When Maria Varfolomeyeva worked as a pro-Ukrainian journalist in Luhansk in 2014, she was extremely careful not to stand out after Russian-backed armed groups seized control of local government.
She would attach an orange-and-black Ribbon of St. George, the separatists’ symbol, to her bag, and put a sticker with the flag of armed groups’ self-declared republic on the back of her smartphone. On the smartphone, she would log into a fake Vkontakte account that she had carefully filled with reposts of pro-separatist memes and news stories.
But she made one mistake, and it cost her 14 months of freedom.
‘They looked at me as if I was mad’
While Varfolomeyeva, 31, is from Luhansk, she had lived in Kyiv for eight years. In the fall of 2013, she moved back to Luhansk to care for her sick grandmother, the last member of her family who remained in the city. Her parents live in Israel and Russia.
Two months later, the EuroMaidan Revolution started in Ukraine. Luhansk had its own pro-Ukrainian protests, and Varfolomeyeva was an active participant. She recalls that to wear the EuroMaidan symbol – a blue-and-yellow ribbon – on your clothes or bag was risky in Luhansk.
“When you left home wearing it, you didn’t know if you were coming back,” she says.
When Russian-backed armed groups seized control in Luhansk, she started working as a stringer and fixer for Ukrainian media from outside Luhansk, helping them with assignments in the region.
So she had no suspicions when, in early January 2015, a journalist she knew from Kharkiv asked her to photograph a couple of houses in Luhansk and send him the pictures. He said they were private residences. She donned her usual pro-separatist disguise, and went to take the photos.
The buildings turned out to be several large private houses. Minutes after Varfolomeyeva started taking pictures of one of them on her phone, standing quite openly on the street, several men came out and approached her.
They were dressed as civilians, so Varfolomeyeva didn’t feel threatened. She asked them if she was on the right street.
The men looked stunned. They were members of the armed groups in control of the city, and the houses served as their barracks.
“They looked at me as if I was mad,” Varfolomeyeva recalls.
They demanded that she go inside with them. She protested. When another of them showed up with a machine gun, she had to obey.
“When a man with a machine gun tells you to do something, you do it,” she says.
A very wrong photo
Varfolomeyeva’s big mistake had been made a few months before. Soon after the end of the EuroMaidan, she was at a party at a friend’s place. He was making merchandise for the Right Sector, an ultra-right movement that formed during the revolution.
Varfolomeyeva, who sympathized with the Right Sector, asked for a photo to be taken of her with the group’s symbols. She put on a Right Sector shirt, covered her face with a bandana, and put a friend’s gun in an armpit holster. Her friend took a photo and they had a laugh.
But when the Russian-backed fighters detained Varfolomeyeva in January, they found the photo in her phone. They thought they had hit the jackpot. They suggested that she was a coordinator for the Right Sector organization in Luhansk.
“Because, of course, I look like one,” Varfolomeyeva says sarcastically.
Maria Varfolomeyeva shows the photo that got her in trouble with the Luhansk separatists. (Kostyantyn Chernichkin)
She was questioned several times. She didn’t deny her pro-Ukrainian views, but refused to admit any connection to the Right Sector.There were threats.
The interrogators promised to “shoot her in the leg” if she didn’t talk, she said.
And there was, as Varfolomeyeva puts it, “some beating,” but not much. She wouldn’t go into detail.
Prison days
Varfolomeyeva spent 419 days in captivity. During that time, she was moved between several jails. One of them was a detention center where her three cellmates were women with criminal pasts, convicted of fraud or drug dealing.
The cell even had a TV, but only with Russian news programs. Varfolomeyeva watched the segments on Ukraine and tried to decipher what was actually happening from the distorted coverage.
“If they tell you that a cup is black, you know that it’s either green or white,” she says.
For most of her time in captivity, Varfolomeyeva was held in the basement of the Luhansk office of Security Service of Ukraine, which the armed groups had turned into their own security headquarters.
Unlike the detention center, the basement was prison mostly to local people suspected of “treason.” For the Luhansk armed groups, treason meant having pro-Ukrainian leanings.
Many of the prisoners, Varfolomeyeva recall, were there because of anonymous complaints from their neighbors or friends.
She recalls a middle-aged woman, a real estate broker, who was locked up because she had a phone number of a Ukrainian security service officer in her smartphone’s contact list. She had previously sold him an apartment. She was released after a fortnight in the basement.
Varfolomeyeva spent most of the days in her cell reading. It helped take her mind off the surroundings.
The Bible helped her most. She speaks with fervor of how important her faith was in getting her through this time.
Several months into her captivity, the armed groups paraded Varfolomeyeva on Russian television. It was only then that her family found out her location. Before that, she was only allowed to call her sick grandmother once and say a few lines that her hostage-takers had prepared: “I’m fine. I’ll be home soon.”
After her imprisonment became known, her father started coming once a week, driving from Russia, to bring her food and books. She asked him for foreign language textbooks.
“I really improved my French while I was there,” she says.
Painful wait for freedom
Varfolomeyeva knew she was on the list of the captives that could be exchanged. She was told she would be one of the Ukrainians to be exchanged in July 2015. But when the day came, it didn’t happen.
It was a hard blow.
And the same thing happened several more times. The exchanges were either canceled, or other people were exchanged instead of her. Her despair grew.
“Waiting is the worst thing,” she says. “The biggest mistake that people who first get there do is to count the days.”
Then early in March this year, a jailer told Varfolomeyeva to prepare herself for execution. It was a common “joke.” She laughed.
But to her surprise, this time it meant she was to be released. All her belongings from 14 months in captivity fit into two bags.
On the afternoon of March 3, Varfolomeyeva was exchanged for two captives held by the Ukraine authorities: a sniper and a woman who supported the pro-Russian armed groups.
Finally in Kyiv
Now Varfolomeyeva is back in Kyiv. She has received many job offers but wants to take a break before returning to work.
Her grandmother died while she was a prisoner. She has no one in Luhansk anymore.
At an interview with the Kyiv Post, Varfolomeyeva, tall and slim, looked like a model. From the outside, at least, it seems a year in captivity hasn’t left a mark on her. She wore red lipstick and winged eyeliner. On her return to Kyiv, she dyed her hair blonde. A brunette, she had dreamed of the change while sitting in captivity.
“I spent a year in a basement. I want to compensate for it,” she says. “I want to shine.”
