Global Courant 2023-05-02 19:43:48
Odessa, Ukraine — It was late August, more than six months after Russian troops entered the southern Ukrainian city of Kherson.
A Russian investigator told Liliya Pshenichnaya, a single mother of a teenage girl, to sign a protocol stating she was charged with “espionage”.
She risked up to 20 years in prison and would serve her sentence 500km (310 miles) northeast of her hometown of Kherson, in separatist-held Donetsk, the investigator said.
“I said to him, ‘How can I sign it? I don’t consider myself guilty,'” Pshenichnaya, a 58-year-old bespectacled tailor, told Al Jazeera.
The researcher simply asked her to write down that she had “read the protocol”.
Four months earlier, Pshenichnaya managed to send her 15-year-old daughter Alina to the Kiev-controlled Black Sea port of Odessa.
In mid-July, four armed Russian soldiers blindfolded and took Pshenichnaya to a pre-trial detention center after a search of an evangelical church near her 16-story apartment building.
At the church, Pshenichnaya said she helped distribute packages of medicine from Kyiv-controlled areas and cared for children from an orphanage displaced by the invasion.
She was never given any explanation as to why she was detained, nor did she see any evidence of the alleged “espionage”.
She said the longest interrogation was “about nothing”. Two Russian officers asked about her hairstyle and wondered if female parishioners in her church had to wear long skirts and cover their hair.
They assured her she would be released “within days”.
She wasn’t.
Liliya Pshenichnaya, who was imprisoned for 60 days in Kherson (Mansur Mirovalev/Al Jazeera)
Like most of the women Pshenichnaya slept with in the detention center, she was not a political activist, public servant, military or law enforcement officer.
She did not send any Google Pins showing the whereabouts of Russian garrisons or weapons depots to Ukrainian troops. Nor did she participate in the assassination of Moscow-appointed officials.
Most of the women she shared the cell with were arbitrarily detained and faced charges that observers said could not hold up even within the judicial standards Moscow has transplanted to the occupied Ukrainian territories.
Some were quickly released — a real estate agent who kept having panic attacks and an apolitical woman who was picked up at a restaurant, Pshenichnaya said.
Some also faced “espionage charges”, such as a frightened 16-year-old girl who was caught taking selfies on a park bench.
Another woman drove her cancer-stricken mother out of a hospital and stopped the car next to a train carrying tanks and ammunition.
Drunk Russian soldiers asked her to buy them mineral water. She had no cash — and they reported her as a “spy,” Pshenichnaya said.
A 72-year-old shepherd who brought cattle home was reportedly accused of planting trackers on Russian vehicles.
“They can imprison you and forget you,” said Pshenichnaya in Odessa, where she moved after Kherson’s liberation last November. “I didn’t know how to behave, how to remind them of me.”
A Kiev-based analyst said “99 percent” of detained Ukrainians were arbitrarily detained.
“Russians had no primary intelligence and never managed to set up their own law enforcement network,” Aleksey Kushch told Al Jazeera.
He compared the practice to the Oprichniki, a rampant militia founded by Russia’s Tsar Ivan the Terrible who seized people on a whim to extract confessions of wrongdoings they never committed.
“If someone incriminates themselves by torturing, then they may be guilty,” Kushch said.
A view from a provisional detention center that Ukrainians say was used by Russian military to imprison and torture people before withdrawing from Kherson (File: Murad Sezer/Reuters)
The practice dates back to 2014, when Moscow-backed separatists in Donetsk and Luhansk drove hundreds of people into makeshift concentration camps known as “basements”.
“They were held for petty or imaginary offences, held for months and used for forced labor or sexual assault,” Nikolay Mitrokhin, a historian at Germany’s University of Bremen, told Al Jazeera.
The separatists forced the prisoners to dig trenches near the front lines – and tried to “sell” them for ransom to family or friends.
The detainees had no access to lawyers, were held incommunicado, tortured and electrocuted, survivors said.
The torture “goes on for hours, you lose track of time, and the most terrible thing is that you can’t stop it,” Ihor Kozlovsky, a religious scholar accused of “espionage, told Al Jazeera in 2021.
Many were sentenced to death in accordance with the Stalinist-era “constitution” adopted by the separatist states.
The practice was imported into the Ukrainian territories occupied by Russia last year, Mitrokhin said.
The occupiers were rightly afraid of underground Ukrainian agents, but cast their nets too wide.
Media Initiative for Human Rights, a Ukrainian human rights group, said in mid-April it had identified nearly 1,000 civilians being held in more than 100 locations in the occupied territories and Russia.
The actual number is much higher, the ministry said.
Threats and torture
During her 60-day detention, Pshenichnaya often felt desperate and forgotten.
Her church’s pastor and parishioners were too scared to look for her, let alone ask for her release.
Her neighbor sent her a package containing freshly baked pies, schnitzels, nail clippers and a mirror, but the guards took everything, she said.
While all of the women imprisoned with Pshenichnaya were pro-Ukrainian, few had done anything truly harmful to the inmates.
They were frequently interrogated, threatened and tortured.
There was a school principal who refused to teach according to a Russian curriculum and a police officer who withheld her service weapon after refusing to cooperate with the Russian-appointed “administration”.
Another police officer was covered in bruises and passed out after each interrogation, Pschenichnya said.
The interrogators told the officer they would dismember her eight-year-old daughter and hand the mother “one piece a day.”
Fortunately, the child’s grandmother managed to get her out of Kherson, Pshenichnaya said.
But after the Russians withdrew from the city in November, they took many prisoners, including the officer.
According to Media Initiative for Human Rights, captured civilians are routinely moved to annexed Crimea or Russia, as far as the East Siberian city of Irkutsk.
It said Moscow refuses to provide information on these citizens and does not allow access to them to rights groups or international monitors.
And while Ukrainian POWs are listed and regularly exchanged, getting captured civilians back is much harder than that, the group said.
“We really doubt that Russia will return the civilians,” the group’s Anastasiya Panteleyeva told a press conference in mid-April.
A young boy waves a Ukrainian flag at a former Russian checkpoint at the entrance to Kherson as local residents celebrate the liberation of the city, on Nov. 13, 2022 (File: AFP)
Pshenichnaya considered herself lucky.
A Russian intelligence officer who interrogated her in April pranked her and got her released in mid-October.
Once in her apartment, she was afraid to leave. She couldn’t get her phone back and lost contact with most of the people she knew.
Only after the liberation of Kherson in November did she leave for Odessa, with a sewing machine and Feya (Fee), a cat her daughter had rescued.
She longed to return home, but the city is under constant shelling amid blackouts and shortages.
She felt powerless about changing her fortune.
“You have to wait passively for something to be resolved, and you can’t participate in it,” she said.
But despite the many shellings, Odesa felt safe.
“It’s just a shame to complain here,” Pshenichnaya said, before returning home to her daughter who is getting ready to graduate from high school and take university exams.
She wants to study web design.
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