By Olha Hembik | 2024-11-12

WARSAW -- More than 400 Ukrainian women are languishing in horrific conditions in Russian prisons.

And those are just the women of whom Ukraine is aware.

Former Mariupol resident Larisa Kucherenko was one of the fortunate ones, freed in an October 2022 prisoner exchange that included 108 Ukrainian women.

She recounted her experience of more than six months in Russian captivity.

The authorities of the so-called Donetsk People's Republic arrested Kucherenko, a servicewoman in the Ukrainian National Guard, April 2, 2022.

They accused her of participating in a terrorist organization and committing a terrorist attack on residents of Mariupol, and they demanded she sign a confession.

"I said, what kind of nonsense is this? ... I will not sign this," Kucherenko told Kontur. "They said that my signature was completely unnecessary."

The occupation authorities later arrested her son and her husband, an armored personnel carrier driver and mechanic, respectively, in Unit 3057, the same one as Kucherenko's.

They accused her husband of belonging to the Azov Brigade after they found patriotic tattoos on his body.

At first Kucherenko was held in a penal colony in the Russian-occupied village of Olenivka in Donetsk province.

"They crammed 20 of us into a cell designed for eight. They humiliated, threatened and called us 'Nazis.' There was no food. I lost 40kg," said Kucherenko.

After about a month, she was transferred to the basement of the Donetsk pretrial detention center, where she remained for about six months. The women had no chance to walk the grounds. They were forced to stand all day and sleep on dirty mattresses.

"When they took us to be interrogated, they deliberately shoved us and mocked us. I banged into something, leaving a scar on my leg. The wound didn't heal for a month and a half. It became putrid," said Kucherenko, adding that the ordeal left her disabled.

Speaking Ukrainian was prohibited. Every morning the prisoners were forced to sing the Russian anthem and shout phrases glorifying Russia, she said.

"They said that if we don't shoot you, then your own people will shoot you during the exchange," said Kucherenko.

Her husband and son are still being held.

Ukrainian 'spy'

In a more recent prisoner exchange, 23 Ukrainian women detained by Russia were repatriated September 13, according to Ukraine's Coordination Headquarters for the Treatment of Prisoners of War.

"This is the largest number of women exchanged in recent times," said Victoria Stepanenko, a spokeswoman for the Women's March charity.

Crimean Tatar activist Leniye Umerova was among those freed, she told Kontur.

The 25-year-old activist was detained while traveling to visit her father, who had complications from cancer, in temporarily occupied Crimea.

She took a long route to reach him -- through Bulgaria, Romania and the Georgian border with Russia, where she was detained on December 4, 2022.

She was the only passenger on the bus who did not have a Russian passport.

Russian authorities, suspicious of her for having a Ukrainian passport, accused her of spying on Russian troops' "deployment and missions," punishable by 10 to 20 years' imprisonment.

Umerova was released from the Temporary Detention Center for Foreign Citizens near Vladikavkaz in March 2023. After that, she experienced a number of administrative arrests and detentions in Beslan and Moscow for several months, according to news reports.

The Kremlin flouts both "the norms of international law" and the Geneva Conventions, Lyudmila Huseynova, public ombudswoman for children's rights in specific districts of Donetsk province, told the Association of Relatives of Political Prisoners of the Kremlin website in February.

"The Geneva Conventions, often cited to protect civilians from being taken as prisoners, have been largely ignored since 2014, resulting in the capture and torture of civilians," she said.

Some female prisoners of war (POWs) were imprisoned as long ago as 2014, with their fate unknown to Ukraine, according to the Coordination Headquarters for the Treatment of Prisoners of War.

Russia has not allowed the Red Cross and other humanitarian organizations to see the prisoners, in direct violation of the Geneva Conventions.

Those freed in prisoner swaps report torture, inhumane detention conditions, humiliation, rape, poor nutrition, psychological coercion, lack of medical care and the inability to contact relatives, Ukrainian publication Slovo i Dilo reported May 24.

'Hell on Earth'

Some civilians whom Russia holds illegally as "POWs" do not make it out alive.

On October 10, the Russian Ministry of Defense, responding to an inquiry from her father, revealed that 27-year-old Ukrainian journalist Victoria Roshchyna had died in captivity.

After spending more than a year in Russian detention, Roshchyna died on September 19, allegedly while being transported to Lefortovo prison in Moscow.

The cause of her death was not specified, but she had been confined in Pretrial Detention Center No. 2 in Taganrog, Rostov province, which Ukrainian prisoners previously identified as one of the worst places to be detained in Russia.

"They call it hell on Earth. Those who have been released describe terrible torture," Tetyana Katrychenko of Ukraine's Media Initiative for Human Rights wrote on Facebook October 10.

"In particular, Azov unit members from Azovstal are held" there, she said, referring to the Mariupol factory that Ukrainian defenders held for several months in 2022 before surrendering.

According to former prisoners, beatings and torture by electrical shock are systematic practice in the Taganrog jail, BBC reported in August 2023.

Roshchyna had been held by the Russians once before, and she wrote about her experience in an article that was published in March 2022. She described threats, physical abuse and other mistreatment.

Russian authorities promised to return Roshchyna's body to Ukraine as part of an exchange of detainees' bodies, but they did not in the latest exchange November 8.