Why did the Russian Army capture thousands of civilians in the occupied territories of Ukraine? What happened to these people? Families experience moments of despair as they wait for answers.”Everyone tells me I should wait. We’ve been waiting for over a year now. Conditions in prison are not the best, to say the least,” says Anton Chirkov, as he invites us into his living room.
There are several women seated around a large table. Anton settles down at the head of the chair that would have belonged to his father. The huge piece of furniture was made by the 49-year-old businessman himself, owner of a funeral home, as well as several other pieces of furniture in the house.
The Chirkov family home is located in a residential area in the village of Dymer, on the banks of the dam that supplies Kiev, about 30 kilometers from the Ukrainian capital. The site was occupied by Russian forces on February 25, 2022.
In the first three weeks of the Russian occupation, when there was no electricity or telephone lines, Anton’s father, Oleksandr Chirkov, and his neighbor Dmytro Bohayevskyi kept life in the city alive.
In those days, villagers often gathered around a Chirkov fountain. For this reason, according to his son’s suspicions, Oleksandr was considered the leader of the resistance against the Russian occupation. “When they came to us on March 16th, they asked for our weapons. Everyone had some. We had three guns in a safe,” says Anton.
The next morning, the Russians seized the weapons. “They told my father to pack his bags,” Anton says. He hasn’t seen his father since that day.
On the same morning, the neighbor Dmytro Bohayevskyj was also taken by the soldiers. When his mother Tatiana found out about this, she ran to the village council and wanted to know where her son was being held. “The soldier just told me ‘don’t worry, they’re in excellent condition,’” she recalled.
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The detainees were taken to a foundry in south Dymer. About 40 people were placed in one room. They were all accused of “opposing the military special operation”, the term used by the Russians to refer to the war in Ukraine.
Some had to dig trenches, others were beaten and interrogated about resistance. Only a few were released, others were taken to the Hostomel airfield and held prisoner in large industrial refrigeration containers.
The relatives of those arrested were only informed of this after the liberation of the entire Kiev region. On March 28, the Russians fled from the Ukrainian Army’s attacks, leaving only two dozen prisoners.
“When it became clear to us that our son Dmytro was not among them, my husband and I searched in vain for him in all forests, ravines and buildings,” recalls Tatiana Bohajevska.
In early April 2022, Red Cross volunteer Volodymyr Khropun was released in a prisoner exchange. He said the retreating Russian army took dozens of Ukrainian civilians with it.
They were transported through Belarus to a prison in Novosybkov, a Russian town on the tri-border area of Russia, Belarus and Ukraine. Other prisoners were later released. They started looking for relatives of former prison companions to inform them about their conditions.
“The prisoners of war who have been exchanged are our biggest source of information,” said Karina Dyachuk, co-founder of the Imprisoned Civilians organization, created in December, which brings together families of more than 350 prisoners from six regions of Ukraine.
Accused of “espionage” or “terrorism”
When people in Dymer discovered the whereabouts of their relatives, they wrote letters to Russian institutions such as prisons, the army, the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the Russian intelligence service FSB, asking what needed to be done to release the prisoners.
“No one has received a response,” says Tatiana Bohajevska, who has a list of 42 missing people. Of these, only six were not located. Most of them are still in Novozybkov, where more than 600 Ukrainians, civilians and military, are reportedly being held.
According to the Ukrainian ombudsman Dmytro Lubinets, Russia currently detains more than 20,000 Ukrainian civilians, including those imprisoned on the Crimean Peninsula, in the self-proclaimed republics of Donetsk and Lugansk, and in the Russian occupation areas of Kherson and Zaporizia regions.
Some are accused of espionage or terrorism under Russian law, explains lawyer Emil Kurbedinov, a well-known advocate for members of Crimea’s Tatar minority. Many civilians, however, are held without justification.
Civilians as prisoners of war
The Ukrainian authorities consider the detention of civilians in Russian-occupied territories to be war crimes. In April, a report by the NGO Human Rights Watch highlighted that, according to the Geneva Convention for the Protection of Civilians in Time of War, “the detention or application of forced residence to protect persons should only be ordered where the security of power in whose hands these people are in is absolutely necessary”.
In addition, prisoners must be guaranteed access to lawyers and their family members, as well as the right to challenge their detention. According to Karina Djatschuk, from the organization Imprisoned Civilians, none of this is guaranteed to Ukrainian prisoners.
The representative of the Red Cross in Ukraine, Oleksandr Vlasenko, underlines that the detention of civilians and prisoners of war is regulated by different Geneva Conventions and therefore different norms of international law apply to it.
Even so, in the middle of last year Russia began to register civilians and soldiers equally as prisoners of war.
According to Tatyana Bohayevska, information about her son Dmytro first appeared in January on the Russian internet portal Nemesida, where data on Ukrainian military and security forces is published. The DW report was also able to find data about Oleksandr Chirkov on the same website.
The Ukrainian staff dealing with POW exchanges does not agree with this practice as far as civilians are concerned. For them, Russia should unconditionally release them without any exchange. “If we start exchanging civilians for soldiers, that will make everyone in the occupied territories become hostages”, assesses Karina Dyachuk.
Towards a deal?
Since February last year, 140 Ukrainian civilians have been released in exchanges, including Dyachuk’s father. The Ukrainian coordination team does not provide details about this. “Our civilians are being held hostage in the Russian Federation in order to force Ukraine to enter into political negotiations,” says team member Oleksandr Kononenko. He explains that ongoing talks are aimed at making progress on the release of civilians.
The office of the Ukrainian ombudsman Dmytro Lubinets is also looking for ways to free Ukrainian civilians detained in Russia. At the beginning of the year, during a meeting with the Russian ombudsman Tatyana Moskalkova in Ankara, Turkey, he proposed the repatriation of women, the elderly, injured and seriously ill people, but there was no reaction from the Russian side.
The two sides at least managed to agree on visits to captured civilians. Lubinets hopes that “the practice we have started can lead to a process for the release of civilian and convicted hostages”.
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