In prison colonies and detention centers in Russia and the occupied territories of Ukraine, thousands of Ukrainian citizens, who have been illegally arrested, are being held, the BBC’s Russian service reveals.

The journalists of the BBC Russian Service point out that military or security forces of Russia have started arresting Ukrainians for suspected “action against the special military operation”. At the same time, the detained Ukrainians have not officially been charged or convicted of criminal cases, while the authorities prohibit their lawyers and relatives from visiting them.

Russian and Ukrainian human rights activists succeeded to recognize 30 prison colonies and detention centers, from which information arrived about the Ukrainian prisoners in them. According to the Russian lawyer Maria Esmond, in most of the cases that have become known, the Ukrainian military and civilians are kept separately from other prisoners. A detainee in a detention center on the territory of Crimea told the BBC that the Ukrainians they put in solitary confinement are treated like “subhumans”.

Based on the data of human rights activists and journalists, in the region of Siberia the Ukrainians have them in the Krasnoyarsk region (in prisons in Minushinsk and Yeliseysk) and in Detention Center -1 in Irkutsk, whose jailers are known for torturing prisoners.

According to information from the Ukrainian authorities, in November 2023 there were more than 700 Ukrainian prisoners, while the number of missing residents in the occupied territories may reach 25,000 thousand, of which a part could have been killed or taken to Russia.

Based on the estimates of the naiti svoich Ukrainian missing persons program, in total, without charge, the Russian authorities have arrested about 7,500 people, of whom it was possible to locate 200. This number does not include Ukrainians illegally transported from Ukraine to Russia.