In a small apartment in a high-rise block on Kyiv’s left bank, 50-year-old Natalia struggled to remain composed as she contemplated spending a second New Year’s Eve without her son Artem.
“It’s the time when you’re meant to be with your family and this is going to be the second year without him, unless there is a miracle. I’m looking towards the holiday period with fear,” she said.
Artem, 31, was a member of Ukraine’s Azov regiment and was taken prisoner at the end of the siege of the Azovstal steel plant in Mariupol last May. It was only in March this year that Russia officially confirmed to the Red Cross that Artem was being held prisoner there; Natalia has heard nothing since and had no news from him directly.
Artem is one of at least 4,500 Ukrainian servicemen and women believed to be in captivity in Russia as prisoners of war. Their families are often deprived of even elementary information about their location and wellbeing. Prisoners who have returned in exchanges tell stories of mistreatment, humiliation and torture in Russian captivity.
A year ago, Natalia met a woman, also named Natalia, whose older brother, also named Artem, was a Ukrainian border guard and is now a prisoner too. The two Natalias meet up regularly to talk about their respective Artems. “Other people try to be empathetic but there are some things they just can’t understand. But I can write two words to her and she immediately understands what I mean,” said Natalia.
Both Natalias hope that soon their Artems will be included in one of the sporadic prisoner exchanges arranged in tense negotiations between Moscow and Kyiv, but none have taken place since 7 August. Ukrainian officials claim Russia has lost interest in negotiating swaps.
There is a paradox for the waiting family members: they are desperate to raise attention about the plight of their loved ones, but are also aware that if any individual hostage becomes a cause celebre, their “exchange value” rises, and Russia may demand more to return them. The Natalias declined to give their surnames.
For now, they busy themselves collecting supplies to send to soldiers at the front. They try not to read interviews with returned prisoners; it sets off all kinds of flights of imagination about what could be happening to their relatives.
Maria Klymyk, of the Media Initiative for Human Rights in Kyiv, whose organisation has conducted interviews with more than 100 returning prisoners, said many came home with injuries to their legs, ribs, lungs and teeth from malnourishment, neglect or physical abuse. Some needed amputations.
“Almost everyone we have spoken to was tortured,” she said.
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Valeria Subotina returned from 11 months in Russian captivity in April. Subotina, a university professor from Mariupol and press officer for Ukraine’s Azov regiment, married her boyfriend, Andriy Subotin, during the Azovstal siege. They exchanged foil rings inside the plant; Andriy was killed soon after during a Russian strike, she was taken captive at the end of the siege and taken with hundreds of other Azov fighters to a prison in Olenivka, in the so-called Donetsk People’s Republic, Ukrainian territory occupied since 2014. A dozen women were crammed into a cell designed for two people. The captives allocated one of the two beds to a woman in her 70s and the other 11 took turns to nap on the second bunk. She spent 41 days in the cell.
“There wasn’t physical violence against the women, but we could hear men scream from the second floor. One time we heard really awful screams and in the morning we saw them take a body out. Often, the women were sent upstairs to mop up blood,” she said. More than 50 people were killed in the prison in July last year, when a missile hit one of the barracks. Ukraine accused Russia of the strike; Russia claimed it was a Ukrainian missile, but did not let any international organisations access the site to investigate. Subotina heard the explosion but was not injured.
At the end of September, guards tied the prisoners’ hands and tightly affixed blindfolds over their eyes, throwing them “like bags of potatoes” into a truck, Subotina recalled. She desperately hoped it was a final humiliation before the longed-for exchange.
Instead, she was delivered to a prison in Taganrog, southern Russia. The conditions were ostensibly better than at Olenivka – the cell was less crowded and had a toilet with a door. But a daily regime of systematic humiliation began. Walking was permitted only in a position called “the swan” – hands locked behind the back and lifted up high, with head bowed down low. Laughing was strictly forbidden, as was speaking Ukrainian. Subotina was given an XXL prison uniform that billowed absurdly over her slight frame, and size 48 shoes (12.5 in the UK).
On one of the first days, she was taken to a room, stripped and beaten with fists and batons by female prison officers. “They weren’t doing it carefully, they didn’t care about bruises. I realised this was a bad sign, that we’d be there for a long time,” she recalled.
The women were subjected to a twice-daily ritual when they had to file out of their cells for a search. As they emerged, guards beat and kicked them, usually on the legs. Then there were other tasks aimed at humiliating the prisoners, such as forced squats, or singing the Russian national anthem. Subotina sang it loudly and angrily, finding a strange catharsis in the rare ability to raise her voice. The screams she could hear from neighbouring cells suggested men were subjected to more intense physical torture than women.
There were frequent interrogations, the questioners changing frequently. “After a while, they would start to realise we’re normal people and become less aggressive, then they would be rotated out for new ones,” she said. The men came from all over Russia and appeared to be particularly rough with Azov detainees. The battalion’s origins as a far-right volunteer unit have given it a special place in Russian propaganda about the so-called “neo-Nazi” nature of contemporary Ukraine.
The interrogations were usually in the day, but late one night Subotina was pulled out of her cell and dragged to the basement, where she was beaten from all sides. When her eyes accustomed to the gloom she saw there were about eight men in the room observing her.
Everyone was deferential to an older man in civilian clothes, apparently a senior FSB official. There was a strong smell of alcohol in the air. One of the men ordered her to strip naked. “You wanted to see a real Azov, sir, well here she is,” said one man, addressing the boss.
“She’d look good with a Russian flag tattooed here,” said another of the men, pointing to above Subotina’s genitals and laughing. Subotina was terrified but kept an impassive bearing, believing that to show fear would only worsen the situation.
The FSB boss snapped at a prison official: “You should feed them more and give them a razor. She’s wasting away and disgustingly hairy.” He allowed her to get dressed.
The subsequent interrogation lasted for hours and veered from aggression to cajoling. At one point, the FSB man offered her a job in occupied Mariupol: “You have a PhD, you are respected, perhaps we can make you the rector of the university there,” he said. “There will not be any exchanges soon. So you can either rot in this prison for life or accept our offer,” he added.
Subotina could not tell if it was a genuine offer, but in any case she turned it down. When she returned to her cell, close to dawn, she began to think about a shard of glass she had hidden there, and how she could use it if there was really no prospect of freedom anytime soon. However, shortly after she was told to get dressed for another transfer. Blindfolded again, she was thrown in a prison truck, then put on a plane. It landed at what she later found out was an airfield in Belarus. From there, a bus journey, a border crossing into Ukraine while Russian prisoners moved the other way, and a long period of rehabilitation.
“After 11 months I was in a terrible state. I just can’t imagine what it will be like for people who will be there for years,” she said.
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The hardest thing for Subotina to get used to after returning was the forgotten sensation of freedom: to choose what to eat, to be able to enter or leave a room freely. She tried therapy but the psychologists she encountered seemed poorly trained to deal with her needs. “I could see them feeling sorry for me, and I wanted them to feel proud of me. I could see they were getting more and more upset with my stories and by the end it wasn’t clear who was meant to be comforting who,” she said.
Tetiana Sirenko, a psychotherapist who runs programmes at a residential rehabilitation centre for returnees outside Kyiv, said returning prisoners faced numerous problems. Almost everyone she has worked with had undergone torture of varying degrees, she said, with frequent reports of electric shock torture and injections of unknown substances.
Many things can be triggering, bringing back memories of psychological and physical trials, including debriefing interviews by Ukrainian officials, and interactions with doctors. One of Sirenko’s clients smashed up a beauty salon where she had gone for laser hair removal; the equipment reminded her of electric shock torture in Russia.
Existing in an information vacuum also has consequences. “People are told for months that Zelenskiy has surrendered Ukraine, that everyone has forgotten about them. If you can’t verify what you are told all the time, then the brain begins to perceive everything as a certain reality,” she said. She compared a speedy reintroduction to Ukrainian society to a deep-sea diver ascending to the surface too quickly.
Some relatives have prepared for the fact that when their loved ones do make it home, there will be a long and difficult period of rehabilitation. Anastasia is a 27-year-old woman who is waiting for her husband, a saxophonist who played in the band of Ukraine’s National Guard and was taken prisoner in Mariupol.
She is one of thousands of Ukrainians praying for a Christmas miracle to return their loved ones to them before the holiday period, but is realistic about the readjustment process that would ensue. Previously, she had dreamed of taking him for a date at a jazz club when he came back, rekindling the happy memories of their prewar lives. Now she is not sure.
“I used to have all these plans, but the longer he’s there, the harder it is to plan anything because I don’t know what state he’ll be in,” she said. “Psychologists have explained to me that he won’t be the same. They told me every month in captivity requires three months of recovery. It’s already been nearly two years.”
