For months after the Russian military occupied his hometown in southern Ukraine, Yevheny made plans to leave. But each time, the 48-year-old lawyer said, he was thwarted, by warnings of gunfire on the roads and, once, when a hired driver disappeared.
Then came the Russian soldiers, who searched his house, hauled him off to a nearby village and cast him into a dark cellar where he would undergo a violent, weeklong interrogation.
Yevheny’s harsh treatment is just one example of a colonialist repression Russia is enforcing across the Ukrainian territory it controls, a system comprising a gulag of more than 100 prisons, detention facilities, informal camps and basements that is reminiscent of the worst Soviet excesses.
Research by a team of reporters involving dozens of interviews with former detainees, human rights organizations and Ukrainian officials from the Office of the General Prosecutor, the intelligence service and ombudsmen, reveals a highly institutionalized, bureaucratic and frequently brutal system of repression run by Moscow to pacify an area of 40,000 square miles in Ukraine, roughly the size of Ohio.
The abuses almost always occur unseen and unheard by the outside world, as Russia-controlled areas are largely inaccessible to independent journalists and human rights investigators. But human rights organizations and Ukrainian prosecutors and government officials have managed to monitor the situation closely, drawing on accounts from civilians who are either still living there or who have found a way to leave.
The ultimate aim of Moscow’s efforts, rights advocates said, is to extinguish Ukrainian identity through such tactics as propaganda, re-education, torture, forced Russian citizenship and sending children to live in Russia.
Russia occupies roughly a fifth of Ukraine’s territory, home to more than four million people, the United Nations says. The occupied territories include Crimea, forcibly annexed by Russia in 2014; parts of eastern Ukraine also seized in 2014; and a wide band of eastern and southern Ukraine conquered in 2022.
The fate of Ukrainians in these areas is one reason Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, has said he would not accept a peace deal that would cede territory to Russia. “Ukraine does not trade its land, and does not abandon its people,” he said at a conference on Crimea in Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital, in September.
In addition, the Russian forces are holding about 22,000 Ukrainians, roughly 8,000 of them prisoners of war and the rest civilians, many of them on dubious charges, according to human rights organizations and Ukrainian officials.
Ukrainians who have escaped Russian occupation said it was like living in a cage, where travel is restricted and many live in fear of arbitrary violence or detention. Information is controlled and inhabitants are subjected to relentless propaganda in the media, in schools and in the workplace.
For many trapped there, the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 happened so fast that they had little or no time to react, let alone escape. Some did not have the means or transport to leave, and some trusted that the war would be short and would pass them by.
At the time of the invasion, Yevheny, who, like others in this article, asked that only his first name be published for security reasons, was living by the sea in southern Ukraine. At first, he said in an interview earlier this year, Russian troops did not even enter his small coastal town.
But 10 months later, in December 2022, eight masked, uniformed men came looking for him. In the subsequent interrogation, he said, he was punched, beaten with a crowbar and subjected to water boarding and near suffocation with a plastic bag.
For six weeks after that beating he could not lie down, and he could only sleep sitting up in a chair. “My legs, my buttocks, everything from the waist down was black,” he said. “All my limbs, all the muscles, were not working. The skin on my arms was all cracked.”
It took him eight months to recover with the help of a local doctor, who told him he was not the only person to have been tortured in that basement, Yevheny said.
Rights organizations and Ukrainian officials working in the southern regions said they had collected many similar accounts. Yurii Sobolevsky, first deputy chairman of the Kherson Regional Council, said he personally knew of dozens of cases of enforced disappearances, detentions and beatings in the occupied part of his region.
The Kremlin has denied that its soldiers torture civilians.
When in April a local Ukrainian official warned Yevheny that the Russian military was planning to confiscate his house, he fled. “They wanted to detain me a second time,” Yevheny said. “That’s why I left.”
He became part of an exodus that, earlier this year, numbered 50 to 100 people a day, including whole families who had abandoned their homes in occupied areas and traveled via Russia to cross into Ukraine-controlled territory. They crossed at the single functional border crossing between the two countries, near the city of Sumy in Ukraine’s northeast.
The crossing was closed after Ukraine invaded Russian territory in August. But Ukrainians arriving this year said in interviews that they had left their homes because of the growing dangers in Russian-occupied areas.
They described increased pressure to adopt Russian citizenship and threats to seize their properties after Russian officials called for the expulsion of Ukrainians who were not sympathetic to Moscow’s rule. Others said they left because of shelling in frontline areas and the lack of utilities and medical care. Students were leaving to continue their educations in Ukraine, others to find work.
Some left for fear of the Russian occupiers’ brutality.
Ukrainian prosecutors and a United Nations special rapporteur have documented hundreds of abuses occurring under Russian occupation from enforced disappearances, summary executions of civilians, unlawful detention, torture and sexual violence.
The first cases of torture of Ukrainians in detention emerged 10 years ago, when Moscow-backed separatists seized power in parts of the eastern provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk. Alice Jill Edwards, the U.N. special rapporteur on torture, said last year that torture and sexual assault by Russian soldiers of Ukrainian civilians and soldiers had reached a level of a systematic, state-endorsed policy.
Oleksandra Matviichuk, head of the Kyiv-based Center for Civil Liberties, which has documented human rights abuses since 2014 and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2022, said, “There is a clear goal to this violence, this cruelty,” noting that it was “a tactic of war, to keep the territorial occupation under their control.”
Much of Russia’s official activities, including the deportation of Ukrainian children and the seizure of property, are published on Russian government online sites. Procurement contracts available in the public domain reveal how occupied Ukrainian prisons and detention facilities have been renamed and integrated into the Russian detention system.
The Media Initiative for Human Rights, a Ukrainian rights organization, has mapped more than 100 formal places of detention in the occupied territories and in Russia where Ukrainians are being held. Other groups, including the Ukrainian government’s Coordination Headquarters for the Treatment of Prisoners of War, have collected information of abuses on a similar scale.
Yet there are many more unofficial places of detention and cases of people being abducted and later being found dead, Ms. Matviichuk said.
Oleksii, 43, a Ukrainian welder, was held in three separate places of detention in Donetsk in 2015. After a week of brutal beatings by different groups he was left for dead outside the city.
He told his story after crossing the border into Ukraine in April with his wife, Olena, 39, their five children and their dog, Czar.
Twice displaced in the last decade, they first fled occupied Donetsk in 2015. Oleksii sent the family ahead to live in a Ukraine-controlled region, but was detained by the local police before he could follow them.
He was held for a week, he said, repeatedly beaten into unconsciousness. But he remembers his last interrogator, a Russian with a red beard, who removed the hood covering from Oleksii’s head and offered him a last wish. Oleksii asked for a call to his relatives and a cigarette. “He gave me a cigarette but no call,” Oleksii said.
“Then he said, ‘This is it.’ He broke my fingers, broke my nose. Only two ribs were not broken,” Oleksii added.
When he regained consciousness, Oleksii found himself in the half light of dawn or dusk, he could not tell which, in a sprawling field surrounded by dead and decaying bodies. “There were dozens of them,” he said. “They had been there for a long time.”
Unable to walk, he began to crawl out of the dumping ground and surprised a woman collecting bottles in a wheelbarrow. She screamed and ran off but returned the next day with her husband and daughter. They took him to their home in the wheelbarrow and nursed him back to health. A week later, volunteers helped him escape to Ukrainian-held territory.
Oleksii and his family made a new home in a village in the Zaporizhzhia region, but during the invasion of February 2022, Russian troops took control of that area, too.
To avoid trouble, Oleksii barely went out of the house and made excuses to keep the children out of the Russian language school. When Ukrainian classes became available online, the children secretly began studying at home, with their mother, Olena, on the lookout.
“If the dog was barking, we would look out of the window in case someone was dropping by and would find the children online,” she said.
In April, when Olena heard that the school’s former principal and his wife had been detained and not been seen since, they decided to flee.
“It was no life,” Olena said. “There was a constant fear that you would be taken away.”
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