At the beginning of the war in Ukraine, Mykola Zakhozhyi, a 37-year-old father of two young boys, jumped on his motorcycle and zoomed off from his house in the suburbs of Kyiv.
He told his wife he wanted to see what was going on with the Russian troops who had just invaded their area.
He did not come back that night. Or the next. Or that month. Or the month after that.
“I was in shock,” said his wife, Iryna. “And the kids kept asking: When’s Dad coming home?”
Dad, a heating and water technician, had become one of hundreds of Ukrainian civilians taken by Russian forces from occupied areas of Ukraine and shunted through a constellation of Russian prisons in a new kind of gulag.
They are a class of prisoners languishing incommunicado deep within the penal system of an enemy state. Some have died in captivity, and relatively few have been released. Those who have been freed, like Mr. Zakhozhyi, say they were tortured, nearly starved and tormented constantly.
He described his nearly yearlong ordeal, which he said included regular beatings with a plastic pipe and a paltry diet of ground-up fish heads, in a series of face-to-face interviews from Makariv, his suburb outside of Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital.
He also provided paperwork showing he had been incarcerated in Russia. Ukrainian human rights investigators and government officials corroborated that he had been taken prisoner by Russian forces and the accounts of a half-dozen others like him who were interviewed by The New York Times.
The details of how Mr. Zakhozhyi said he was treated could not be verified independently, but everything he said fit with a growing body of reports and investigations into the abuse of prisoners in Russian custody. The other former prisoners interviewed by The Times shared similar stories.
The Ukrainians call these prisoners “civilian hostages.” Their fates are likely to be one of the most difficult issues to resolve if Ukraine and Russia ever agree on a peace deal, which the Trump administration is pushing hard again.
Uniformed soldiers captured on the battlefield are routinely exchanged between the two sides. They are P.O.W.s — prisoners of war — and there is an established channel for them. Trading them is part of modern warfare.
Captured civilians are a different story.
In the twisted logic of war, Ukrainian officials say that they cannot start trading the Russian soldiers they have captured for their civilians. It would only incentivize the Russians to scoop up more civilians. And the Russians, occupying 20 percent of Ukraine, have a vast population to choose from.
That has made these cases particularly difficult to resolve, leaving families across Ukraine suspended in a black hole of confusion, anxiety and great fear as they try, on their own, to track down their loved ones.
Ukrainian officials say they have confirmed that at least 1,700 civilians are in Russian captivity. “The actual number,” U.N. investigators said in a new report, is “likely significantly higher” because it is difficult to get information on many cases.
Russian authorities have shared very little about where captives are being held or even if they are still alive. The only information often comes from a patchwork of accounts and fleeting glimpses from released Ukrainian P.O.W.s who were kept in the same prisons.
Emails to the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Russian Embassy in Washington to discuss these prisoners and their accusations went unanswered. In August, a Russian official said allegations of human rights abuses were “ridiculous” and “misinformation.”
Unlike the legions of Ukrainian children that Russian forces have abducted, the adult prisoners have not received nearly the same level of attention, the Ukrainian government says.
“There are three categories of prisoners,” said Oleksandr Kononenko, a Ukrainian human rights official. “P.O.W.s, children and civilian hostages.”
“The last category is the hardest,” he said. “The Russians don’t even want to talk about them.”
Captured and Kicked
Mr. Zakhozhyi said the abuse started from the moment he was captured on March 2, 2022.
He had ridden his motorcycle to the woods outside his town, trying to spot the Russian invaders. But they spotted him first.
Mr. Zakhozhyi said that Russian soldiers had dragged him to a frozen pit and kicked him in the head so hard he was knocked out. When he came to, he saw Russian soldiers pouring diesel over him and some other captives, threatening to light them on fire.
One Russian soldier nicknamed Kliuch, or key, used a small wrench key to break people’s fingers, Mr. Zakhozhyi said. He wanted to cover his ears and block out the screams.
Under international law, Mr. Zakhozhyi fell into a gray zone. He was not armed when he was apprehended, nor was he part of any official military unit.
But he was, by his own admission, trying to help the Ukraine war effort and resist the Russian occupation, part of a volunteer network in the early days of the war gathering information on Russian troops and sharing it with people who had connections to the Ukrainian military.
The Geneva Conventions give occupying powers (like Russia in this case) the authority to detain civilians that they deem security risks. The conventions specifically refer to spies and saboteurs, and the Russians have put some Ukrainians on trial for espionage and sentenced them to years in prison.
But legal scholars say that Russia and Ukraine often disagree on who should be considered a civilian or combatant, and that the Russians flagrantly disregard international law.
The fact that Russia refuses to call the conflict in Ukraine a war, but rather “a special military operation,” complicates matters further. According to a new report by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, Russia intentionally “blurs the line between P.O.W.s and civilian detainees.”
Mr. Zakhozhyi’s case is an example of the confusion. He was incarcerated with captured Ukrainian soldiers and civilians, he said, and the Ukrainian government originally gave him a document indicating that he had been held as a P.O.W.
But in a recent interview, Petro Yatsenko, a spokesman for the Ukrainian government’s agency that handles both civilian and military prisoner issues, said he did not know exactly why that happened, but that Mr. Zakhozhyi was “a civilian for sure.”
Regardless of a prisoner’s status, the Geneva Conventions call for humane treatment. That is not what they have received in Russia, say U.N. investigators, human rights groups and Ukrainian officials.
“Ninety-four percent have claimed torture,” Mr. Yatsenko said. “It’s not rare cases. It’s policy.”
A Desperate Search
When Mr. Zakhozhyi failed to come home that first night, his wife, Iryna, a kindergarten teacher, said she became crazed with tracking him down.
She frantically called his friends, tried to get through to national hotlines, scoured social media accounts, barely slept or ate and tried to take care of her kids at the same time.
“This was the beginning of the invasion and there was a lot of confusion,” she remembered. “There were Russia troops in our area, air raid alarms, electricity problems.”
A few weeks into her search, she got a call that stopped her cold. Near her town, a mass grave had been discovered. And one of the bodies matched her husband’s description.
She could not bear to go and sent a family friend. The friend came back and said it was not him.
Several weeks after that, a Ukrainian soldier who had just been released in an official prisoner exchange responded to a plea for information that Ms. Zakhozha had posted on Facebook.
The soldier told her that her husband was alive. He had shared a cell with him in a pretrial detention facility in Kursk, a Russian city not far from the border. The news, she said, sent her racing.
She contacted every agency she could think of, but none could confirm the information.
Finally, she found a small volunteer organization called Civilians in Captivity that was tracking civilian detainees. The members invited her to join rallies to pressure Ukrainian officials to do more.
Their logo: a low battery. Their message: Time was running out.
A Litany of Abuse
At each prison he was taken to, Mr. Zakhozhyi said, he was treated to what was known as “the welcome beating.”
The guards would line up the incoming prisoners and force them to run a gantlet. The prisoners were knocked to the ground with punches and kicks. Sometimes, Mr. Zakhozhyi said, the guards jumped on their backs. Then they would march the prisoners through the corridors, taking special care to slam them into the metal door frames.
Mr. Zakhozhyi said he was held in half a dozen different places, including army camps, two detention facilities and an airfield that he believed was in Belarus — he was blindfolded at the time, but said he could recognize the accents.
In the Kursk jail, he said, he was beaten on the way to the showers, beaten on way to the yard, hit with electric shockers and beaten while waiting to be interrogated. None of this, according to other civilian prisoners, was unusual.
“They weren’t full of hate,” said Oleksandr Tarasov, a Ukrainian journalist who was held in Russian captivity. “They were coldblooded systematic professionals.”
Tetiana Katrychenko, a Ukrainian human rights defender, said she had collected several reports of Russian guards who forced Ukrainians to cut patriotic tattoos out of their skin with razor blades or scrape them off against walls.
“This is the sick imagination of Russians who want to delete Ukrainian identity,” Ms. Katrychenko said.
Another released prisoner said his group was forced to run around naked while making buzzing bee sounds as guards pummeled them and ordered them to shout, “Putin is president of the universe!”
Hope and Despair
After one exchange of P.O.W.s in August 2022, Ms. Zakhozha said another Ukrainian soldier who had been freed contacted her. He said he had been held in the same facility as her husband in Kursk, but the Russians had taken Mr. Zakhozhyi somewhere else. But he did not know where.
That same month, Ms. Zakhozha said, she received an email from the International Committee of the Red Cross confirming her husband was in captivity in Russia but stating he was a P.O.W.
That sent her into another tailspin. She resumed her late-night social media patrols, marched in rallies for prisoners and spoke on a Ukrainian talk show, “I’m Searching for You.”
“I was crying all the time,” she said.
At the Media Initiative for Human Rights, another Ukrainian human rights organization working on civilian prisoners, Anastasiia Pantielieieva and her team steadily gathered information about hundreds of cases, including Mr. Zakhozhyi’s.
They said more than 100 different Russian-run facilities were holding Ukrainian teachers, journalists, local administrators and others suspected of resisting the Russian occupation.
“The Russians are trying to show that Ukrainians are terrorists,” she said. “It’s part of their political strategy and they’ve put a lot of effort into this.”
Even if the war comes to an end, she fears the Russians will keep holding these prisoners as bargaining chips.
Ms. Pantielieieva also said that at least 100 had died in Russian captivity, based on bodies that had been exhumed from occupied territory after the Russians left, remains that had been officially exchanged and witness testimonies. And many prisoners have been sexually assaulted, according to her organization and several others.
The Whisper Network
Mr. Zakhozhyi’s wife did not know it, but after about two months in Kursk, he said, he was transferred to another facility. This time, he was sent all the way to Tula, about 120 miles south of Moscow.
In Tula, the guards took a “white plastic pipe, maybe 30 centimeters diameter,” Mr. Zakhozhyi explained with an engineer’s precision. “Before they beat your back with it, they would tell you about the bruises they would leave. A British flag? Tic-tac-toe? A cross?”
In Tula, he got sick. He lost more than 60 pounds. A typical meal, he said, was a single slice of white bread or maybe, every once in a while, a mushy, hockey-puck-shaped lump of minced fish heads.
He hit rock bottom. His Ukrainian cellmates tried to cheer him up. But, he said, “I didn’t want to talk to anyone.”
He did take part in a whisper network, though, which several other former prisoners also described.
When the guards were not watching, the Ukrainians sat quietly with their cellmates and whispered to one another their personal details. Name. Phone number. Girlfriend or wife’s name. Phone number. Facebook avatars. Place of capture.
The prisoners committed the details to memory. It was not an exercise just to kill time. It added up to a vital lifeline of information.
One night in early 2023, Mr. Zakhozhyi heard cell doors banging open and guards barking out names.
“I said to myself, ‘Lord, let them call my name.’”
They called his name.
He was marched outside to a bus, blindfolded, driven to an airfield and put on an aircraft. He emerged at a tented camp where instead of a welcome beating, he and the other prisoners were treated to powdered potatoes and noodles.
Apparently, the Russians were trying to fatten them up — or least make them look less sickly. Mr. Zakhozhyi ate till his stomach hurt.
He climbed aboard another bus, where a Russian officer stepped on and said: “Cossacks, why are you so sad? You’re going home.”
He was released as part of an exchange of P.O.W.s. It is not clear if the mistake in categorizing him as a P.O.W. helped get him out; in other exchanges, a few civilians have been released along with many more soldiers. Ukrainian human rights groups and the Zakhozhyis said they still do not know why he was chosen to be freed.
The Russians never provided any explanation.
A ‘Shadow’ Returns
On the morning of Feb. 4, 2023, Ms. Zakhozha was anxiously monitoring a prisoner release broadcast online when she saw the image of a man who looked like a dying version of her husband.
A Ukrainian woman called a minute later. She said she was standing next to him on Ukrainian soil. Ms. Zakhozha dropped the phone and fainted, she said.
Mr. Zakhozhyi tried to call back. But he just stared at the phone. His hands were quivering. His whole body was shaking. He could not push the call button. He had been captive for 11 months.
“I had such inner fear,” he said. “I had left her alone with all these problems. How did she do with my parents? And the kids? I didn’t know how to start the conversation.”
Finally, he hit the button.
It has been more than two years since the Zakhozhyis were reunited but still, he says, he feels the presence of “a shadow” on his life.
His ears continue to ring from the beatings. His back is so damaged from the time a guard jumped on him that he has trouble picking up his youngest son.
On Friday afternoons, he, his wife and their two boys used to race off into the woods to go camping. Now, they look forward to squeezing together on the couch and watching TV.
Sometimes, after work, he likes to sit by himself, which he rarely did before.
After all he’s been through, what he really craves, he said, was “maximum silence.”
Reporting was contributed by Katya Lachina and Oleksandra Mykolyshyn from Kyiv, Ukraine; Anastasia Kuznietsova from Mantua, Italy; and Ada Petriczko from Warsaw.
Jeffrey Gettleman is an international correspondent based in London covering global events. He has worked for The Times for more than 20 years.
The post The Ukrainians Stuck in Russia’s New Gulag appeared first on New York Times.
