It was like something from the cold war. After five months in the most notorious jail in occupied Ukraine, Alina Panina, 25, had found herself, without explanation, at the foot of a bridge over a river in no man’s land with 107 fellow female Ukrainian prisoners of war.
Behind Panina lay Russian-occupied territory and her experiences of the siege of Mariupol’s Azovstal steelworks, the subsequent surrender and then captivity in Olenivka prison in Donetsk. There she was witness to the aftermath of an explosion that killed 53 male prisoners, a blast said by Kyiv to have been engineered by Moscow to silence the victims of torture.
Ahead, north, stood the Russian PoWs for whom she and the other women were, it seemed, being swapped – and free Ukraine. The freedom that Panina, a junior sergeant in the national border guard, had yearned while counting off the hours and endless days with 28 other women in a cell designed for four.
No reason had been given for why they were here now under a leaden grey sky staring across a bridge in the south of the country. “We were told nothing,” she said. But then the order came to cross.
They walked in near silence over the bridge in Kam’yans’ke, a small village that stands between the two militaries. Unsure that they would make it to safety until the final steps. The drivers of coaches that brought them kept the engines on so they could be taken back as quickly as they had arrived, Panina said in the first major interview given by any of the women since their release last week.
Then, sheer elation. “When we saw our soldiers, some girls couldn’t hold back their emotions,” she said. “They shouted glory to Ukraine. Some girls began to sing the national anthem of Ukraine.” Hearing their own language spoken by officials on the other side brought it all home to many, Panina added: “Some girls could no longer hold back tears and cried. They fell to their knees on the ground.”
As they sang and the tears flowed, Russian PoWs stood awkwardly by the side waiting to play their part in the prisoner swap. “I looked at them directly at them, but they didn’t look me in the eye,” Panina said. “They looked to the ground.”
Panina, talking from a military hospital where she is recovering from her ordeal, had been part that cold Monday morning of the first all-female prisoner swap of the war in which 108 Ukrainians, including 12 civilians, had been traded for 110 Russians.
She has spent the last two days enjoying a visit to the hospital by her parents, Oksana, 45, and Volodymyr, 44, a former miner. She appeared well and collected but her story began in a now ruined city subjected to a Russian attack – the horrors of which will last long in the memory of Panina and other survivors.
When Vladimir Putin launched his “special military operation” on 24 February, Panina had been checking cargo for contraband with her two sniffer dogs, spaniels, at Mariupol’s port, the biggest in the Sea of Azov. She was ordered to move to join defensive forces gathering at the city’s smaller steel plant, known as Azovmash, on the northern outskirts .
There she stayed, as the Russians swept into the city, desperately trying to reassure her dogs as explosion after explosion rocked the plant.
“They calmed down after a couple of weeks of it,” Panina said. “But it was hard. The dogs could tell even before something was fired that it was coming. They would whimper.”
Mariupol was collapsing around them, along with the Ukrainian defence. Six weeks in, she saw the Russian soldiers for the first time. “They were at a distance of 20 metres from us,” she said. “I saw the Russians with my own eyes and they saw me.”
The order came soon after for the defensive forces at Azovmash to retreat back to the massive Azovstal complex by the port, where Ukrainian forces planned to stage a last redoubt under the overwhelming Russian firepower that was levelling the city of 400,000 people.
Panina’s new home, along with 70 others from the border guard, including two other women, was a bunker within the works. “It was very scary. The bunker was 100 metres from the sea in an open area with no metal constructions to protect it,” she said.
The Russians switched their attention from Azovmash to Azovstal on 12 April, she said. Hour after hour the steelworks would be pounded by heavy artillery, missiles from multiple launch rocket systems and strikes from the air as well as warships. The bunker “sagged and swayed” when hit. Panina would venture out only to allow her dogs time in the fresh air. Others who went out to the fighting positions did not come back. “I think at least 10 of the 70 people in our bunker died,” she said quietly.
They lived on tinned meat, macaroni and boiled grain, as did the dogs after a week when their tins of food ran out. But the situation could not continue. An agreement had already been struck earlier in May for civilians to be evacuated.
On 16 May, Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, announced in a televised address that “the defenders of Mariupol” would now also be relieved. That address did not reach Panina and her group. “Our commander came to us and said that surrender was the only way to save your lives. He said: ‘We will organise a list. The first 20 people of the wounded and injured soldiers and then a second 20 people.” I was in the second group,” she said.
At 10am on 17 May, Panina emerged into the light to surrender. “It was terrifying because we came out without any weapons or armoured vests. I was with the dogs. We walked for 5km [3 miles] from the bunker to the Russian soldiers. Everything was destroyed and there were unexploded missiles sticking out. It was like the ground had been dug up by diggers.”
The military had arranged for supplicant Russian media to be on hand as the women were herded on to waiting coaches. “They wanted to know who I was and why I had the dogs, they were filming me,” said Panina. The animals were taken from her, as were the food rations being carried by others.
Now prisoners of war, the group had no idea where they were heading nor what awaited them. The coaches drove for five hours. Panina saw a road sign for Olenivka on the way but knew nothing of the prison’s horrific reputation for abuse and squalid conditions.
It was 9pm by the time the coach drove past the barbed wire perimeter walls of the prison camp. Men and women were separated, and everyone was searched and told to strip. Watches and rings were taken. They were now part of the system.
Panina was taken with six other women to a cell measuring 6 metres by 4 metres with four bare wooden beds. There was a brief interrogation the next day about the nature of their military roles. Then a day later, two more women joined them. Within a week, there were 28 people to the one small cell.
The Russians provided a few mattresses after a few days but there was enough floor space in the cell that also had an exposed hole in the ground for a toilet. The prisoners remained in the clothes that they had taken out of the Azovstal plant. The only break from the four walls around them was a 15-minute walk once a day in the courtyard. They had a chance to shower once a week although that proved irregular.
“Our block had 10 cells on one floor, which was full of women, and an upper floor, with cells for men,” Panina said. “We weren’t allowed to talk to them [the men]. They appeared to be wasting away, getting thinner and thinner.”
Two of the women in her cell had injuries, one a broken arm and the other shrapnel wounds to her head. The Russians did not tend to them but provided some medical kit for two of the women, medics, to use. Meals, pushed through a hole in the cell door, were boiled cereal groats – mixed with chicken at breakfast and with fish at dinner.
Nights could be difficult. “Because of where we had been people would wake up screaming. It was difficult to sleep because the slightest noise would alarm people. But we became like sisters. We would spend our time talking about recipes, braiding each other’s hair. I read. The Russians gave us some books all about their history.” Typical fare was How the Steel Was Tempered, Nikolai Ostrovsky’s 1930s socialist realist novel about the Russian civil war.
Then at 10pm on 29 July, after the usual evening count of prisoners in their cells by the guards, there was a mighty explosion followed by screams.
Unbeknown to Panina, 53 Ukrainian PoWs had been killed and 75 wounded – mainly soldiers from the Azovstal complex including from the Azov Regiment, a unit with a rightwing genesis that has been held up by the Kremlin as evidence of the neo-Nazi nature of the Kyiv government. Ukrainian officials have claimed that part of the prison was destroyed by Russian forces to cover up the widespread torture of those being held that section. The International Committee of the Red Cross has since been blocked from inspecting the prison.
“There was a lot of crying, dogs barking,” Panina said of the explosion’s aftermath. “The Russian guards had kept open the observation holes as it was so hot at the time but they locked those up and went to see what had happened. I saw injured men taken into empty cells above us.”
“They told is that it was a Ukrainian strike, but none of is believed them. We all knew just smiled. We knew,” she added.
Life continued as it had after the events of 29 July. It was only two weeks ago that the monotony was dramatically broken again when at 10am the women, and a further 28 prisoners, were ordered from their cells and put on buses for a three-hour drive to the Russian port city of Taganrog. They were then transferred in military Kamaz vehicles to Rostov-on-Don, an hour east and put on a military plane to a location in the Voronezh region of the country, arriving at 3am the following day.
“All this time, the Russians did not tell us anything about where and for what they were transporting us,” said Panina. “We stayed in the prison of the Voronezh region for two weeks, with 12 to a cell. Then they moved us back to Taganrog for two days before being flown from there to Crimea. I think it was somewhere near the city of Sevastopol.”
From there the group were taken on coaches through the southern Kherson region and it was only then that terror turned to relief, said Panina. “When we started driving from Kherson oblast to Zaporizhzhia oblast and we saw that we were going to the village of Vasylivka and further into the grey zone [no man’s land], I think we all understood what was going on.”
“What I remember most is the moment when you stand there and see what is ahead of you – Ukrainians and the Ukrainian side,” she said. Pausing, she added: “I’m OK. I just want to say about our guys who are still in Russian captivity that I wish them also all these we happy moments after the exchange. We are very much waiting for them.”
