Tamara Klykh, a 75-year-old retiree from Kyiv, looked tired as she met the Kyiv Post in her apartment in a residential district on Kyiv’s left bank on Oct. 8.
She had returned just days before from a long trip to Verkhnyeuralsk, a city of 9,000 people in Chelyabinsk Oblast, in Russia, some 2,340 kilometers east of Kyiv. She had been visiting her son Stanislav Klykh, a political prisoner of the Kremlin, who has been held in Russian jails for more than four years.
It was the first time she had seen her son in a year. Before that, she traveled to his prison in October 2017.
“He looks much better now. Still ill and dirty, because they let the prisoners change their set of clothes only once a season. But I told him he looked wonderful,” Tamara said.
Klykh was one of the first of 70 Ukrainians and Crimean Tatars to be illegally imprisoned by the Kremlin after Russia launched its military intervention in Ukraine in 2014.
A Ukrainian historian and activist, the 44-year-old Klykh was arrested in the Russian city Orel, where he had gone to see his girlfriend Russian Viktoria Semyonova in August 2014.
He was seized by agents of the Russian Federal Security Service on his arrival in the city. Meanwhile, Semyonova disappeared.
In May 2016, Klykh and another Ukrainian, Mykola Karpyuk, were sentenced to 20 years and 22 years in prison respectively by the Supreme Court of Chechnya.
Russian investigators claimed both Klykh and Karpyuk, who were members of UNA-UNSO (Ukrainian National Assembly) nationalist organization, fought against Russia in the first Chechnya war in 1994-1995, killing at least 30 Russian soldiers.
Klykh and Karpyuk said they were UNA-UNSO members, but denied they had fought in Chechnya.
Even after being sentenced, Klykh refused to admit guilt and was tortured by Russian law enforcers, Tamara said.
Klykh declared a hunger strike in 2017 in protest against his sham trial. Then in 2018, he went on hunger strike again in solidarity with Ukrainian filmmaker Oleg Sentsov, who started a hunger strike in May, demanding that the Kremlin release all of its Ukrainian political prisoners.
Sentsov had to stop his strike after 145 days on Oct. 6, as Russian authorities had threatened to start force-feeding him due to his critical state of health.
Klykh was subjected to the same threats from his prison guards, his mother said. Moreover, the tough prison conditions and torture have affected both his physical and mental health, Russian human rights activist Zoya Svetova told Radio Liberty in October 2016.
Klykh was taken to a psychiatric asylum two times for medical treatment. But the Russian authorities have not declared him mentally ill, as if they did so they would have to transfer him from prison to hospital, Klykh’s mother said.
“They used to spill cold water on Stas, beat him in order to force him to plead guilty,” Tamara said, using the familiar form of Stanislav in Ukrainian – Stas.
“Once I noticed he has a scar on his nose and asked him about it. He said a prison guard hit him with a Taser and cut his nose with its metal edge.”
Protestor
This time the Russians let the Klykhs spend three days together, a day longer than during their previous meeting in 2017. They were accommodated in one of the administrative buildings of Verkhnyeuralsk state prison.
The woman recalls it was a cold and dirty room. The water was freezing. But she didn’t care. The first thing she did was to prepare a soup with dumplings for her son, and make him some sandwiches. She cooked a lot for him over the three days, she said.
“You know, he has lost more than 20 kilograms in prison,” Tamara said.
She said it was hard for her to see her son, whom she describes as extremely intelligent and attractive, looking so exhausted and miserable.
In 1994-1995, when the Chechen war was raging in Russia, Klykh was in Kyiv, finishing his studies at the history faculty of the Kyiv National Taras Shevchenko University, his mother said.
A passionate fighter for Ukraine, the young Klykh went on hunger strike for Ukrainian independence from the Soviet Union along with hundreds of other students and Ukrainian nationalists during the Revolution on Granite student protests in Kyiv in October 1990.
“Of course Ukraine’s nationalistic leaders Levko Lukyanenko or Viacheslav Chornovil were encouraging active young people to join UNA-UNSO. And Stas joined,” Tamara recalled.
She said Klykh liked the patriotic spirit of the UNA-UNSO but hadn’t supported the more extreme nationalist positions that were widespread in the organization.
Klykh took an active part in the Orange Revolution in 2004. He also supported the EuroMaidan Revolution in 2013-2014, his mother said. However, he didn’t take part in clashes with police – he donated clothes and books to the activists.
Russian love
At that time, Klykh was working as a lecturer in Kyiv Transport College and divorced his first wife.
“He was 40 and already divorced,” Tamara said. “I was worried about whether he would find a new wife. But he used to calm me, saying that even young women were attracted to him.” She showed a photo of her son – a tall, well-built masculine man with blue eyes and full lips.
But in summer 2013 Klykh met Victoria Semyonova, a Russian woman from Orel, at a resort in Kherson Oblast in the south of Ukraine. Semyonova said she had a 15-year-old daughter and a Ph.D. in medical science.
For a year the two had a long-distance relationship. She visited him in Ukraine. Klykh told his mother Semyonova was intelligent and smart; He said he thought she might have been destined to be his wife.
The last time Semyonova came to Ukraine to visit was in the winter of 2014. She spent the New Year with Klykh’s family.
“Stas took her to see EuroMaidan. She didn’t like the smell of it, was unimpressed,” Tamara said.
Semyonova called in August and asked Klykh to come to Russia, saying she was pregnant.
Tamara tried to persuade Klykh not to go.
“I’ve heard that Ukrainian men were being kidnapped there,” she said.
Karpyuk was arrested in March 2014. Sentsov disappeared soon after that.
But Klykh said he had to clear the things up with Semyonova and either get married or break up. So he took the train to Orel.
“She was supposed to meet him in her apartment, but suddenly changed her mind and asked him to book a room in a hotel,” Tamara said.
Klykh was at first surprised but agreed, his mother said, because he thought Victoria wanted to prepare her daughter for their meeting.
“They spent the night together. And in the morning she said she had to go. Soon after the police arrived and arrested Stas,” Tamara said.
And Semyonova, who had used to be on good terms with her prospective mother-in-law, stopped answering Tamara’s calls. Today her phone number isn’t active anymore.
Kyiv Post tried to reach Semyonova, but she was unavailable. There are more than 100 women with the same name living in Orel.
“Stas had already forgotten about his time in the UNA-UNSO as a youth. But the Russians hadn’t,” she said.
Ukrainian historian Stanislav Klykh, who was sentenced to 20 years in the Russian prison on sham charges, reacts in a courtroom during one of the court sessions in 2016. (Anton Naumlyuk) ( Anton Naumlyuk)
Behind bars
Following his arrest Klykh, who used to call his mother frequently when he was away, disappeared.
After 10 months of desperate searching, his mother found him in a pre-trial detention center in Pyatigorsk, a city in Russia some 1,400 kilometers away from Orel.
Then he was transferred to a pre-trial detention center in Grozny, the capital of Chechnya, a republic in Russia.
“That’s where they started torturing him, because he refused to admit his guilt. How could he? He had never been to Chechnya and was watching the TV reports about that war with me at home after lectures,” Tamara said.
Klykh’s lecturers and course mates were all questioned in court, proving that he was studying in Ukraine. But the Chechen court refused to allow their testimonies to be used in the case.
“Everything was already decided for him and Karpyuk,” Tamara said.
Unlike Klykh, Karpyuk had fought in several armed conflicts – in Transnistria (1993), where he fought on the side of the separatists, and in the Georgian war in 2008, where he fought on the side of Georgia against Russia.
After his trial in Chechnya, Klykh was transferred several times, until he ended up in Verkhnyeuralsk prison.
Like many of the other Ukrainian political prisoners, Klykh still doesn’t understand why Russia decided to arrest him.
Tamara said she spoke to the mothers of other political prisoners, and they all think Russia took them hostages in order to trade them with Ukraine.
Klykh spends his days in his cell, watching Russian TV on a small television set the Ukrainian consul bought him, and reading the Russian independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta. He has been trying to collect pieces of information to determine the prospects for his release.
“The people in prison told him it all depends on Ukraine and its desire to come to Russia’s terms. For example, if Ukraine restarts water supplies to Crimea, then they’ll be free,” Tamara said.
Ukraine said it was ready to exchange Russian prisoners it holds for Klykh, Sentsov and 20 other Ukrainian political prisoners in June.
However, Russia has been blocking all prisoner exchanges since December.
Tamara persuaded Klykh to write a plea for mercy to Russian President Vladimir Putin. But one has to admit guilt to be pardoned, and Klykh still refused to do so. The plea was turned down.
Tamara visited Klykh in prison a month after he returned from the psychiatric hospital to which he was taken after he announced his second hunger strike in support of Sentsov.
With Sentsov’s hunger strike having failed to persuade the Kremlin to release all of the Ukrainian political prisoners, Klykh has almost lost hope.
His mother, however, still hopes she will one day see Klykh free again.
“I was 70 when Stas was arrested. Now I’m 75. Stas was sentenced to 20 years, so I might not live to see him free. But I still hope to, because that’s the only thing I have left.”
