His wife’s face is barely recognizable, but he knows it’s her. He identified it in the photo posted on a Russian social network and had it examined with the slight hope that it could have been retouched. Alas, she was not. In the photo, Oksana has her eyes closed and cannot seem to open them, as the eyelids covering them are swollen and covered with crusts of blood. His nose and forehead are swollen too. Nothing is known about the condition of his skull, which was covered by a hood. She is sitting with her hands tied. The face does not smile, it is as if it had lost all signs of life.
Andriy, her husband, shows another photo of his wife, taken before her kidnapping: lovely with her bangs, brown braids and big, soft eyes, in her military parka. Because she is in the army and, therefore, doubly exposed to reprisals, neither the photos nor the real names can be released.
Two months without sleep
Andriy is around thirty years old and has features aged by more than two months without sleeping. He is sitting in a room at the NGO Center for Civil Liberties, chaired by Oleksandra Matviïtchouk, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2022 and declared “undesirable” by the Russian state in 2024. Since its founding in 2007, the The organization focused on defending human rights in Ukraine and the Kremlin’s political prisoners. Since the total war led by Russia against Ukraine, it has extended its mission to prisoners of war, civilian and military hostages.
In this room located in the center of kyiv, there are six of them. Five women and a man whose wife, husband or son are languishing in Russian prisons. At least violent, as indicated by the photos and the scant information they have gathered. Probably they were even more so than the photos show. Maybe some are already dead. Oksana, Andriy says, was an officer in the Ukrainian armed forces. The last time her husband spoke to her was on February 11, 2024, to tell her she was going on a mission. On the 15th, he received a message telling him that she had disappeared the day before. His colleagues confirmed to him that they had lost track of him after the explosion of an aerial bomb. He went to the hospital where the injured and dead had been sent. Oksana’s body was not there. Only one conclusion remained: she had been kidnapped by the Russians.
Andriy says. “I searched Russian social networks and found a photo of my wife with four other people in a place that I cannot name here,” says Andriy. “I recognized her immediately despite the bruises that “The photos showed the destroyed and barely recognizable faces of the five soldiers of the brigade. All had been violently beaten and tortured.” Since February 15, Andriy has had no information about his wife apart from his own research on the networks and this photo so painful to look at, which only gives a sketchy overview of the limitless monstrosity of the crimes of the Russian army. Detaining prisoners without informing them about their situation, even if they are military, is contrary to the Geneva conventions. Even more so if they are tortured.
Why don’t the Russians notify anything about their detainees? “Firstly to add a dimension of suffering to the family. But above all because without a trial in Russia and without official notification, the prisoners do not exist. The Russians therefore have no accountability for the murders and torture. Even the Red Cross has no information,” analyzes Mikhailo Savva, doctor of political science and expert at the Center for Civil Liberties.
“Please help me find her”
Several women were allegedly kidnapped and imprisoned at the same time as Oksana, in the same place at the same time. According to information collected by Andriy, the Russians have indicated that these women could not be the subject of a prisoner exchange. “Please help me find her,” implores Andriy, desperate by the helplessness of the Ukrainian state and the International Red Cross.
According to estimates by the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense, nearly 25,000 Ukrainian civilians and military personnel are detained in Russian prisons. The Civil Liberties Center obtained the release of 250 of them, in addition to prisoner exchanges between states, “thanks to our work with civil society partners in Russia,” explains Mikhailo Savva. civilians is limited. Only States can act to enforce the Geneva Conventions and international law.”
Alongside Andriy, two women talk about a soldier kidnapped in the same conditions on November 2, 2023. One is his wife, the other his mother. They too cannot reveal their real first name or their face. In the photos, like Andriy, they only show themselves from behind. The youngest begins, sobs then gives up, unable to speak. The mother, bundled up in her blue down jacket, recounts this “last connection we had, an SMS with only “Hello””. It was November 2, 2023. Their son and husband was “on his way to his work station,” said the mother, specifying that no clue of the location can be published. Six days later, when they began to worry about not having heard from him, they called and sent messages. His phone was connected, but no one answered. The command ended up officially confirming to them that the soldier had disappeared.
Mute phone
For months, they continued to call and write to the messages on her cell phone, which always remained connected – and always silent. “Please,” they begged, “whoever you are, answer us!” On WhatsApp, the blue lines indicated that the message had been read. An application told them that the phone was traveling to every corner of Russia. They were tracking him.
“On the Telegram channel of a Russian blogger,” said the mother, “I found interviews with one of his imprisoned military comrades, which he gave visibly under pressure. The one who spoke said that he was the one who was doing best among his other comrades in prison, that all were injured It was not clear and he did not say the same thing from one interview to the next. The last time we located his phone, he. was in a lost hole between Krasnodar and Crimea…” She bursts into tears, takes a Kleenex from her pocket. “Please tell everyone…” The other three women say they have not heard from their respective husbands. These are civilians, kidnapped without any legal basis and imprisoned respectively on March 12, 2022 in the Kherson region, March 16, 2022 in Irpin, and March 23, 2022 in Boutcha.
Irina Shvets was able to obtain meager information from exchanged prisoners about the conditions of detention in Rostov prison, where hers is located. At the time of the invasion on February 24, 2022, Oleksandr was in Boutcha, the town on the outskirts of kyiv that had become one of the symbols of war crimes – summary executions, rapes, torture, mass killings – committed by the Russians. against Ukrainian civilians between February 27 and March 31, 1922.
“You must be from the Azov battalion…”
“We were in contact by telephone until March 21,” says Irina. “On the 22nd, there was no more connection. The Russians had blown up the communication pylons. On April 3, I managed to contact neighbors who told me that as the Russians began to withdraw, my husband refused to flee the building where he was hiding because he was busy feeding 160 women and children in the basement and he didn’t want to leave them. His neighbors told me they saw him being kidnapped and taken away by Russians.
According to neighbors, those who took him were not soldiers, but people from the Sobr, a special unit of the Russian Interior Ministry integrated into the national guard. They heard them say to Oleksandr, who was athletic and strong: “You must be from Azov! [NDLR : bataillon paramilitaire ultranationaliste ukrainien]”While the others had their hands tied with strings, he was handcuffed and taken away separately.
Irina gave a DNA sample to investigators who came to work on the Boutcha massacres. In October 2022, the Ukrainian Red Cross told her that her husband was in a prison in Russia. On January 23, 2023, while exchanging information with families of prisoners on Telegram channels, Irina saw a photo of her husband wearing prison clothing and a number. She managed to trace the thread to a prisoner who had been with him during a transfer, and to the wife of another who had shared his cell.
Brutal reception
She was able to reconstruct certain stages of her journey. On March 23, 2022, several of them were locked in a building at Hostemel airport. On the 24th, transferred to Belarus. On the 25th, received “very brutally” in a prison in Brantsk, Russia. Mikhailo Savva, of the Center for Civil Liberties, specifies that the “brutal receptions” during transfers to Russian prisons are “a systematic and deliberate procedure to psychologically break civilians and obtain total obedience from them.” The prisoners, he adds, are being held “without any legality even according to Russian law. Nothing other than a paper signed by a local FSB chief [NDLR : service de renseignement]”.
In December 2023, Irina learned that her husband was in Rostov in a cell called “Scissor No. 1”. The wife of a prisoner who passed through the same cell shared information on the conditions of detention. “The mold-covered cells are filled with 20 to 30 people, who never go out and have to share a bed for three or four. Water is dripping from the ceiling. The food served to them would be refused by an animal. I can imagine the state my husband is in,” she concludes soberly.
*Some first names have been changed
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