UKRAINSK, Ukraine – When Nelia Shchogoleva was traveling to Kostiantynivka in Donetsk Oblast late on July 25, she was so agitated that the driver of her taxi wondered if she needed sedatives. Shchogoleva, 53, was being driven to meet her husband Viktor Ashykhmin, 59, released after spending, he says, almost 600 days in secrety captivity of the SBU, Ukraine’s state security service.
Ashykhmin, who is openly pro-Russian, was arrested on Dec. 7, 2014, under charges of separatism at his home in Ukrainsk, a city of 11,000 people located 640 kilometers southeast of Kyiv and 40 kilometers from the separatist stronghold of Donetsk.
In the almost 20 months he spent in SBU detention centers, initially in Kramatorsk and then in Kharkiv, Ashykhmin never went to court or saw a lawyer, he says. Instead, he says he was first tortured and then several times almost exchanged for Ukrainian soldiers.
It was only after the United Nations, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch issued reports about the SBU’s secret detention centers this summer that Ashykhmin, along with about a dozen other captives, was finally released. He said he knows of five other people who remain in SBU detention.
SBU chief Vasyl Grytsak denied on Sept. 1 that the SBU had any secret prisons, adding, however: “I don’t exclude that I might not be aware of something.”
SBU spokesman Yuriy Tandit ignored Kyiv Post inquiries on the matter.
Police search
Ashykhmin said the SBU officers released him on a road near Kostiantynivka, gave him $4 to get home, and said: “tell your relatives you spent all this time earning money abroad.”
Now Ashykhmin and 10 other former captives are preparing a lawsuit against the Ukrainian authorities, while military prosecutors have started investigating the issue.
Mykola Vakaruk (R) talks to a neighbor next to his apartment building in Ukrainsk of Donetsk Oblast on Sept. 11. He was detained in December 2014 after Ukrainian authorities suspected him of helping the Russia-backed separatists. He spent 19 months in detention and was released on July 25.
“If he was guilty, then why didn’t they put him in jail, where he could see a lawyer or where I could visit him,” said Shchogoleva.
During the 20 months of her husband’s captivity, she wrote letters to law enforcement and international human rights groups.
Police said that they searched for Ashykhmin, placed his photos on a missing person’s list and once invited Ashykhmin’s wife to identify a dead body, saying it could be her husband. The SBU claimed they had no information about his whereabouts, but Shchogoleva knew he was in Kharkiv after exchanged captives told her by phone from Donetsk that he was there.
‘Exchange material’
At the end of 2014, hundreds of Ukrainian soldiers were being held in separatist prisons in Russian-controlled areas, and the country’s authorities badly needed some captive separatists to carry out prisoner swaps.
Ashykhmin, who was among the main organizers of the separatist referendum on May 11, 2014, in Ukrainsk, seemed to fit the bill.
Ashykhmin said when eight armed and masked men detained him, they found anti-government messages on his social network pages on his computer and cell phone.
Then they handcuffed him, put a black plastic bag on his head, and took him to the SBU office in Kramatorsk, where he claims they tortured him for the next three days.
“They had the metal-and-plastic tubes filled with the lead shot… They beat me with this on the heels, sometimes they missed the heels, and hit me on the legs,” Ashykhmin said.
After the beatings, they made him write a confession and filmed it.
In the Kramatorsk prison, Ashykhmin saw Mykola Vakaruk, 34, another man from Ukrainsk, with whom he had sometimes discussed pro-Russian topics. There were also several local women in what Vakaruk called the “discussion club,” two of whom they also later saw in detention.
The masked men, who said they were from “military intelligence,” detained Vakaruk on Dec. 9, 2014, saying they suspected him of being a spotter for separatist artillery.
Vakaruk said he openly spoke against the government, but has never been involved in any anti-government conspiracy and didn’t even vote in the separatist referendum.
On Dec. 23, 2014, soon after his arrival at the SBU’s detention center in Kharkiv, Ashykhmin said he was brought before a detective, who said, after looking in his file: “I don’t want even read this nonsense. Any lawyer would easily destroy this case. So we will use you in a (prisoner) exchange.”
“We were exchange material,” said Vakaruk.
‘You don’t exist’
On Dec. 26, 2014, Ashykhmin was brought to a minivan along with other prisoners, prepared to be exchanged for the Ukrainian soldiers kept in the separatist prisons. But 10 minutes later he was returned to his cell. “It’s so depressing when people come and go and you just stay there. I was afraid I’d never see my wife again,” he said.
The second Minsk peace deal, signed Feb. 12, 2015, linked prisoner exchanges with political changes to establish peace. But failure to implement the new agreement drastically slowed the exchange process.
In the rare cases that there were exchanges, the separatist officials required the Ukrainian authorities to swap soldiers for separatist fighters. Neither Ashykhmin nor Vakaruk met this requirement. The former miners were of no interest to anyone.
“The SBU didn’t know what to do with us for the whole of 2015,” Vakaruk said. Once in October 2015, the SBU even allowed the prisoners to make short phone calls home to ask their relatives to pressure the separatist authorities to put them on exchange lists, he added.
Surprise inspection
Ukrainian ombudswoman Valeria Lutkovska told the Kyiv Post she had received the first reports that the SBU were secretly keeping captives and torturing them in 2015, but she couldn’t collect any proof. She added that in 2016 she made a surprise inspection the SBU’s detention center in Kharkiv, but she was persuaded that it was used as a dormitory for SBU special forces officers.
Ashykhmin said that in April the SBU officials drove the captives around the city for several hours, and on their return the prisoners saw that their cells were unusually clean, and their beds had fresh linen.
Another inspection took place in May. The captives were taken to a shooting range for hours, they say. “One of the officers told us — guys, you don’t exist here,” Vakaruk said.
International scandal
Meanwhile, alarming reports about secret detentions were reaching international human rights organizations.
In late May, a special delegation of the UN Subcommittee on Prevention of Torture tried to check the SBU detention centers, but were refused access in Kharkiv and Kramatorsk. The delegation then suspended its work in Ukraine.
Then on July 21 Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch issued a joint report, accusing both sides of the war of torturing their captives and keeping them in secret detention. The report claimed that the “unlawful, unacknowledged detention centers” existed on SBU premises in Kharkiv, Kramatorsk, Izyum and Mariupol.
“The allegations of secret detention by Ukraine are compelling and serious, and they merit thorough investigation,” said Denis Krivosheev, deputy director for Europe and Central Asia at Amnesty International.
A view of the Security Service of Ukraine building in Kramatorsk in Donetsk Oblast, where several men say they were held in illegal detention for several days and tortured.
Ashykhmin and Vakaruk believe it was the international scandal that made the SBU authorities finally decide to let them go on July 25, just in four days after the report was published.
A second group was released on July 26. But as of Aug. 29, there were five prisoners still kept at a secret SBU compound in Kharkiv, Amnesty International says.
On arriving home, Vakaruk, said he had to introduce himself to his 3-year-old son, who didn’t remember him. He spent the first two weeks constantly talking to his wife, friends and relatives.
Ashykhmin is trying to limit his contacts with openly pro-Russian and pro-Ukrainian acquaintances. But he is also determined to bring his case to the Ukrainian courts or the European Court of Human Rights.
“We’re also citizens of Ukraine. How can they kill us, just because we think differently?” he says.
