‘I just want them back’: Ukrainian civilians tell of torture and legal limbo in Russian captivity

Serhiy Nosach knew that Russian soldiers hunting out implacable opponents of their occupation of southern Ukraine would one day come for him.

He taught Ukrainian history and “defence of Ukraine” classes at a school in Beryslav, a town on the Dnipro river in Kherson region that Russians seized soon after their invasion last February, and many of his former pupils had joined the military and police force.

Nosach was blindfolded and taken from his home on August 5th, joining what Ukraine says are thousands of its civilians who are now held – often incommunicado and subject to torture – in makeshift and official jails across occupied territory and inside Russia.

“They drove me around the city and asked who else I knew who had pro-Ukrainian views or a relative in the Ukrainian armed forces. I said I knew nothing about anyone, so they took me to their base at a local machine-building factory,” Nosach recalls.

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There, he says, they put him with 15 other captives in a cargo container measuring about two metres by six metres that was blisteringly hot at the height of summer. Only inside the stifling container could they uncover their eyes, and they were blindfolded again before interrogation.

His captors questioned him about photos on his phone of a landmine and messages about the movement of Russian military vehicles, and continued to demand information about pro-Ukrainian activists and relatives of Ukrainian soldiers in Beryslav.

For several days they punched him, stunned him with an electric shock baton, and attached wires to his body and turned on the current. They threatened to shoot him and told him that unless he gave them what they wanted, “you won’t live until the morning”.

“One soldier screamed things like ‘Russia is here forever!’ and ‘[Russian leader Vladimir] Putin is president of the world!’” he recalls. “I just told them that everyone with a pro-Ukrainian position had already left town.”

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During one particularly long session of electric shocks, Nosach (51) says he suffered “something like a heart attack” and the Russians took him back to the container. After five days in detention, they drove him into the centre of Beryslav and left him there with an order not to leave town.

Nosach already had a history of heart problems, and spent about a week recovering in a local hospital. His wife Tetiana fled for Kyiv-held territory with their youngest child a month later and he joined them in late September, running a gauntlet of Russian military checkpoints to reach safety.

“Emotionally and psychologically it was very hard to leave my hometown,” Nosach says. “But captivity was the hardest thing. There were times when I thought it might be easier if they killed me than to go through that torture.”

What the Kremlin calls a special military operation to “liberate” Ukraine’s Russian speakers from a “neo-Nazi” regime in Kyiv has encountered fierce resistance from the country’s armed forces and fury from all but a tiny minority of its civilians.

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Russia’s propaganda said its invasion force would be met by weak defence and a warm welcome from people in eastern and southern Ukraine. In fact, Moscow’s troops have had to destroy cities such as Mariupol and Severodonetsk to occupy them and have taken prisoner more than 20,000 civilians, according to Ukrainian ombudsman Dmytro Lubinets.

Ukraine also says Russian troops have effectively deported many thousands of Ukrainian citizens by allowing them to flee fighting only by entering Russia rather than escaping to Kyiv-controlled territory, and that more than 16,000 Ukrainian children have been taken to Russian territory, some of whom have been put up for adoption there.

Kyiv calls this evidence of Russia’s genocidal intent, and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy last month urged Filippo Grandi, the visiting head of the UN refugee agency (UNHCR), to address the plight of “our people who were forcibly deported to Russia by the occupiers. These are both adults and our children”.

At the end of his trip to Ukraine, Grandi said that “in a situation of war, you cannot determine if children have families or guardianship. And therefore, until that is clarified, you cannot give them another nationality or have them adopted by another family.

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“Giving them [Russian] nationality or having them adopted goes against the fundamental principles of child protection in situations of war…This is something that is happening in Russia and must not happen.”

Russia acknowledges taking many Ukrainian children to its territory and putting some up for adoption, but claims it is “saving” them from orphanages and from abandonment by their parents.

Juliya Vorona only learned the fate of her uncle, Serhiy Kabakov, when a relative in Russia saw pictures of him on state television being forced to the ground and arrested by armed security service officers and accused of plotting to blow up a collaborationist official in Kherson.

That footage was broadcast in August last year, when Kabakov had already been held secretly in custody for a month after being detained with 15 other people in Kherson, in what Moscow called a swoop on “partisans” acting covertly on orders from Ukraine’s SBU security agency.

During six months in Russian detention – first in Kherson, then occupied Crimea and now in Moscow’s notorious Lefortovo prison – Kabakov has not been allowed to contact his relatives and they cannot get a letter or parcel to him from Ukraine.

“I don’t know how they have treated him [in captivity],” Vorona says of Kabakov (48), who until the invasion worked for a firm that mined sand to build beaches in Kherson, which is on the Dnipro river near the Black Sea; now he is accused of terrorism and faces a potential life sentence in a Russian jail.

“A state-appointed Russian lawyer told us only that he is alive, he is healthy, he is eating and has what he needs… But he has health issues – I know he has an ulcer – and if he doesn’t get the help that he needs for that, I don’t want to imagine what will happen,” Vorona adds.

Ukrainian civilians abducted by Russia vanish into a legal vacuum, where they are often held unofficially and in secret and are not treated as prisoners of war, and so are not eligible for exchange when the two sides periodically swap captured soldiers.

This absence of official status in the Russian prison system also makes it practically impossible for representatives of international organisations such as the Red Cross and United Nations agencies to visit and check on the welfare of Ukrainian captives.

Nosach is recovering from his ordeal but has not been able to return to Beryslav, which despite being liberated by Ukrainian forces last November is still hit by frequent deadly shelling from Russian troops on the eastern bank of the Dnipro.

The same danger prevents Vorona and her family from returning to Kherson city, which was also cleared of Russian forces three months ago.

“When I heard that Kherson had been liberated, I couldn’t work or speak or do anything. It was a moment that is impossible to compare to anything else,” she recalls. “A totally different feeling – it is freedom.”

She does not know if there is any truth to Moscow’s claim that her uncle and those arrested with him were part of a covert network of Ukrainian partisans, who are carrying out tasks ranging from surveillance to assassinations deep inside occupied territory.

“Maybe they will be heroes,” she says. “But I will be happy if they are alive and healthy. I don’t want them to be heroes – I just want them back.”