his family months to locate him and understand what was going on. past. He “was arrested and taken to Moscow. Intelligence agents beat him throughout the flight. Then they took him to a forest and simulated an execution, ”says his father. Charged with possession of confidential information and espionage, Vyhivskyi was sentenced to eleven years in prison.
The figures are, by definition, approximate but, according to the NGO Media Initiative for Human Rights, which has identified 60 detention centers, in April there were 948 civilians detained 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 spy agencies. It is a policy of systematic repression”, says lhor 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 from the southern and eastern regions and have seen how they work. They have created a system of informants, they have lists of names and they practice arbitrary arrests”. Russia, Kozlovski continues, tries 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 with them. They are under enormous psychological pressure.”
Finding lawyers in Russia is challenging; they fear being persecuted and few accept these cases. Despite the lack of means, languages and contacts, many relatives have knocked on the doors of European Foreign Ministries, community institutions or the US administration. Now, they have proposed to involve the EU and systematize their efforts. “Maybe we can start by creating a group of European and Ukrainian experts, and then prepare an agenda to help those affected,” says Olga Hryb, whose brother, Pavlo, was illegally detained in Belarus in 2017 when he was going to visit a girl. and taken to Russia, where he was charged with terrorism. He was 18 years old and had several health problems. The EU and other bodies denounced his case and, in 2019, he was released in a prisoner exchange. Scarred by captivity, he now fights in his country's army.
“At the international level there is talk of the deportation of children but not of prisoners or detained civilians. You have to talk more about them," advises Iryna Herashchenko, former vice president of the Rada, who has worked on cases of disappeared persons and political prisoners and is still in contact with many relatives of victims. "They are heroes, we cannot tell the world that we fight for anonymous prisoners, we must say out loud the names of those you know."
