"I'm a woman – they won't touch me." But the Russians did. On Russia's abduction and torture of Ukrainian civilians

There are some things you want to shout about from the rooftops, but sometimes you don't have the energy to even put an exclamation mark at the end of a sentence.

"Mum, could you get the kids please?"

A woman is holding her phone – it’s on speaker, and there’s lots of noise around her. She has a Ukrainian flag draped over her shoulders. She’s holding her phone – plus a bunch of yellow chrysanthemums – in her left hand and pressing her right hand to her cheek, so it’s easier to wipe away her tears.

"Can you hear me, my darling boy? Misha, sweetie, I’m finally home. Hello, princess! I’m home, mum. I’m back in Ukraine. That’s it, it’s all over."

"That’s it" isn’t marking the end of the phone call, but the end of a time when phone calls like this were impossible. It marks the end of this woman’s time in Russian captivity.

The Russian-Ukrainian prisoner swap that took place on 13 September 2024 was special, according to Ukraine’s Coordination Headquarters for the Treatment of Prisoners of War. For the first time in a long while, 23 Ukrainian women – including seven civilians – were freed.

Ukrainska Pravda’s editorial team had hoped that Viktoriia Roshchyna, a UP journalist who was captured by Russian forces in August 2023, would be among those released. Information available at the time suggested that this would be the case. But Russia didn’t release her. In October, the Russian Defence Ministry informed Viktoriia’s father that she had died on 19 September. In reality, she was killed by the Russian regime.

Journalist Viktoriia Roshchyna killed in captivity: a tribute through 7 of her best articles

Bringing back civilians is an incredibly difficult process, and made more so by the lack of formal procedures. International law provides for the exchange of prisoners of war, but there is no legal mechanism for the exchange of civilians.

In theory, warring parties have no right to forcibly detain civilians and must release them. In practice, this should be referred to not as a swap but the "return" of civilians, and third countries often have to get involved. The United Arab Emirates assisted in organising September’s release, for example.

"The Coordination Headquarters for the Treatment of Prisoners of War is gathering information about all the civilians being held in Russia," Petro Yatsenko, a spokesman for the headquarters, tells Ukrainska Pravda. "But we’re not disclosing how many of them there are; there are confirmed cases, and then there are cases we’ve found out about from sources that we need to look into further."

The Office of the Prosecutor General of Ukraine says there are more than 4,000 registered proceedings regarding the detention of approximately 15,000 Ukrainian civilians in Russia. It’s important to note, however, that not all 15,000 are still being held prisoner: some of them may have been freed when Russian-occupied territories were liberated by Ukrainian forces, and others may have been released after being tortured by the Russians.

Still, there are a number of Ukrainian civilians being held in Russia whose only hope is a prisoner swap, because Russia has taken their cases to court and is preparing to pass or has already passed sentence.

Since the start of the full-scale invasion, Ukraine has succeeded in bringing 3,672 of its citizens back from Russian captivity. Only 168 of them – fewer than 5% – were civilians. Only a third of those civilians were women.

Here we share the stories of three Ukrainian women who have yet to come home.

They were abducted in different cities, under different circumstances, and on different pretexts. One of them was abducted in the Russian-occupied territories in Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts before the full-scale invasion began, one in the Russian-occupied part of Kherson Oblast, and one in Crimea after it became a springboard for the Russian offensive on mainland Ukraine.

Still, these women’s stories have far more in common than this brief introduction might suggest.

"A misplaced sense of patriotism": Viktoriia Kletchenko's story

Whenever Viktoriia Kletchenko manages to call her mum from the Russian prison camp where she is held, she asks the same question: when will she be exchanged? She asks every single time she calls. But her mother does not have an answer.

On 6 October 2023, the Rostov Oblast Court in Russia sentenced Viktoriia, who is from Kakhovka in Ukraine’s south, to 10 years in a penal colony. Ten years is the minimum sentence for espionage under the Russian Criminal Code. Viktoriia was accused of gathering information about the deployment of Russian troops and military equipment in Russian-occupied Kakhovka and passing it on to Ukrainian special services.

"She obtained information about the deployment of troops to specific locations either in person, or by observing the movement of forces, or by talking to other Kakhovka residents on the Telegram messenger app, or by talking to Kakhovka residents in person while out and about," Viktoriia’s sentence reads. It also says: "She carried out the aforementioned activities out of a misplaced sense of patriotism."

Viktoriia turned 24 this August. She was born in Kakhovka and had lived there her entire life, not even leaving her native Kherson Oblast to pursue higher education – she trained to be a seamstress. She didn’t get a chance to use her sewing skills until her time in the Russian prison camp, where she sews sacks for sugar in a workshop.

Before the full-scale invasion, Viktoriia worked for a firm that issued microcredits. The firm closed after Russia invaded Kherson Oblast and the office building was bombed.

Viktoriia could have fled the Russian occupation: her boyfriend left and asked her to join him. But she didn’t want to leave her parents, who refused to go because of Viktoriia’s 87-year-old grandmother, who is almost blind.

"And then Vita [Viktoriia] said: ‘I’m a woman – they won’t touch me’," recalls her aunt Viktoriia Kuznetsova, who lives in Kyiv.

But the Russians did. It started in March 2023. One day, Viktoriia left her house and just disappeared. Her parents could find no trace of her. Three days later she came back; it turned out that she had been detained by Russian secret services. The Russian Federal Security Service (the FSB) followed soon after with a search warrant and confiscated all of Viktoriia’s devices.

Several weeks later she disappeared again, and once again her parents could find no trace of her. Ten days after Viktoriia’s second disappearance, her mother got a call from an investigator in Russia’s Rostov-on-Don, informing her that her daughter was being held in a pre-trial detention centre there.

Ukrainian human rights activists had been aware of the Rostov-on-Don pre-trial detention centre since before the full-scale war. That’s where the majority of political prisoners from Crimea were held ahead of their trials. Human rights advocates sometimes compared the conditions there to torture. After the full-scale invasion, Russia also used this detention centre to hold the captive defenders of the Azovstal steelworks and the southern Ukranian city of Mariupol.

Viktoriia’s trial was also held in Rostov-on-Don. She is serving her sentence in a women’s prison camp in Azov, a small town in Rostov Oblast that is four times bigger than her native Kakhovka.

"Our Vita was a little bit naive. She’s a homebody. She lived with her mum and dad," Viktoriia’s aunt says. "She loves animals. She had a cat and a dog, both sick, and she was always trying to make them better."

Now it’s Viktoriia’s mum who takes care of her pets. Viktoriia’s dad passed away earlier this year: his heart gave out. After his daughter was captured, he was distraught that he hadn’t been able to protect her, that he hadn’t looked after her enough.

"I can't call them anything other than maniacs": Nataliia Vlasova's story

"Why were you tortured?"

"The way I see it, they were just having fun, they were enjoying it, I could sense it. I was a puppet, and they could do anything they wanted with me. Torturing me relentlessly couldn’t yield any new information: they found out everything I knew on the day the torture started."

June 2024. Southern District Military Court, Rostov-on-Don. The public prosecutor is questioning Nataliia Vlasova, a 43-year-old woman from Ukraine.

Nataliia was captured in March 2019 at the Olenivka checkpoint, which was then controlled by Russian-backed "Donetsk People’s Republic" (DPR) forces. She spent four months at the Izoliatsiia (Isolation) prison and torture centre, and it was the most horrific time of her life. At one point Nataliia begged her torturers to shoot her dead, but they said no, she had to suffer.

"I can’t call them anything other than maniacs, because very few people are capable of taking pleasure in inflicting pain on a naked, tied-up woman and committing all kinds of perverted acts," Nataliia said in court.

These words are the least horrifying part of her testimony about the four months she spent in the torture centre. Nataliia’s testimony is filled with cries of pain and the crackle of electric shocks, with the smells of blood, sperm, and ammonia.

"At a certain point of being tortured, when it feels particularly relentless, you become indifferent to what’s going on and what will happen next. In any case, I had no control over my fate and my body didn’t belong to me. The worst thing was that they said they knew which kindergarten my daughter attended and were going to bring her a toy stuffed with explosives. I had no doubt that they were capable of anything."

Nataliia’s daughter was only four when Nataliia was abducted. She was travelling from Kyiv to Donetsk the week after her daughter’s birthday. The girl is now nine, and she has never known what it’s like to have your mum pick you up from school.

In July 2019, Nataliia was transferred from Izoliatsiia to Donetsk’s Detention Centre No.1, where she spent the next four years. In July 2023, she was transferred again, this time to the Rostov-on-Don detention centre, also known as Detention Centre No.1.

Nataliia’s case involves five people, all of whom are accused of terrorism, attempted murder, illegal border crossing and weapons trafficking. Nataliia denies the charges against her. At the same time, she does not understand how Russia can put her on trial if she is accused of carrying out illegal activities in Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts – territory that Russia did not claim as its own in March 2019.

"Nataliia is lovely, a wonderful person," says her sister Olena, who is seven years older. "Calm and even-tempered. She always thought things through before doing anything, she was never in a rush. She can handle a lot, she’s very strong."

But it wasn't until this year that Olena discovered how strong. When Nataliia was transferred to the Donetsk detention centre, she was finally able to contact her sister.

Thinking back to their conversations during that time, Olena says that sometimes she would complain to her sister about her daily struggles – being out of work, or someone being rude to her. Nataliia always tried to calm her down and be supportive. It was only later, when Olena read Nataliia’s testimony about the torture she had suffered, that she realised what horrors Nataliia had been going through when they were having those conversations.

The last time they spoke was several months ago.

"For the first time, I sensed from her voice that she needed help. I asked her, ‘How’s your health?’ and she said, ‘Could be better.’ That wasn’t like her at all. It was as if she was already broken, you know?"

"I screamed that there was no limit to their bloodlust": Iryna Danylovych's story

On 29 April 2022, Iryna Danylovych, 42, a nurse from Feodosiia, Crimea, was on her way home from her shift at a medical centre. At around 09:00 in the morning, she reached a deserted bus stop in Koktebel to catch a bus home.

She never caught that bus. Instead, a silver Skoda pulled up at the bus stop. Inside was a group of men; three of them were wearing balaclavas, so she couldn’t see their faces. The fourth one, their leader, flashed his FSB ID card at her and ordered her to get into the car. He said they needed to talk to her. Iryna tried to resist, but she was dragged into the car anyway.

That was how Iryna ended up in FSB custody.

She was brought into the Crimean FSB department building with a black bag over her head. Her clothes and personal belongings were inspected; the inspection was filmed on camera. Among the items the FSB officers found in Iryna’s bag was a glasses case.

Iryna was held in the basement of the FSB building for over a week; her family were not told where she was, and no official documents were drawn up to account for her detention. She was beaten, starved, forced to endure freezing cold, and threatened with being taken to a forest and buried alive there. Eventually she was forced to sign some blank pieces of paper.

"Then they left the room and spent a long time quietly discussing something and making a phone call. When they came back, they told me there was an explosive device in my glasses case instead of glasses," Iryna said during her first testimony in court. "They claimed they had just received a phone call informing them about it. ‘We were about to give you your bag back, opened it, and it turned out there was an explosive device inside,’ [they said]. I started screaming that there was no limit to their bloodlust."

Screaming didn’t help. Iryna was officially detained, and in December 2022, she was fined and sentenced to seven years in prison for possession of explosives.

The real reason for Iryna Danylovych’s arrest? "Ira was a citizen journalist," human rights activist Iryna Siedova says. "She wrote about medical workers’ rights during the Covid-19 pandemic. She had a blog and was posting a lot of important information online. In concocting this horrible criminal case, the Russians were attempting to further undermine freedom of speech [in Crimea]."

In her final statement in court, Iryna Danylovych pointed out that her indictment doesn’t say where she got the explosive device that was allegedly found in her bag, why she was carrying it with her, and what she was going to do with it. Instead, there is a whole folder of interviews she had given to foreign media outlets.

It’s significant that one of the first pieces of news about Iryna was published in January 2016, when the FSB questioned her about the operations of the Ukrainian Cultural Centre in Crimea.

Six years on, during the latest round of interrogations before her arrest, the FSB operatives’ concerns hadn’t changed: they wanted Iryna to tell them about [pro-Ukrainian] Crimean activists.

In the Simferopol detention centre, Iryna began to develop health issues. Within a few months, they got so bad that Iryna went on a hunger strike because of the lack of medical care. Her father, Bronislav Danylovych, told journalists that before she was arrested, Iryna had been a perfectly healthy woman; he believed regular beatings and the conditions in which she was being held were to blame for her health issues.

Iryna’s health deteriorated further when she was transferred to a prison camp in Russia’s Stavropol Krai after being sentenced.

"She started losing the hearing in her left ear. When Iryna was taken to the correctional facility, a medical worker told her that her ear would stop hurting when she goes deaf," says human rights activist Iryna Siedova. "Her situation keeps getting worse. She complains of numbness [the left side of her body is growing numb following a mini stroke – ed.] and pain in her heart, and has lost the hearing in one ear. But they no longer give her medicines, not even the ones she was prescribed in Simferopol."

Iryna’s 78-year-old father Bronislav – who was suffering from cancer himself – spoke about his daughter’s health on many occasions. He was a vocal advocate for his daughter’s release and contacted numerous human rights activists and the media. But the cancer eventually took its toll, and he passed away on 1 August this year.

"Sometimes I wake up and catch myself thinking: ‘I’ve woken up, and no one’s come to get me. That means they won’t come today’," Iryna Danylovych wrote back in 2017, suggesting that she was aware of the possibility of being arrested.

Five years after that post was written, she would be prevented from going to bed after the night shift.

Invisible Ukrainians

Iryna Didenko, Deputy Director of the Department for International Cooperation at the Prosecutor General’s Office, sometimes takes statements from people who have been brought back from Russian captivity.

She says she has yet to come across a single case where the Russians did not torture a person they had captured.

"When I started working on these cases, I thought there must be a reason why someone would be tortured; for example, they might be looking for information," Didenko says. "Turns out I was wrong. All the victims we’ve talked to were tortured for nothing. They [the Russians] have days and hours set aside for torture. Every prison in the Russian Federation is competing with all the others to have the most ‘creative’ torture methods."

One man who was brought back to Ukraine from Russian captivity provided Didenko with an example that perfectly illustrates the lack of any kind of logic behind Russian torture. The man was given maths problems – asked to multiply three-digit numbers. If he answered correctly, he was beaten. If his answer was wrong, he was beaten even harder.

"Threats are normal, the use of electric shock is normal," Didenko says. "And there is a lot of sexual violence."

"Are women treated better than men?" she continues. "Quite the opposite. The men said that they [Russian prison officers] would deliberately open the windows in their cells so they could hear the women being tortured. For those men it’s a form of torture in itself – the fact that they can’t intervene and protect the women."

Ukrainians who were brought back to Ukraine say there are special cells [in Russian prisons] where prisoners aren’t held – instead, they’re fitted out with torture devices. In these former prisoners’ stories, the horror of Orwell’s Room 101 mingles with the hopelessness of Kafka’s The Trial, with people being held prisoner without even being told what they are accused of. 

The stories of Viktoriia Kletchenko, Nataliia Vlasova and Iryna Davydovych came out largely because these women were taken to court. But the majority of Ukrainian civilians held by Russia are detained incommunicado. Their detention is not documented or confirmed; they have no access to lawyers and no right to send letters. (These were the conditions of Viktoriia Roshchyna’s detention too.) So these people remain invisible – to their families, to lawyers, to Ukrainian law enforcement, and to the general public.

No one knows where they are held and in what conditions, or whether they are alive at all. If they ever manage to pass on any information about themselves to their families, it’s a miracle. For the most part, their stories come out when they are told by other Ukrainians who were detained at the same facilities at some point and have since been freed. 

"Civilians are being detained without being notified of suspicion; they’re not taken to permanent detention facilities, not even pre-trial centres," says Tetiana Katrychenko, acting director of the Media Initiative for Human Rights. She continues: "The Russian Federation has set up detention facilities in the occupied territories that cannot be monitored. No monitoring mission can get there. These centres are often set up in police stations or administrative buildings, in basements. Lawyers can’t go there, and you can’t send letters there either."

"Viktoriia Roshchyna was held for over a year, but no one knew where: she was likely in [occupied] Melitopol first and then moved to Taganrog [in Russia]," Katrychenko says.

"When someone admits their ‘guilt’ under torture, charges are brought against them and they are transferred from, say, a pre-trial detention facility in Taganrog or a police station in Mariupol to a detention centre in Rostov[-on-Don] or Donetsk, depending on the charges," Katrychenko explains. Ukrainians are usually charged with either espionage or sabotage. If a person in occupied territory has obtained a Russian passport, they can also be accused of treason.

But when a person enters the Russian penitentiary system, they at least have a chance that their case might gain some publicity and they might be able to let their family know what’s happening to them through their lawyers, rather than vanishing into the bowels of Russia’s torture chambers.

The tragedy is that under these circumstances, an actual prison sentence might seem like the lesser evil.

***

This September, the UN’s Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine presented an update in which it shared new evidence of Russia torturing Ukrainian civilians and prisoners of war. The commission concluded that torture was practised wherever Ukrainians were detained, and that sexual violence was a form of torture practised in almost every detention centre.

After speaking to Ukrainian prisoners who had been freed, Ukrainian prosecutor Iryna Didenko has arrived at a conclusion that the UN commission failed to draw: if people are being abducted, isolated and tortured simply because they are Ukrainian citizens, isn’t this genocide?

"How do they decide who to detain? In the beginning, they [Russian occupation forces – ed.] targeted local government representatives, activists, journalists – people who could influence the opinions of people in their region. But then they started targeting regular people. They went from door to door. What were the reasons for detentions? [If people had] anything related to Ukraine, they’d be taken straight away," Didenko says.

She adds that she will never forget interviewing a woman from Kherson Oblast who had been abducted, beaten, tortured, raped, subjected to death threats, and taken to a field where shots were fired just above her head.

The Russians had "material evidence" of her criminality: a single fridge magnet with a Ukrainian flag on it.

Rustem Khalilov, Ukrainska Pravda

Translation: Olya Loza

Editing: Teresa Pearce