It was an especially dangerous time for a man of military age in Russian-occupied northern Ukraine, where Russian troops were losing ground in the face of a fierce Ukrainian counterattack.
Soldiers from the occupation forces arrested a young mechanic as he was walking through his village with his wife and a neighbor, blindfolded him, tied his hands and pushed him into a bus.
It was the start of “six weeks of hell,” says Vasili, 37 — who, like most of those interviewed for this story, declined to give his last name for fear of reprisals. Taken from one place of detention to another, he was beaten and repeatedly subjected to electric shocks under interrogation, not understanding where he was and why he had been detained.
He wasn’t the only one. Hundreds of mostly male Ukrainian civilians disappeared in the nearly six-month period of the Ukraine War, detained by Russian troops or their proxies, held in basements, police stations and triage camps in Kremlin-controlled areas of Ukraine and ending up incarcerated in Russia.
Thousands passed through this extensive makeshift triage system in the conflict zone, but no one knows exactly how many were sent to Russian prisons. The UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission has documented 287 cases of forced disappearance and arbitrary detention of civilians by Russia and says the total is certainly higher — in the hundreds, not thousands.
Vasili is one of the few people detained in Russia who have returned to Ukraine. He was released after about six weeks and made his way back through a long and tortuous journey, after a total of three months away. Back at work in a workshop in the city of Kharkiv, he says he’s glad he survived.
“It was embarrassing, maddening, but I came out alive,” he says. “It could have been worse. Some people were shot.”
Russian forces have been detaining Ukrainians since the invasion began in February, but the experiences of most civilians remain unknown. Interviews with men who were arrested and families of the missing offer new insights into one of the war’s enduring horrors.
Agents asked for information about Ukrainian military positions and groups, according to Vasili, but interrogations were often futile as the next blow came before he could answer a question. “They don’t believe anything you say, even if you’re telling the truth,” he says. “You can’t prove your innocence.”
Other families, less fortunate than his, continue to search for missing relatives, torn by anxiety over where they are or whether they still live.
“I go to sleep crying and wake up crying,” says Olha, 64. His son was detained by Russian troops and beaten unconscious, but released three days later, and his grandson, according to the International Committee of the Red Cross, is in a Russian pre-trial detention center.
His village, Vilkhivka, on the outskirts of Kharkiv, was overrun by Russian troops in late March. Planes bombed the village and Russian soldiers told residents they had an hour to leave, she said. “They said Vilkhivka would be razed to the ground.”
Look, relatives and neighbors ran through the fields for 8 kilometers, to where they were told that a Russian military truck would take them to waiting buses. The son and grandson did not arrive, so her husband returned to look for them. As she sat in a vehicle, Russian soldiers pulled out two bandaged young men she thought might be wounded Ukrainian soldiers.
She says that, in front of the other passengers, the military beat the men and shot them in the head. “They were left in that forest. I closed my eyes and cried.”
Her grandson, Mikita, 20, has not been seen since. Olha was taken with her daughter-in-law to Russia, where they were housed in a hostel. She returned home in July and was reunited with her husband, who had survived alone. Her son managed to join them in Russia, and he and his wife remained there to try to locate Mikita.
They have no idea if the boy will face charges. The Red Cross can only tell them he was in custody, according to the grandmother. Russia denies that it tortures or kills Ukrainian civilians and says it only attacks military targets.
The majority of civilians detained in the war zone are men with military experience or of combat age. In the occupied areas, Ukrainians with leadership qualities — activists, local officials and journalists — are more likely to be detained, human rights officials said. But many ordinary civilians were caught up in what is often a chaotic and arbitrary pursuit.
Vasili says he was caught by accident because he was walking down a street in Tsikuni, northeast of Kharkiv, when members of the security forces carried out a raid. His wife and a neighbor were told to go home, but he had his hands tied with duct tape and was pushed into a bus as men in balaclavas stormed a nearby house firing guns, forcing four men to fall to the ground. They were shot on the same bus.
Among them was Vadum, 36, a welder who lived in Tsirkuni with his wife and young son. Vadim ventured out to buy diapers and baby food, according to his sister, Daria Shepets, 19. She says some of the detainees served as border guards during hostilities with Russia in 2014, but that he had no ties to the military.
The detainees were taken to the basement of a house, where they were beaten and interrogated, says Vasili. They were later transferred to another village, held in a group of about 25. After about three weeks, he was taken with a dozen men to a detention center on the northern border. In the third week, Vadim and his three friends left and were never seen again—Vasili thought they were being released.
But when he got home at the end of June, he was shocked to find that he was the only one coming back. He was lucky when there was a change in the leadership of the unit that maintained his group; the detainees were suddenly thrown onto the street. Because of the fighting, they had to travel to Russia, where they were arrested again — this time by officials from the FSB spy agency, who, according to Vasili, offered him money and a job.
He refused and after three days he was released. “They probably realized that we were useless to them.” With a long beard and unkempt hair, Vasili was able to borrow money from a friend of a friend to obtain new documents and travel back through the Baltics and Poland.
