About how Ukrainians are treated in Russian captivity, both prisoners of war and civilians, two former captives told the American media Ukrainian Service: Ukrainian Armed Forces volunteer Lyudmila Huseynova and doctor Anna Olsen.
The women are in the United States for a three-week advocacy trip organized by the NGO Media Initiative for Human Rights, a team of media workers specializing in human rights issues.
During the Russian occupation of the Donetsk region, Lyudmila Huseynova stayed with her husband in the occupied territory and spent more than a month in the notorious Izolyatsia prison in Donetsk. She was arrested in 2019 for her pro-Ukrainian stance after a whistleblower from townspeople.
“Almost all the time I was there with a bag over my head. Even in the cell. The cell windows are smeared with white paint, you can’t see anything there, you don’t know what’s on the street. For any rustle, any knock on the door, I had to put this bag on and turn my face against the wall,†she said in an interview with American media.
Huseynova says she was prohibited from sitting or lying down between 6 a.m. and 10 p.m. All the while, the woman, who was almost 60 at the time, was forced to stand or walk around the cell.
“Once I was tired and a few minutes earlier I went up to the second floor on the bunk, they threw me out and beat me. There you can constantly hear the screams of women and men who are tortured,†recalls Huseynova.
After that, for more than three years, she was detained in the cell of the Donetsk remand center with criminals.
“I slept next to an unknown woman – one had tuberculosis, the other had another disease. And you sleep on the same bunk with them. A hole in the floor covered with a rag is a toilet. Where you wash, you also wash the dishes behind you,†the woman said.
In October last year, Lyudmila was released as part of a wife swap. She came to the United States with Anna Olsen, a senior combat medic with the Marine Corps’ 36th Separate Brigade Chemical and Biological Protection Company, who is now on temporary retirement. In April last year, the Olsen brigade, which was surrounded at the Ilyich factory in Mariupol and had almost a thousand wounded, after unsuccessful attempts to break through, was captured. The woman was imprisoned in Yelenovka, Taganrog, Kursk and in the Belgorod region.
“The worst was in Taganrog, because that’s where there was more physical and moral pressure, and not just pressure, but also torture,” Olsen said in an interview with American media.
During a trip to the United States, Anna talks about the systemic nature of Russia’s violations of the Geneva Convention on the treatment of prisoners of war – torture, denial of medical care, emotional abuse, lack of food. They ate, she said, unleavened cereal diluted with running water.
The two women say captives aren’t easier than captive men, they don’t beat them any less. Olsen also adds that in Russian prisons, women not only do not receive hygiene products, but often they do not have the opportunity to wash themselves.
“It’s normal that they don’t take prisoners of war bathing for more than a month – even for three minutes under cold water,” Olsen recalled.
Lyudmila Huseynova says that for more than 3 years she has not had a single meeting with her relatives. Another woman with whom she was in the same cell, Olga Meleshchenko, had not seen her child for three years. Olga was accused of espionage.
“In fact, she liked something in favor of Ukraine on the Internet. And there are many such cases, there are many such mothers. Women are beaten in the same way as men, but violence can be used against a woman, and she is used. It is more difficult for a woman to go through all this psychologically, because somewhere her children remained. As the hearts of these women ache, as they scream at night about their children, this scream is worse than the screams of torture,†says Huseynova.
Thus, she believes, the Russians want to intimidate the Ukrainians, to break their resistance. Olsen explains the particular cruelty on the part of prison staff as follows:
“They don’t understand how you can love your country so much that you don’t defend life, but death. It’s nonsense to them,†she said.
He thinks the propaganda she was forced to watch while imprisoned is also affecting her.
“They have stories on TV about how we laugh at their army and how we can eat babies,†Olsen recalled.
In the United States, women are demanding the creation of a special mechanism for the release of captive Russian civilians.
“According to the Geneva Convention, military personnel are exchanged for military personnel, but there is no mechanism for the exchange of civilians who are also in captivity,†Olsen explains.
Huseynova says the captives are civilian men and women who have already been detained for 3-5 years, as well as those who have not been screened into the occupied territories since the start of the full-scale invasion.
Lyudmila Huseynova spent more than a month in the notorious Izolyatsia prison, then more than three years in the remand center in Donetsk.
According to the Ukrainian authorities, at the end of last year, 3,400 Ukrainian citizens, military and civilians, were in Russian captivity. Another 15,000 are considered missing. As Kirill Budanov, head of the Main Intelligence Directorate of the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense, said in an interview with the Ukrainian American media service, about two thousand people have already been returned from Russian captivity. According to him, about 40% of those held hostage by the Russians are civilians.
“Russia is not ready to put an end to the practice of torture, as a result of which soldiers and civilians suffer new injuries; Russia is not ready to hand over civilians, even if they have health problems or are old enough. There is no mechanism for the release of thousands of civilians, since the practice of exchanges under the Geneva Conventions does not apply to them,†Ukrinform quotes Tatyana Katrichenko, coordinator of the NGO Media Initiative for Human Rights, who accompanied Olsen and Huseynova on the trip.
She called for the creation of a special platform for the release of civilian hostages during a hearing on the gross human rights violations caused by Russian aggression against Ukraine at the UN headquarters in New York on February 22. All three Advocacy Tour participants participated in these hearings.
At the request of American media, Natalya Okhotnikova, a researcher at the ZMINA Human Rights Center, explained that the idea of ​​creating a separate mechanism for the release of civilian hostages remains a subject of controversy. On the one hand, she says, current norms of international law do not regulate this issue. On the other hand, she points out, it is not so easy to make the new mechanism work.
“You can force Russia as much as you want to do or not do something, but in the absence of real levers of influence – and I am now talking exclusively about the legal mechanisms of state accountability and its individual leaders – not one mechanism will work,†she said in a written response to American media.
So, says Okhotnikova, a potential new mechanism should take into account not only the principles of international law, but also the mechanisms to force Russia to respect them.
“And this is the position of international organizations, how exactly to design this mechanism”, notes the researcher.
Olsen explains the particular cruelty on the part of prison staff as a misunderstanding of Ukrainians by Russians.
According to Alexandra Matviychuk, 2022 Nobel laureate and director of the Center for Civil Liberties, “in accordance with the 4th Geneva Convention, the Russians could not arbitrarily arrest civilians at all,” she wrote in a response to American media.
“If this is a ‘negotiating platform’, then there should be a clear vision of how to involve Russia in it. And, as I understand it, there isn’t. said Matviychuk.
On November 12, 2019, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a federal law revoking the ratification of the Additional Protocol to the Geneva Convention for the Protection of Victims of International Armed Conflicts. But Russia remains a party to the Geneva Conventions, which include four treaties and three additional protocols.
Russian officials say they are “liberating Ukraine” as part of their “special operation”, blaming Ukrainians for death and suffering and denying evidence of war crimes. In particular, Putin called evidence of crimes in Bucha “fake”.
The article uses information from SuspÑ–lny, the State Tax Service, Radio Liberty, the NGO Media Initiative for Human Rights.
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