Behind closed doors: Families of Ukrainian civilians captured by Russia fight to return loved ones home

Ukrainian article of the week published in the 54th edition of the "What about Ukraine" newsletter on November 14th, 2024. The article was written by Olena Struk for LB.ua and was translated for n-ost by Tetiana Evloeva. Find the original article in Ukrainian here.

Say you happen to be on Instytutska street in the town of Bucha, northeast of Kyiv, and choose to turn onto a path that runs into a thick forest. In that case, you’ll come across the home of Olena and Serhii, among a dozen other dwellings.

Two years ago, this secluded neighbourhood had a chat group, where residents could discuss local issues. On the morning of 10 March 2022, the neighbours made a roll call in the group, and asked each other how they could escape. A day earlier, after hearing of a possible safe passage, people gathered in groups to evacuate from Bucha, as it had just been seized by the Russians.

This was when Olena responded in that chat: “Serhii is missing”.

Despite the blackout, they kept in touch for quite a while. On 25 February, Serhii managed, by some miracle, to drive his wife and daughter to the border with Poland. Still, he chose to return home. He kept his family updated via text messages, telling them about the Russians who set their encampment nearby, and describing how he provided their neighbours with drinking water from a borehole with a hand-pump on their property, and how he had to obtain permission from the Russian military every time he drew water. Olena urged him to leave. However, leaving was a dangerous undertaking: when two nephews of their neighbours were trying to flee, their car was riddled with bullets. When Serhii finally made up his mind to escape, they lost contact with him.

Olena started investigating. On the day he vanished, she found out their car was discovered empty, and with its doors open. People informed Olena that her house was taken over by the Russian military, who turned the place into an outpost. Others shared how they caught a glimpse of a man taken by the Russians, and bound for the nearby town of Hostomel. Several days later, Olena received the text message that Serhii sent her on the day he vanished: “I’m in the car, waiting for our two female neighbours, ready to head out.”

“I thought he might be in captivity,” says Olena, “and even managed to contact volunteers from Belarus, as I learned that the Russians were taking our people across the border. However, they had no information about Serhii.”

Even after Bucha was liberated, Serhii’s fate and whereabouts remained unknown.

“He never contacted us, and no body was found in the house,” says Olena. “That’s when I decided to try and contact those volunteers from Belarus once again.”

This time, they did confirm that Serhii had been taken across the border. It took them another day and a half to tell Olena whether her husband was listed as dead or alive. Finally, they told her that he was alive.

Detainees charged with “interference with the Special Military Operation”

According to Mykhailo Savva of the Ukrainian Center for Civil Liberties, figures indicate 1,700 Ukrainian civilians are being held in captivity by Russia, however, the true number is way higher.

“We assess that it’s possible there’s at least 7,000,” he explains, “as those are the people who were registered as missing. They were never found and never laid to rest, so the chances are, they are still alive out there.”

Still, the Russian Federation has never issued any information about them. In July 2024, Ukrainian ombudsman Dmytro Lubinets presented the number of over 14,000 civilian hostages. There are 180 known locations of where Russia holds Ukrainians, both in the federation itself, and on the temporarily occupied territories.

Olena says she was luckier than most people, as Serhii’s internment at the Briansk Detention No.2 Centre was confirmed by the Red Cross about 45 days after he went missing. Soon after, she was contacted by another man freed from captivity, Borys, who had been together with Serhii. Borys told her that they had spent the initial weeks of their confinement in a commercial refrigerator in a Hostomel enterprise.

According to the Media Initiative for Human Rights (MIHR), Hostomel was one of the three main locations in the Kyiv Region where Russians were bringing detainees from nearby settlements. From witness testimony obtained by the MIHR, people kept warm by sleeping on top of each other. During the interrogation of the detainees, the Russian military questioned them about their involvement with the Armed Forces of Ukraine and the Anti-Terrorist Operation. To force them to confess, the Russians beat and kicked the prisoners, and staged mock executions.

Later on, the Russians took Serhii to Belarus, where he was held for a short time, before they transported him to the Briansk region of the Russian Federation.

“Every Ukrainian detainee, be they a serviceperson or a civilian, is charged by the Russians with ‘interference with the Special Military Operation’,” explains Mykhailo Savva. “They see no difference whatsoever between detaining civilians and capturing prisoners of war. They are being held together, and, judging from the wording of their charges, any Ukrainian is perceived as a mutineer against the regime. Legally speaking, this takes things to crazy levels of complication. Again, in their official correspondence, the Russian officials cite both the Geneva Convention (III) relative to the treatment of prisoners of war and the Geneva Convention (IV) relative to the protection of civilian persons in time of war. Thus, to my understanding, what they are trying to do here is to obscure the issue as much as possible and refrain from making any specific statements regarding the legal status of those people, so that we can do nothing about it.”

And sadly, it works.

At the same time, Mykhailo estimates the number of Ukrainian civilians who were tried and sentenced, mostly for ‘espionage’, ‘international terrorism’, ‘treason’, and ‘extremism’, as 307.

“These are the people who we can count, as they have at least some communication with their attorneys,” explains the expert. “When a Ukrainian is detained without any criminal charges laid against them, no legal counsellors have access to that person. For instance, when Russian defence attorneys learn about such people and come to detention centres or prisons where they are held, the Russian authorities deny them access. The lawyers are told: “Why would they need an attorney when no criminal charges have been brought? No charges, no attorney”. Which means these detainees are ‘incommunicado’. These people are held captive on grounds that are absolutely illegal, even in terms of the present-day Russian legislation. We know that orders for their detention are signed even by heads of regional offices of the FSB. Every three months, their terms just get extended.”

After Olena sent a request to the Russian Ministry of Defence, the answer was that indeed, her husband was detained on the territory of the Russian Federation. However, with multiple references to the provisions of the Law ‘On Defence’ and ‘On Legal Defence Practices and Attorneys in the Russian Federation’, she could not receive information on the Serhii’s location and transfers.

Olena maintains regular communication with the Coordination Headquarters for the Treatment of Prisoners of War and the National Information Bureau, but also with the Russians, to remind them time and again about her husband’s case. She uses a Russian attorney, which a Ukrainian human rights organisation has provided for her, free of charge.

“My attorney helps me write those requests, and address them, because properly addressing them is a challenge on its own,” she explains. “Sometimes it’s the Ministry of Defence, sometimes it’s another governing body. For instance, when my husband was brought to the Briansk Region of the RF — how would I know which address I should write to, in order to learn any information?”

Knowing those specifics is even more crucial when the whereabouts of the person in question are unknown.

“Our road map of what to do when a person goes missing is limited by the State Border of Ukraine,” explains Mykhailo Savva. “However, we need to expand it, because, sad as it may be, there’s no way of knowing the person’s fate without maintaining contact with the Russian authorities. For instance, one must contact their military police and their Investigative Committee, and those are different requests with different requirements as to how they are filed. We are currently working on an improved algorithm for the relatives, a roadmap that is as clear as possible, and covers as many options as we can find, because one way or another, the relatives have to keep searching.”

Another source of information is people released from Russian captivity. The Coordination Headquarters, a subdivision of the Ukrainian Main Directorate of Intelligence, has such info.

“But, of course, we need more assistance from the Red Cross,” complains Petro Yatsenko of the Coordination Headquarters for the Treatment of Prisoners of War, “as their representatives have a mandate to visit the places of detention where the Ukrainian captives are held, and thus can offer updates to their relatives. However, those officers are yet to receive wide access to such detection centres, both in the RF and on the temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine.”

For a year, Olena had no news of her husband, until she received a letter from him in 2024, where the man clearly gave a stock response: he was fed, clothed, given necessary medical care, and treated well. From this, Olena figured that Serhii never received any of the numerous letters that she and her associates were regularly sending him.

In September, Olena had another stroke of luck: a soldier who happened to be Serhii’s cellmate was released. That’s how she knew that her husband had been in Mordovia, a republic between Moscow and Kazan, a month before — and could still be there.

“That young man shared that Serhii is holding on, mentally. He kept mentioning my husband’s legs, and saying: ‘Don’t worry, the swelling is gone, his legs will be fine’. From that, I deduce that before, his legs had been terrible. Back in the previous summer, I was told that Serhii could hardly walk. All of the prisoners have problems with their legs, as they are forced to stand in one spot for hours at a time.”

According to the UN Human Rights Office, being forced to stand for lengthy periods is one of the means of torture suffered by Ukrainians in Russian captivity.

“Why do we have no clue about our own compatriots who were taken hostage?”

A commercial photographer in the past, Olena retrained after everything that happened to Serhii. Now she is a social worker employed by NGO Bachyty Sertsem [Ukr. ‘Seeing with one’s heart’], who teaches her skills to kids with disabilities.

“Before he was imprisoned in a commercial refrigerator in Hostomel, Borys, my husband’s fellow inmate, had been thrown by the Russians into a pit and tortured,” shares Olena. “As I struggled to understand what they wanted from him, he told me that they had mentioned something about the ‘biolaboratories’ and ‘NATO troops’. He then added a comment that helped me over the past two years: ‘Don’t try to find logic where there is none’. I know that I might get worked up, but I really have a hard time understanding why they could freely show the dead bodies in Bucha and lament the goods [looted by Russians], but nobody ever mentioned the people taken by Russia.

“Why is it that an average Ukrainian knows about the 200 Israelite hostages taken by Hamas, along with the rest of the world — but we have no clue about our own compatriots who were taken hostage? Just why has it never been announced? It really hurts. Now, we are in real trouble, as soldiers returning from captivity are treated as heroes, while the civilians returned from captivity are treated as something negative — all because that matter never had any proper coverage! Some people even brand such hostages as ‘collaborators’.

When the Russian military established control over separate areas in the Kharkiv, Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, Donetsk, Kyiv and Chernihiv regions in 2022, they launched a persecution campaign against a broad range of civilians who were against the invasion and refused to support the Russians. As stated by human rights activists in their report ‘Your loyalty to Ukraine makes you a Nazi: Torture and other crimes against humanity by the Russian Army in Ukraine’ («"Ти вірний Україні — ти нацист". Катування й інші порушення як злочини проти людяності з боку російської армії в Україні»), this group included both those who were openly or covertly loyal to Ukraine, as well as those who were suspected of such sympathies. That said, even the smallest thing (like a subscription to Ukrainian news, owning a hunting rifle, living under Russian occupation as a non-Russian citizen, or refusing to switch to the Russian curriculum at schools if they were a teacher) could lead them being branded as ‘suspicious’.

“In every area they seized, the invaders primarily targeted people who could organise some form of resistance,” muses Mykhailo Savva. “That is, they believe it helps to remove the possible leaders. This is the strategy they resort to within Russia, and there, it proved more or less effective. However, Ukrainians are different, as our potential for self-organisation is much higher. Thus, the invaders’ tactics failed, so they decided to scale it up and capture as many people as possible. It’s like a fool who, facing a problem, decides to triple the effort in the hopes that this way, the problem will be gone.”

Still, only the aggressor state knows the true reason behind holding Ukrainian civilians captive.

“I’m not sure that even they can clearly formulate the reason,” says Petro Yatsenko. “But we assume they see it as a means of putting pressure on Ukrainian society, an attempt to break the will of both the captives and their relatives in Ukraine.”

“There may be a lack of effort when it comes to taking care of civilian captives”

According to the Coordination Staff for the Treatment of Prisoners of War, of the 3,767 Ukrainians freed from Russian captivity, 168 were civilians.

“We see the imbalance among those whom we manage to return home,” says Ihor Kotelianets, head of the Association of Relatives of Political Prisoners of the Kremlin. “Civilians, at best, constitute five to ten percent of all those released. We see that the military captives are being taken care of — which is great, thank God for that, however, there may be a lack of effort when it comes to taking care of civilian captives.”

The view that this issue had lacked the attention of authorities is supported by the fact that Ukraine didn’t have an agency overseeing the matters of unlawfully detained Ukrainians until this year.

“It was a stalemate,” sighs Olena. “The civilians were supposed to be taken care of by the Ombudsman’s Office, however, they have nothing to do with the exchange of captives, which was the responsibility of the Coordination Headquarters for the Treatment of Prisoners of War, which, in turn, had no authority over the cases of civilians. We spent half a year protesting, with banners.”

Coordination Headquarters’ Petro Yatsenko explains that de facto, the Headquarters had been assisting the families of detained civilians since the early days of the full-scale invasion — however, it took some time to make this work official.

In April 2024, NGOs finally achieved their goal, and a specified task force for civilian cases was created within the Headquarters. That task force was headed by an officer from the Office of the Commissioner for Human Rights, which was better than nothing.

“It is not to say that in this format, proper attention is paid to discussing and creating tools for releasing civilians,” notes Ihor Kotliarets. “On the other hand, a lot of effort is put into supporting the families of captives and civilians freed from captivity, not to mention all the work on further improving the legislation. The task force got rolling, and in my view, it has been quite proactive.”

As for the question of why it took so long to launch such a task force, we have at least one possible answer. Maybe it was because the government feared that should they have had an established tool to deal with the matter, Russia would be incentivised to take more civilians from the temporarily occupied territories as captives. The Russians might have reasoned that Ukraine would reveal how highly the nation valued human life, and how eager it was to invest a lot of effort into freeing captives. At the same time, the more hostages Russia would have taken, the higher the public pressure to free them, thus giving Russia leverage in their dealings with the Ukrainian authorities.

“This is the prevailing opinion among those involved in the process,” explains Ihor Kotelianets. “Which is why we are playing the weak cards we were dealt, pretending we don’t really care that much and that the aggressor state is free to do as it pleases, so they will not be able to manipulate us. At the same time, the government cannot simply ignore the issue.”

And thus, Ukraine finds itself balancing on this tightrope.

“As long as there is a demand to free the hostages, those decisions will gradually be made, little by little,” adds Ihor.

Demand for a proper procedure

“The Geneva Conventions do not apply to the exchange of captured military personnel for civilian hostages,” explains Petro Yatsenko. “We cannot exchange their soldiers for our civilians, so as not to incentivise them to take more hostages from the temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine. Therefore, every release of our civilians so far resulted from negotiations with Russia.”

All the complexity of the issue of freeing captive Ukrainian civilians can be summed up in one phrase by Kyrylo Budanov, the Chief of the Main Directorate of Intelligence of the captured military personnel and civilians: “This process is very complex, and there is no simple solution. We are working on a case-by-case basis.”

Using this approach could take Ukraine decades to return all its captive citizens, argue relatives of the detainees.

“The essence of the conflict is that, on the one hand, we have to comply with international humanitarian law, and on the other hand, it does not provide us with any protection,” explains Ihor Kostelianets. “Involuntary disappearances and unlawful captures of civilians are crimes. At the same time, as those crimes are being committed, it remains unclear what can be done about them and what action should be taken so that justice is served, and that those crimes don’t happen again. The international law fails to provide any answers to that dilemma.”

The International law only stipulates that Russia wasn’t supposed to detain them in the first place.Russia is supposed to unconditionally release every unlawfully detained civilian.

But it doesn’t make any difference, so the demand to free those hostages is enormous.

“Families of the captives have been lamenting that ‘we have no tools to return them home’ for a long time now,” says Ihor Kotelianets. “If that is the case, please create those tools. Because now Russia only releases Ukrainian civilians in exchange for political concessions, or when we have [Russian or Russian-sympathetic] captives they badly want back. We also see surges in exchanging captives whenever we advance on the battlefield. Those are the three main factors. Political concessions are, of course, out of the question. We should rather reverse the situation with our advocacy efforts to get third parties involved, so they put pressure on Russia, forcing it to make concessions. Classic examples of such pressure include sanctions, political negotiations, and third parties communicating with Russia to achieve a certain goal.”

Recently, over 45 countries’ participants in the Ministerial Conference on the Human Dimension of the Peace Formula in Montreal pledged support for the total return of Ukrainians (including civilians, prisoners of war and children) who were captured and deported to Russia.

Earlier this year, in the summer, the Coordination Headquarters presented their new project, “Хочу к своим” [Rus. ‘I want to reunite with my people’] aimed at returning Ukrainian civilian hostages home in exchange for pro-Russian collaborators serving time in Ukraine.

Ihor Kotelianets believes that in doing that, Ukrainian authorities demonstrated the level of flexibility and creativity they are not typically famous for. However, this project was not without disadvantages — the most obvious one being that among the 1,500 inmates in Ukraine eligible for participation only about 500 have shown any interest in being released to Russia. Yet when it was time to seal the deal, only a little over 230 ended up doing so. At this moment, it seems unlikely that the project has the potential of becoming the main tool to free the Ukrainian hostages.

According to Petro Yatsenko, one of those inmates has already been transferred to Russia.

Other obstacles, according to the Coordination Headquarters, include Russia’s lack of eagerness to welcome back its henchmen, its desire to keep quiet about the project, as well as the Ukrainian prison administration ignoring the requests of inmates to be transferred to Russia.

Human rights advocates point out other vulnerabilities of the project, like the violation of the right to privacy and possible pressure that authorities can exert on prisoners in Ukraine.

“We all are well aware of the practices of enforcing certain outcomes on inmates by the police and prison administrations,” explains Ihor Kotelianets, head of the Association of Relatives of Political Prisoners of the Kremlin. “These are institutions with very low credibility, so we need some safeguards like involving third-party observers, to avoid any grievances. Either way, we must not discourage state institutions from trying to act on the demands of the people and the hostages’ families.”

Mykhailo Savva believes that while the idea is good, the wording of the deal is unfortunate.

“I think it would be better if it was presented as a mutual release initiative, where Ukraine would release convicted collaborators and Russia would release convicted Ukrainians,” he argues.

The project failed to incorporate another tool, initially proposed by the Center for Civil Liberties, which is filing a lawsuit against Russia at the UN International Court of Justice for violating international conventions, in particular the International Convention against Torture (which Russia is party to), as such unlawful long-term detention of civilians constitutes torture under the Convention.

“Of course, the proceedings at the UN International Court of Justice will take quite a while,” notes Mykhailo Savva. “However, we don’t have to wait for the final decision. All we have to do is demand an interim relief, such as freeing all the civilians. There were precedents in history, like the lawsuits related to civil unrest in the Balkans. Therefore, this means it is efficient, while the only drawback is that such a lawsuit is complex. And, as far as I can make out, the Ukrainian Government doesn’t want to be one-on-one with Russia in such a legal proceeding. Therefore, the best option seems to be filing such a lawsuit by a group of states.”