This account was made possible with the help of the Reckoning Project, a nonprofit multinational group of journalists, analysts, and lawyers, headquartered in Kyiv, that collects evidence on war crimes in Ukraine. TRP’s executive director is Janine di Giovanni, a Vanity Fair contributor who has chronicled the group’s work for the magazine.
In the summer of 2022, four months into Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Danylo and Illia Martynenko were desperate to get out of town. Life under occupation had been untenable for the brothers, who lived in the southern Kherson region. Russian soldiers had captured Danylo, 28, and Illia, 20, and thrown them into a former pretrial detention center that the troops had turned into a prison for Ukrainian civilians.
There, the soldiers accused each of the brothers of spying for Ukraine and set about torturing them to extract confessions. (To protect the brothers’ family, the pseudonym Martynenko is used here as a surname.) For two weeks, the brothers recounted, they were beaten with truncheons and jolted by electric shocks. The Russians fired gunshots above their heads in mock executions and threatened to kill their parents if they didn’t admit to being Ukrainian spies. One evening, the brothers were forced to strip naked and then crawl down a hallway with a guard riding each of them, piggyback-style. The soldiers threatened to coerce the brothers’ fellow captives to rape them. And even though no rapes actually took place, the fear of such a hostile violation, the Martynenkos said, took a grave psychic toll.
After two weeks of abuse, the two men were released. “My brother and I had nightmares after our time in captivity,” Danylo said. “We were scared that we would be taken away and tortured again.”
It was enough to convince them it was time to flee their town. Danylo and Illia knew that the only possible way to escape occupied Kherson was through Crimea, the Black Sea peninsula that had been under the Kremlin’s control since 2014. Other routes out of Kherson were blocked by the Russian military, which would have surely resulted in their being recaptured.
On July 15, Danylo and Illia got into a car and headed south toward Crimea and what they hoped would eventually lead to their freedom. If they could make it to Crimea, the brothers planned to get to Russia and then to Georgia, in the southern Caucasus.
Instead, the Martynenkos ended up becoming trapped in Crimea’s labyrinth of Russian-run filtration camps, detention centers, and torture chambers through which the Putin regime, according to human rights organizations, channels suspected anti-Russian or anti-government Ukrainian and Crimean civilians, many of them later being fed into the main Russian prison system. The brothers, in fact, found themselves among the same inmate population that has been tapped to fill the ranks of the Russian military and its proxy militia groups as they have waged their campaign to take over all of Ukraine.
War crimes experts and human rights monitors say these camps are part of the larger penal colony network, with its intentionally harsh and inhumane conditions, that in February led to the death of Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny, then being held in an Arctic gulag.
This report is among the first to use detailed detainee testimonies and analysis by human rights organizations to describe conditions in six processing centers and prisons in Crimea. Based on in-depth interviews with survivors and prisoners as well as research into Russian military detention practices outside its borders (despite the Kremlin’s attempts to hide such data), the Crimean Tatar Resource Center, the Crimean Human Rights Group, the Center for Civil Liberties, the Reckoning Project, and other human rights organizations believe that some 4,000 Crimean residents have gone through interrogations, arrests, torture, and/or prolonged imprisonment over the last decade. Of this number, according to Crimean human rights sources, more than 200 Crimean opponents of Putin’s government have been convicted, a fifth of them sentenced to 15 years or more in a Russian penal colony. For the past two years, Crimean prisons have housed not only residents of the peninsula, but also more than 100 citizens from other regions of Ukraine.
Militarization and incarceration
Crimea used to be, first and foremost, a holiday destination, where Ukrainians, Russians, and other residents of the former Soviet Union swam in the Black Sea, relaxed in nearby resorts, and hiked up mountain trails. But in 2014, Russian president Vladimir Putin dispatched his troops to take over Crimea’s government buildings and military bases. The Kremlin then orchestrated a sham referendum, the result of which became Crimea’s annexation, whose legitimacy remains unrecognized by most of the world.
Thereafter, Russia began a rapid militarization of Crimea. It built roads and infrastructure to accommodate an estimated 800,000 Russians, many members of law enforcement, who would relocate to the peninsula. With Crimea having essentially become an outsize Russian military base, Putin created a perfect launchpad for his sweeping incursion into Ukraine. Meanwhile, Crimea had become a kind of Orwellian dystopia: a staging ground for a systematic campaign against Ukrainian citizens, including Crimean residents. These efforts have intensified since the 2022 occupation of Ukraine, according to a January report from the Crimean Human Rights Group, a nonprofit that monitors violations of humanitarian rights on the peninsula.
Following the 2014 annexation, members of the Crimean Tatar population—an indigenous Muslim minority—became the Kremlin’s first target. Most Crimean Tatars were defiantly against the annexation, and openly protested it. (It wasn’t their first interaction with Russian persecution. In 1944, Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin forcibly deported all people of Crimean Tatar descent—some 230,000 civilians—to Central Asia. They were allowed to return in 1989, just before the collapse of the Soviet Union, but didn’t come back en masse until Ukraine’s subsequent independence.) The Russian-appointed Crimean authorities also turned their focus on dissenting Ukrainian voices, particularly journalists, human rights activists, and anyone who spoke out against the annexation, or those who held an affinity for Ukrainian culture, language, or claims to the peninsula.
Then, two years ago, when the ramped-up invasion of Ukraine commenced, the Kremlin increased its persecution of those who did not support the war, accelerating the number of arrests. In tandem, as documented by the Crimean Human Rights Group, the Kremlin began building up the peninsula’s prison system to accommodate the new influx of detained Ukrainian civilians in Crimea.
Observers of Russia’s human rights violations say a pattern has emerged. In the occupied precincts of Ukraine, Russian forces—which had been torturing local citizens since 2014 in occupied Lugansk and Donetsk—detained Ukrainian civilians, such as the Martynenko brothers, subjecting them to an initial round of torture and inhumane treatment. From there, many Ukrainian captives would then be transported to Crimea, where the torture, orchestrated by Russian security service agents known as the FSB (Federal Security Service, the successor to the KGB), would intensify with the aim of coercing confessions or constructing mostly fabricated criminal cases against them, according to witness testimonies and human rights groups. These same organizations have concluded that this abduction-and-detention system is conducted and maintained by the FSB, the Russian National Guard, and both rank-and-file Russian military forces and their commanders.
The Crimean Human Rights Group claims that before the 2022 invasion, Russian occupation authorities had built two pretrial detention centers in Crimea: Number 2 and Number 8, both within the confines of Simferopol Penal Colony. Soon after the conflict escalated between Russia and Ukraine, Center Number 2 became a pretrial facility for Ukrainian detainees from the south of the country. Both institutions fall under the jurisdiction of the FSB.
What’s more, as recounted by journalists and human rights researchers, the Russians have opened a “filtration system” for civilians at various locations in Ukraine, including one in the village of Chonhar, located in the Kherson region, just north of the Crimean border. This expansion of detention facilities, the report notes, underscores a troubling escalation in the Russian authorities’ campaign against Ukrainian noncombatants, marking a clear violation of international humanitarian law.
Filtration
Almost immediately after the 2022 invasion, occupying forces opened so-called filtration centers at various border checkpoints. On the morning of their escape, the Martynenko brothers got in their car and drove south, managing to pass through several of these clearance sites. But when they made it to the Chonhar checkpoint, the Russian soldiers who were stationed there began to examine the documents and cell phones of anyone who entered. Some were stopped and interrogated.
Illia passed through quickly and waited on the other side for his brother. Meanwhile, an FSB officer took Danylo’s phone, plugged it into a computer, and ran a program to search through deleted contacts. There, he found a contact saved as “Serhii, Security Service of Ukraine.” The officer accused Danylo of working with Ukraine’s security service, the SBU. Danylo denied having ever been in direct touch with the SBU, saying he had spoken with Serhii a few years before and had even forgotten he’d retained his number.
Danylo was questioned intensely for four hours. Illia waited, his dread mounting. Then a man in a business suit emerged from the interview booths to tell Illia he was free to go. Danylo, however, would remain in FSB custody. “Emotionally, that was harder than going through the torture chamber,” Illia recalled. “We were together in Kherson and now my brother would be on his own.”
Illia sat in his car, trying to muster the courage to call their parents. “At first, I was careful with my words,” he said, “but then broke down in tears.” On the other end of the line, his mother and father began to weep.
Danylo, as if caught up in a scene out of a Franz Kafka tale, was taken to the FSB department in Armyansk, but was still given no explanation about why he had been detained. The next day, the Russians transferred him to FSB headquarters in Simferopol, the administrative capital of Crimea. Danylo remembered being led down into a basement, where he saw a long corridor with prison cells on both sides. The Russians ordered him into one of the cells, where a man named Misha was being held.
Like Danylo, Misha had failed his filtration clearance. Inside the cell, there was one bed and two chairs. That night, before they went to sleep, Danylo and Misha decided to set up the chairs next to the bed to create a space for each man to lie down, evenly dividing the weight of their bodies: half on the bed, half on a chair.
The basement prison seemed like it had been set up very recently, Danylo would later recount. The cells had neither a sink nor a toilet. The men were provided with a single bottle for urination. Oddly, the floor was covered with expensive tiles and the walls had electrical wiring and heating pipes. Danylo speculated that the cell, at one time, had likely been a computer server room or a large storage closet. “I don’t know how many people were held where I was,” Danylo said. “There were approximately 30 to 50 cells.” He and Misha were told that they were “lucky” that it was just the two of them in their confined space. Other cells, he believed, had six to seven people, with no room to sit down.
Danylo claimed to have spent two weeks in the basement. He said he wasn’t permitted to speak to a lawyer, and his family knew nothing of his whereabouts. He was interrogated daily by a female FSB officer, who demanded names of all the Ukrainian soldiers and SBU employees he knew, threatening that if his accounts were not forthcoming, he would be sent to another facility, where he would face worse treatment.
Danylo started having panic attacks. The FSB interrogations continued. “It was my second time in captivity in just a month,” Danylo recalled, “and I felt that if I didn’t somehow get out of there, I’d die.”
Finally, Danylo explained, he provided them names of Ukrainian soldiers he knew who had managed to leave Kherson before it was occupied. Those names seemed to do the trick; after two weeks in custody, he was set free.
Upon his release, though, the FSB refused to return Danylo’s passport and other documents and money, which left him without any resources to get out of Crimea. “I had no money, so I asked them how I was expected to get by. To which they swore at me and said to go wherever the hell I wanted.”
Fortunately, Danylo had contacts in Crimea dating back to family vacations there during his teenage years. One of them offered him a job at a bar, so he could earn enough money to survive. And for the next four months, he diligently returned each morning to the FSB building to ask for his passport.
Back in Kherson, Danylo’s father contacted a Russian lawyer, whom he hired to write a complaint to the Russian prosecutor’s office in Crimea. The local bureaucracy, in response to the overture from outside counsel, relented. A few days later, Danylo, passport in hand, left Crimea on the first bus he could get to the mountains of nearby Georgia, where he would be reunited with his brother, Illia.
“I was nervous,” he said, “because when you leave Crimea for Russia, you go through checkpoints again. But I got lucky. I got out.”
“The Frozen”
Danylo Martynenko’s imprisonment in Crimea is what is known in the FSB lexicon as being “frozen,” said Mikhail Savva of the Center for Civil Liberties, the Kyiv-based human rights organization that received a Nobel Peace Prize in 2022.
The FSB does not formally accuse the detainees of anything. The process, Savva explained, is a deliberate tactic denying the incarcerated any legal status for an extended period. Most detained Ukrainians, according to Savva and others, have spent months in the Crimean system before one of two outcomes occur. Either charges are filed or the prisoners are set free.
Danylo, it turns out, was fortunate that his detention lasted only two weeks. Between 300 and 400 Ukrainians are currently being held in Crimea in a network of what Savva described as official and unofficial prisons, where torture methods are used to extract information. According to data collected by Ukraine’s Center for Civil Liberties, official and sub-rosa prisons, some replete with torture apparatus and designated rooms for punishment, have been set up in various areas of Crimea. Savva refers to the pretrial detention centers as the “official ones” because the Russian government does not hide their location. The clandestine ones, with unknown addresses, are operated out of basements and army barracks.
“It doesn’t matter whether it’s an official establishment,” Savva observed. “All Russian pretrial detention centers are torture chambers in their nature.” The most frequent torture methods, both of which are legal in Russia: electric shocks and beatings with rubber batons. Other techniques include suffocating people, forcing them to run or do push-ups until they lose consciousness, and extracting prisoners’ teeth without anesthesia. The intention is not to obtain real-time information about Ukrainian forces; these citizens have no knowledge of what is happening on the battlefield. The motive is to use false confessions as a pretext, thereby garnering evidence that can be presented in a subsequent legal process.
In many cases, the frozen people eventually receive a formal charge. The accused, Savva said, are then given a Russian state lawyer, who plays a ceremonial role to demonstrate that the Kremlin’s justice system sticks to its protocols. Even so, hearings and trials are held behind closed doors, and human rights defenders and family members only find out about the detainees’ sentences after the fact.
Overall, the Center for Civil Liberties claims to have identified 120 separate prisons in Russia and the occupied Ukrainian territories in which Ukrainian civilians—who have not been convicted of any crime—are being held. Savva’s organization has documented various sites where some of the prisoners are currently confined. “It is then hard to find them because Russia hides them,” Savva noted. “That’s why we say that a couple of thousand of Ukrainian civilians and soldiers are in Russian captivity. But we don’t have more exact numbers.”
Courts as a formality
When the Russian military occupied Kherson two years ago, Mykola Petrovsky, 30, started buying and delivering groceries for the elderly in his community. Because he had a prosthetic foot, he relied on a bicycle to bring provisions to shut-ins across the city. In late March 2022, he was detained by Russian soldiers, who accused him of spying for the Ukrainian military. Petrovsky’s father, whose name is also Mykola, recalled how unknown armed men came to their home, turned the house upside down while searching for something, and then took him away, along with his son.
The father, after being interrogated, was released. That was the last time he saw his son. The Petrovsky family searched for Mykola for half a year before they got their first update on his whereabouts. A Russian lawyer called the parents from Crimea and said that Mykola was in Simferopol’s Pre-Trial Detention Center Number 2. Court hearings were about to start—on charges of espionage.
“The lawyer told us that he did not look well,” the elder Petrovsky said. “He needed new clothes because for six months he wore the same shirt and pants.” The lawyer also said his son was malnourished and had lost a lot of weight. Mykola, apparently, had been taken from Ukraine to Crimea in April 2022, but was not formally charged until the following September. This was, in Savva’s view, a classic “frozen” case. A year later, a Russian court in Crimea delivered its sentence: Petrovsky was condemned to spend 16 years in a penal colony. The onetime bicycle messenger is still in Crimean limbo while his sentence is on appeal.
Neither human rights defenders nor his family allow themselves to be too optimistic about his chances of being released. According to Iryna Sedova, a human rights defender working with the Crimean Human Rights Group, not a single Ukrainian who has been tried in a political case has been acquitted by the Russian court in the decade that Crimea has been under occupation. Since 2014, some 200 Crimean opponents of the Putin regime, as stated above, have been convicted, with over 40 of them drawing 15-plus years in Russia. Typically, they are shipped off to high-security penal colonies, mostly in Siberia. Investigations by the Crimean Human Rights Group found that last year eight journalists and volunteers were arrested by the Russians in the Kherson region and taken to Crimea, some of their whereabouts unknown.
Unlawful arrests in Crimea continue among the local population, including indigenous Crimean Tatars, who tend to be charged with espionage, terrorism, and extremism. Others singled out for arrest have been news reporters and human rights defenders. There have been some 500 “verdicts” since 2022 against members of these groups for “discrediting the Russian army.” Their crimes? Publicly singing Ukrainian songs or going online and condemning Russian airstrikes. Their punishment: fines or three-month jail terms. Also detained have been members of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, a religious organization that is banned in Russia.
Since the Ukraine invasion, Sedova said, “the FSB has had their hands fully untied. If before, they would arrest someone and not hide it, now I have 75 names on my list of missing persons. And how many more are there that I don’t know about?”
Crimea as a transit zone
The caseload of unlawful arrests and missing Ukrainian civilians in Crimea has been farmed out to three regional prosecutor’s offices in Ukraine—in Zaporizhzhia, Kherson, and the Autonomous Republic of Crimea, which since 2014 has been handling cases out of Kyiv. According to Ihor Ponochovnyi, who heads up the Prosecutor’s Office of the Autonomous Republic of Ukrainian Crimea and Sevastopol, the scale of the war crimes committed by Russian soldiers and the FSB is too extensive to be dealt with by a single establishment alone. “Crimea is a gray zone for the Russians,” Ponochovnyi said. “They do whatever they want there.”
It is the prosecutor’s contention that in the first years of Crimea’s annexation, Russian authorities established a strict law enforcement system in Crimea and set up the guidelines for arrest and torture techniques that were then used on the local population. Then, once the Ukrainian offensive began in 2022, the military applied this protocol within the territories it occupied.
In addition, according to Ponochovnyi’s group, Crimea has served as a way station for Ukrainian convicts whom Russian troops rounded up from Kyiv-run prisons now under occupation. As tallied by the Kherson Regional Prosecutor’s Office, it is believed that approximately 1,800 Ukrainian inmates from the Kherson and Mykolaiv regions were transferred through Crimea to penal colonies in Russia. The whereabouts of these people are still unknown. Said Ponochovnyi: “We can say that thousands have been deported to Russia via Crimea. We don’t have a more exact number because Russia hides the fact this is happening.”
Finally, according to human rights monitors, Crimea has become one of the prime transit zones for processing thousands of Ukrainian children that Russia has forcefully transferred—many for eventual adoption by Russian families. The Prosecutor General’s Office of Ukraine estimates as many as 20,000 Ukrainian children have been taken to Russia. (In October of 2022, Vanity Fair and the Reckoning Project were among the first news outlets to publish a detailed report on this practice. A year ago, the International Criminal Court in The Hague issued a warrant for the arrest of Vladimir Putin and Russia’s commissioner for children’s rights, Maria Lvova-Belova, for war crimes—citing their alleged connection to the abduction-and-adoption system. In fact, the UN Human Rights Council, in its 2023 assessment of Russia’s violations of international humanitarian law, extensively referenced the Reckoning Project’s reporting on this subject. (The Russian government’s stance is that it is evacuating the children from a war zone. Ukrainian attorneys and international lawyers, however, contend that the Russian state is conducting illegal deportations.)
In custody, but defiant
Sweeping arrests of thousands of civilians. Hundreds shuttled from Ukraine to Crimea. Many from Crimea to Russia. Children abducted for eventual adoption. All part of a bureaucratic system of organized brutality.
Through it all, many Ukrainians have resisted. Perhaps this refusal to back down was best summed up by Oleksiy Zarubin. A former Ukrainian prisoner who served a four-and-a-half-year term in Kherson for theft, Zarubin claimed—and investigators confirmed—that he had been taken from Ukraine to Crimea to Krasnodar, in southwestern Russia, repeatedly beaten along the way. But he held his own, he insisted, despite his treatment at the hands of his guards and various FSB officers.
“Why would I confess anything? I’m a prisoner. So, I endured the pain,” he said. “Now all I want is for the war to be over and all the war criminals who have done this to us to be held responsible. There needs to be some justice in this world.”
Danylo Martynenko has hopes for justice too. After his captivity in Kherson and Simferopol, and his safe passage to the mountains of Georgia, he and his younger brother, Illia, have moved to a country in the West. Despite being hundreds of miles from the war, Danylo still has nightmares and his brother has panic attacks.
Danylo, for his part, wondered why, even after the Russian military’s 10 years of annexation and occupation, the world, for some reason, continues trying to find logic in its inhumanity. “There’s only one logic there,” he said. “To destroy us.”
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