Invisible prisoners — the struggle to free thousands of Ukrainians in Russian captivity
Officers from the War Crimes Prosecutor’s Office and police investigate alleged war crimes committed by Russian occupying forces in basements and rooms of penitentiary buildings in Kherson, Ukraine, on Jan. 4, 2023. (Pierre Crom / Getty Images)
War
Warning: This article contains graphic descriptions.
Vitalii Atamanchuk was the archetypal man of the Donbas, the industrial heartland that stretches across eastern Ukraine.
He spent more than 20 years toiling in a coal mine. In 2000, he retired, but found the life of a pensioner dull. He went back to work in the mines and, later, found a job with a construction company in the city of Donetsk.
Then, in 2014, the EuroMaidan Revolution swept Ukraine, toppling pro-Russian strongman Viktor Yanukovych. In Donbas, Russian-backed forces began seizing control of parts of the region and claiming independence from Ukraine. Many locals — particularly those who held pro-Ukrainian views — fled the region.
Atamanchuk stayed put. But unlike many who remained, he didn’t keep his pro-Ukrainian views to himself.
"He was always telling people about Ukraine," Atamanchuk’s daughter Olena Maibozhenko told the Kyiv Independent. “Dad promoted Ukrainian attitudes and was a patriot in his heart."
That eventually led to his arrest and conviction by the pro-Kremlin occupation authorities. He has remained behind bars since 2018.
Atamanchuk's case isn’t unique. Since the start of Russia’s war against Ukraine in 2014, Ukrainians in the occupied territories have been subject to illegal detentions, brutal interrogations, convictions in an unrecognized legal system, and torture.
After Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, both sides captured large numbers of military personnel. Prisoner exchanges between the two countries became a top priority. They have freed thousands of Ukrainians.
So far, however, only 10 civilians captured by Russia before 2022 have been returned home.
Now, their families are sounding the alarm. They say their relatives face inhumane conditions behind bars that threaten their lives.
But securing these Ukrainian civilians’ freedom presents an enormous challenge, both legally and practically. Part of the problem is that, legally, civilians do not qualify for prisoner exchanges — although, to complicate matters, they sometimes have been included in them.
Beyond that, no one even knows the exact number of Ukrainians currently in Russian captivity — in part because Russia conceals who it has taken into custody.
The Coordination Headquarters for the Treatment of Prisoners of War, a government entity charged with working to free Ukrainians from Russian captivity, reports that Russia has imprisoned at least 2,000 Ukrainian civilians, while the Ukrainian parliament’s human rights ombudsman puts the number at around 16,000.
Some have been in captivity for over a decade. Many are elderly. Others have had their health destroyed by torture, forced labor, poor detention conditions, and a lack of medical care.
Ukrainian rights activists are working behind the scenes to find ways to free these people outside of the prisoner exchange process, says Mykhailo Savva, a political scientist and expert with the Center for Civil Liberties human rights organization.
"It is very difficult," he told the Kyiv Independent. The mechanisms they use are "very fragile. The Russian regime monitors such activities and destroys them."
Family behind bars
What separates Olena Maibozhenko from the fate of her father? Likely just one decision: to leave Donetsk.
After Russian-backed militants took control of the city, she fled to the suburbs of Kyiv. But her father, mother, and brother stayed behind.
Back home, things started to go downhill quickly. In 2015, Atamanchuk resigned from his job at the construction company after facing hostility for his pro-Ukrainian views.
Olena offered her parents and brother to move in with her outside Kyiv, but they did not want to leave their house and dogs.
Then, in early September 2018, her parents stopped answering her calls. For a week, Maibozhenko could not figure out what had happened to her family. Then, neighbors told her that all three were arrested.
The Atamanchuk family had been kidnapped at night and not allowed to take any of their belongings with them.
Later, a lawyer from occupied Donetsk contacted Maibozhenko and offered to handle the case. The lawyer informed her that her mother and brother were being interrogated, while her father was in a pre-trial detention center.
When Maibozhenko’s mother and brother were released a month later, the story began to come together.
The Atamanchuk family had been kidnapped at night and not allowed to take any of their belongings with them. Maibozhenko’s mother Nadiia had only managed to grab her heart pills. She spent much of her time in detention with her hands tied behind her back and a bag over her head. It was only removed during interrogations.
Nadiia Atamanchuk could hear her son’s screams as the militants beat him in the next room. On the rare occasion when she was taken to the bathroom, she saw her son lying on the floor, handcuffed to the radiator.
By the time she was released, Nadiia Atamanchuk had lost a lot of weight and needed long-term rehabilitation to restore her health.
Maibozhenko’s 49-year-old brother Oleh fared even worse. She told the Kyiv Independent that he was severely beaten and raped by the militants.
She offered to take him out of Donetsk, but he feared that the Russian-controlled forces would stop him at one of their checkpoints and take him back into custody. Moreover, militants armed with machine guns regularly came to their house and extorted money from them.
"He came out of captivity already yellow," Maibozhenko said. "He was treated in a psychiatric hospital and then in a regular hospital. But his heart stopped and he died."
In summer 2020, Maibozhenko learned that, in October 2019, her father had been sentenced to 17 years in prison for allegedly spying for Ukraine in cooperation with the state security service.
The sentence could have been worse. After six court hearings, Atamanchuk had initially been given 35 years behind bars.
Maibozhenko also found out that both her father’s arms and his hip had been broken and he did not receive proper medical treatment for them.
Even before his arrest, her father was considered legally disabled. He had been diagnosed with a disease that caused chronic inflammation in his spine. In prison, he had a series of heart attacks and fainting spells. He now can no longer walk.
Maibozhenko formally requested that the Donetsk occupation authorities release her father on humanitarian grounds. Their so-called human rights ombudsman agreed — on one condition: that Maibozhenko relocate to the occupied territories to look after him.
"I will go there, I will be arrested, and I’ll stay forever," Maibozhenko said. "You have to understand what they do and how they do it."
The Coordination Headquarters for the Treatment of Prisoners of War has informed Maibozhenko that they are working to free her father.
"I understand that my father's term will never end,” she said. "He is 74 years old now, and he is sentenced until 2035. This means life imprisonment for him."
Five children waiting at home
Maryna Schiefer last spoke to her father eight years ago.
When her hometown of Donetsk was occupied in 2014, she was already living in Kyiv and preparing to move to Germany. Today, she lives in Dusseldorf and runs a volunteer organization that helps transport ambulances and humanitarian aid to Ukraine.
Outside of work, Maryna has another important project: She is painstakingly collecting information about her missing father.
"He had a very pro-Ukrainian position all his life, against the Soviet system," Schiefer said.
"When I was a child, he sent me to a Ukrainian school, the first one in Donetsk at the time."
In 2014, after the occupation of Donetsk, Maryna’s father, Volodymyr Cherkas, moved part of the family to Kyiv. But like many elderly residents of the occupied Donbas, Maryna’s grandparents refused to leave. They did not want to abandon their hard-earned home in the city suburbs and hoped that the war would end quickly.
In June 2017, Maryna's grandfather died, so Cherkas, a 57-year-old businessman, traveled to Donetsk for the funeral. He told his mother that, on his next visit, he would take her back to Kyiv so she would not be alone.
A few months later, in August, he headed back into the occupied territories. After arriving at his mother’s home, Cherkas told her he needed to head into Donetsk to retrieve some belongings from his old apartment. He promised to return soon.
That was the last anyone heard from him.
On Sept. 5, the family finally managed to reach Cherkas’s cell phone. An unidentified woman answered and said that Cherkas had a heart attack and was in the district hospital. Then she quickly hung up.
"Ukrainian law enforcement later explained to us that these methods are often used by (militants) to lure and capture relatives," Schiefer said. "They do this to have as much leverage as possible over a person suspected of spying for Ukraine."
Because their grandmother could not easily travel unaccompanied, the family had no one who could go to the hospital. All they could do was send inquiries and report Cherkas missing. But Ukrainian law enforcement agencies said they lacked access to the occupied territories, while the occupation authorities said that they were not holding Cherkas.
The family only learned of Cherkas’s location two years later. In December 2019, Ukraine conducted a prisoner exchange with the militants controlling the Donbas and freed 12 servicemen and 64 civilians from captivity in the occupied territories.
Some of the freed Ukrainians told them that Cherkas had been locked up with them at Izolyatsia, a secret prison run by Russian-controlled forces on the territory of a defunct insulation materials factory in Donetsk.
Ukrainians illegally imprisoned there have reported being subjected to torture, severe beatings, and psychological abuse.
Andrii Kochmuradov, a Ukrainian who was imprisoned alongside Cherkas, described Izolyatsia as a facility where 10 to 20 people could be crammed in a cell and medical care was almost entirely absent.
At one point, they were brought to the training grounds to do some construction work. When they arrived, they found people were using the area as a shooting range for target practice.
"When I saw Volodymyr, I immediately noticed that he had a lump on the back of his neck,” Kochmuradov told the Kyiv Independent. "And during the time I was with him, it grew. He also complained of high blood pressure and did not receive any medication."
The prisoners also had to do forced labor. At one point, they were brought to the training grounds to do some construction work. When they arrived, they found people were using the area as a shooting range for target practice.
"Cherkas remarked that the work would have to be done where they were shooting," Kochmuradov said. "For this, he was hit in the head with a rifle butt."
Schiefer learned from other captives that her father’s heart problems were also worsening.
As she later discovered, after Izolyatsia, Cherkas was transferred to a penal colony in Makiivka, a suburb of Donetsk. He was illegally detained there from 2019 to 2023.
That prison provided medical care, although it was quite basic. Serhii Moskalenko, a Ukrainian who was also illegally imprisoned there, told the Kyiv Independent that the guards often had to call an ambulance for Cherkas.
Cherkas’s family later learned that he was then transferred to a pre-trial detention center in Donetsk, where he and two other Ukrainians faced charges of organizing the abduction of a pro-Russian militant commander.
According to Schiefer, their last hearing took place in May 2024. Cherkas was sentenced to a 6.5-year prison term.
However, because Cherkas and his co-defendants had already spent that much time in custody, they were released after sentencing. As they were leaving the court, men in balaclavas grabbed them, placed them in separate cars, and drove them off.
A year has passed, but Cherkas’s family has been unable to obtain any information about his location and condition.
Today, Cherkas is 65 years old. He has five children, three of whom are minors.
‘They know how to break a person’
When he was illegally detained in October 2017, Andrii Kochmuradov was 49 years old and working for an internet services provider in Donetsk. He was detained together with his wife Olena, then 53.
In the ensuing two years, he would experience a phantasmagoria of torture and abuse in Izolyatsia.
Describing his treatment in the secret prison, Kochmuradov recalled how he would be dragged before a police investigator for questioning.
"A (prison) operative would come and beat me in the presence of the investigator," he said. "The investigator stood there, smoked, and said when it was enough or not enough."
Later, Kochmuradov was transferred to the Makiivka prison and, in June 2019, put on trial. Throughout the ordeal, the lawyers representing him and his wife changed several times.
Once, when a new lawyer appeared in their case, Kochmuradov asked whether she had read the case materials and what her defense strategy was.
He remembers her response: "She laughed and said: 'What strategy? I haven't read it, and you don't need to, either. Your task, when the judge asks, is to stand up and say that you confess and repent. And then you will be exchanged. If you do anything else, you won’t be exchanged.'"
The court 'sentenced' the couple to 15 years in prison. In December 2019, they were freed in a prisoner exchange and returned to Ukrainian-controlled territory.
Kochmuradov has since founded 29 December, a non-governmental organization named after the date he was freed. It fights for the rights of illegally imprisoned Ukrainians and works to secure their freedom.
Not every illegally imprisoned Ukrainian is freed through a prisoner exchange. Such was the case of Serhii Moskalenko, who was held together with Cherkas in Makiivka.
"They tortured me so much that I forgot my name. They didn't give me water, they beat me, and they simulated my execution. They said that my relatives had already been shot."
Until 2016, Moskalenko worked at Donetsk National University. Later, he began driving people across the contact line between Ukrainian-controlled and occupied territory. In December 2017, he was illegally detained, tortured for 10 hours, and then imprisoned in Izolyatsia. The militants accused Serhii of "promoting terrorism."
"They tortured me to extract a confession," Moskalenko told the Kyiv Independent. "They tortured me so much that I forgot my name. They didn't give me water, they beat me, and they simulated my execution. They said that my relatives had already been shot."
"They know how to break a person," he added.
Later, Moskalenko was transferred to Makiivka. For four years, he was held there without the right to correspondence. Then, in November 2021, an investigator came and informed Moskalenko that he would be freed because the "statute of limitations" on his case had expired.
Moskalenko was released in October 2023, six years after his illegal detention.
"When I was imprisoned, there were still push-button phones. I came out and everyone had smartphones," he said. "When I got out, I walked around Donetsk. Everything was gray and abandoned. I woke up every morning and thought about how to get out of there."
Twelve days later, Serhiy managed to leave the occupied territories. He now lives in Germany and works in construction, helps collect humanitarian aid, and wants to return to Ukraine.
Not all civilians are so lucky as to walk free after they are released from prison. Human rights defenders have documented cases where people were sent to fight for Russia against Ukraine or taken to a special detention center for foreign nationals.
Savva of the Center for Civil Liberties stresses that Russia is using illegal detentions, falsified cases, and torture to intimidate Ukrainians in the occupied territories. He believes that the goal is to overcome the population’s will to resist.
Freeing prisoners isn’t profitable
Ukrainian human rights defenders say that there are two primary groups of Ukrainians whom Russia has illegally deprived of their liberty.
The largest group — roughly 7,000 to 16,000 people — is civilians who were deprived of their liberty without a court decision. They were locked up, sometimes in basements and secret prisons, without even a simulacrum of a trial because neither international law, nor Russian law criminalizes "resistance to a special military operations" — the term Russia uses for its war on Ukraine.
The second group is civilians who have been convicted by Russian courts or the occupation authorities' unrecognized courts.
According to Savva, the Geneva Convention allows occupiers to hold trials for people they suspect of engaging in hostile activities. But the international treaty also requires that the trial be "fair and normal."
"And there’s a huge problem with the fairness of such (Russian) courts," he said. "Our analysis of the verdicts we were able to obtain convincingly showed that the vast majority of such cases are illegal or falsified."
"Illegally imprisoned citizens have become an instrument for Russia to force Ukraine to actually surrender."
Savva believes that the illegally imprisoned civilians increasingly resemble hostages, because Russia is using them for leverage in negotiations with Ukraine.
For this reason, it is now "unprofitable" for Russia to simply exchange the Ukrainian civilians it is detaining, he says.
During the Istanbul peace talks last month, Russia included the release of detained civilians in a "package deal," Savva told the Kyiv Independent.
"A package offer means that if any condition is not fulfilled, there will be no agreement," he said. "In other words, illegally imprisoned citizens have become an instrument for Russia to force Ukraine to actually surrender."
The exact number of people that Russia is illegally detaining, both in the occupied territories and in Russian prisons, is not known. Beyond holding civilians in secret prisons, Russia also provides no list of such prisoners. Instead, people spend months piecing together bits of information to uncover the location of their missing relatives.
Moreover, according to the Coordination Headquarters for the Treatment of Prisoners of War, one of the biggest challenges is that Ukrainian civilians cannot be exchanged for Russian soldiers. This would encourage Russians to take more prisoners in the occupied territories.
Ukraine is working to create new mechanisms for the release of civilians in captivity. A year ago, the government launched the state project "Khochy k svoim" (In Russian, “I want to return to my people”), where Ukrainian citizens convicted of collaborating with Russia and committing treason can, if they so choose, be sent to Russia in exchange for Ukrainians in Russian captivity.
Several have already been transferred to Russia during the prisoner exchanges that took place on May 23-25.
But Russia has not responded to these efforts in good faith. Instead, Savva says that the Russian authorities "committed fraud" by handing over not political prisoners, but regulator Ukrainian convicts.
These people were serving out criminal sentences in Ukrainian prisons when Russia occupied southeastern Ukraine in 2022. After Russia retreated from these territories, it took them with. Rather than send them to a third country so they could be repatriated to Ukraine, the Russian authorities decided to include them in a prisoner exchange.
"In other words, Russia would have gotten rid of them anyway," Savva said.
According to Savva, Ukraine is working hard to free these civilians, despite the fact that Russia refuses to follow international humanitarian law and free these people.
Still, he believes that Ukrainian authorities could do more. For example, it has not filed suit in the International Court of Justice over Russia’s violations of its obligations under the United Nations Convention Against Torture.
Such a lawsuit requires serious resources. To pull that off, Ukraine would likely need to seek out other countries who would file suit together with Kyiv or even independently, Savva says.
He also believes that Ukraine could advocate for a new packet of international sanctions targeting the individuals and entities involved in the illegal detention of Ukrainian civilians: the Russian Defense Ministry's military police, the Federal Penitentiary Service, and the Federal Security Service, the successor agency to the notorious Soviet KGB.
"The authors of this conveyor belt of repression apply the same strategy to the occupied territories that they do to Russians themselves: They believe that if there are no leaders, the rest of us will not have centers around which to unite for resistance," Savva said.
"But this strategy does not work in Ukraine."
