You're reading: Families of Ukrainian prisoners say they’re held in Russian prisons, Chechnya

Human rights activists have appealed to Russian officials with allegations that dozens of Ukrainian prisoners of war have wound up in Russian detention facilities and been forced into slave labor in Chechnya.


The claim was made in
an open letter sent to the Kremlin’s human rights council and published on the
website of Open Russia. Another appeal has been sent separately to veteran
human rights activist Lev Ponomaryov of the For Human Rights group.

A request for comment
sent to the human rights council was not immediately answered, and Ponomaryov
was unavailable for comment following the letters’ publication on May 21.

Family members and
activists interviewed by the Kyiv Post say they have one goal in mind with the
letters: to force the Russian side to either verify the disturbing anecdotal
accounts or prove them wrong.

“I talk to many other
women whose husbands, sons and brothers who have gone missing, and it’s always
the same thing: they get phone calls from mysterious numbers in Russia, or they
hear from captives who have returned and say their loved ones are on Russian
territory,” said Maryna Korystynska, the wife of Oleksandr Korostynsky, who
went missing in Marynivka, near the Russian border, in August 2014.

“But, again, I can’t
confirm any of these things because I haven’t been there myself. So we are left
with rumors,” she said. “The trail just goes cold at some point and we have
nothing to go on.”

She believes her
husband is on Russian territory because one of his fellow soldiers was
transported to Rostov-on-Don after the pair found themselves in a battle on the
border with Russia.

“We know that many of
our men have wound up on Russian territory because prisoners who have come back
from there have confirmed it; they say they have seen other Ukrainians brought
in and moved out,” Korystynska said.

The two written appeals
sent to Russia offer detailed information on each and every person who went
missing, including the battle they went missing in and the last time their cell
phone was used – and from where. In many cases, the prisoners’ phones were used
in Chechnya, Russia or the republic of Adygea, leaving relatives of the
disappeared baffled about whether their phones were simply stolen or if the men
themselves were kidnapped.

The list of those who
have “disappeared without a trace” includes more than 100 individuals, most of
whom have not been included on the official list of prisoners in the Minsk
agreements.

Both appeals rely on
video evidence, witness testimony from former captives and accounts from
relatives, many of whom say they have received calls and messages from Russia –
sometimes with mysterious strangers offering the return of their loved one for
a sizeable “reward.”

“With these phone calls
and messages that some of us get claiming our men are in Russia, we don’t know
if it’s true or if this is just some cruel joke,” Korystynska said.

“I would like help (from the Russian side),
some sort of cooperation. Because I’m not even saying that my husband was taken
captive. For all I know, he might have been forced to retreat over the border
and maybe they took him to try and help him in a hospital somewhere,” she said.

Oleh Kotenko of the
Patriot volunteer organization, which works to free prisoners of war in the
conflict, said he had also heard from many relatives that the prisoners had
been moved to Russia – but search missions would be required on Russian
territory to verify these reports.

“The relatives of
prisoners have been notifying us of phone calls they are getting from within
the Russian Federation. We also received a message notifying us that some
prisoners were being sold at a village market (in Chechnya),” he said.

“We have no way to know
if these people are in Russia, we can’t work on Russian territory. So we
enlisted the help of their relatives, who are tracking the phone numbers of the
prisoners and say they are switched on in Russia. How they wound up there –
with the prisoners themselves or whether they were just stolen by the rebels,
that’s another question,” he said.

Viktor Maistrenko, a
volunteer closely involved in prisoner swaps, said the claims of prisoners
being held in Chechnya were “at this point only rumors.”

But that is precisely
why an appeal had been sent to Russian human rights activists, he said – to get
to the bottom of the horror stories haunting the prisoners’ families.

Viktoria Belenko, the
wife of Roman Belenko, said she just wanted peace of mind after nearly a year
of wondering what had happened to her husband. For her, her husband’s
disappearance had been an emotional rollercoaster ride from the very beginning.

“The last time I spoke
to him was on Aug. 30 of last year. At 11 a.m. He said everything was all
right, and he’d be home soon. The next thing I know, he’s being paraded around
on Russian television, on NTV, and the rebels are calling him a prisoner of
war,” she said.

“Volunteers have
repeatedly told me that he’s been spotted in various places, in Russia, in
Luhansk, in Donetsk. As if he’s being moved around,” she said.

“I just want to finally
know what happened to him. It’s been nine months already. I’d like to think
that they didn’t do anything bad to him, but who knows what goes in in their
heads?”