You're reading: Victim of torture in Donetsk: ‘I begged to be shot’

The photo of a haggard-looking, distressed woman wrapped in a Ukrainian flag as she is physically and verbally assaulted by passers-by at a rebel checkpoint in Donetsk has become one of the most haunting images of the war.

Ilona Dovhan, the woman from the picture, was taken captive by Russia-backed militants for almost five days. The 53-year old citizen of Yasynuvata, a small town north of Donetsk once controlled by the rebels, was accused in helping the Ukrainian army – and tortured for it. She was tied up to a lamp post in central Donetsk with a sign saying “She Kills Our Children.” 

But as the woman relives her memories in the safety of Kyiv, it turns out that was merely the lightest of her tortures.

Her worst memory is that of an agonizing interrogation by a group of some 20 Caucasian men who beat her and fired blanks close to her ears. They demanded the pin codes for her credit cards and quickly emptied her accounts.

The rebels were very preoccupied by money, she recalls. Later she found her house robbed, cash stolen from every stash that she considered safe. But it wasn’t money she worried about. The threats were the worst.

“For several hours they were describing how they would rape me, with all the beastly details. They gave these horrible numbers – saying I would be raped by 10 or 20 men, or more,” she recalls.

Some 1.5 months ago Dovhan began taking clothes, food and medicine to Ukrainian servicemen near Slavyanohorsk, a city some 140 kilometers away from her home. She raised some Hr 16,000 among other people who supported the idea of national unity, and passed it to volunteers in Dnipropetrovsk, who bought camouflage uniforms for the soldiers. Dovhan took pictures of the soldiers accepting the donation to show to the donors. She had no idea that those pictures would endanger her life.

Her misery began when she attempted to pass her tablet to her husband in another city. But the photos were discovered when the courier – her friend – was searched by separatists. That friend was tortured into giving them her name and home address.

Dovhan was working in her garden on the afternoon of Aug. 23, when armed men showed up. They searched her house and were outraged to find a Ukrainian flag. Her husband and daughter were away, visiting family in Mariupol, an eastern city free of rebels.

Dovhan’s voice trembles as she describes the details of her captivity. She confessed that she finds talking to journalists incredibly difficult. After her release she received a call from a Russian journalist who told her that she had to get herself together and talk, as her story can make a difference. She took the advice and now she repeats the gruesome details of her story every day to journalists by phone and in front of many cameras.

“As a woman, I feared rape more than anything else. I begged to be shot. After that, what happened in the street didn’t matter,” she says.

After the torture, the rebels took Dovhan to a street in Donetsk, where they stood her next to lamp post, wrapped her in a Ukrainian blue-and-yellow flag, and gave her a sign that said she was a child killer.

“When I begged to slide down, a rebel would hit me with a butt of a gun on a thigh,” she recalls.

She says she had to stand for two hours. Passers-by would stop to swear at her and hit her before posing for photos next to her. An old woman beat her with a club. Another woman threw tomatoes at her, then came closer and pushed two of them into her eyes, leaving her covered in juice.

After that, she was taken back and left alone in her prison for two more days. She was released on Aug. 28 after several journalists, including The New York Times’ Andrew Kramer and Sunday Times’ Mark Franchetti, talked to the rebels. By then her photo from Donetsk had appeared in The New York Times and went viral on the internet.

Dovhan agreed to leave Yasynuvata on one condition: she demanded to be taken home first to fetch her dog and three cats.

There, she found her house robbed. With a convoy of rebels from the Vostok battalion, she left her home town and headed south to meet her family.

But after the nightmare ended, another one began. While she admitted it is important to tell her story, she now suffers from major media attention. She has, however, agreed to make an appearance on a talk show.

“I feel very uncomfortable. I don’t want it to look like I’m a hero, because I’m not. So many people write to me on Facebook, calling me the hero, and it makes me suffer,” she says.

After a short pause, she adds: “I didn’t betray my country when I was there. I didn’t deny that the flags they found in my house were mine. But that’s what any Ukrainian would do. It’s not a feat,” she says.

Kyiv Post editor Olga Rudenko can be reached at [email protected].