BAKHMUT, Ukraine – Sergiy, a convict in the Donbas, first experienced life in the “Russian World” – shorthand for the areas dominated by Russia, in Donetsk in 2014.
That’s when his prison guards beat him with a truncheon for having a small Ukrainian flag in his possession.
Then came hunger, cold, lack of showers, a halt to family visits and the breakdown of order for more than 1,600 inmates in the main prison in Donetsk, where Sergiy was serving a life sentence.
He refused to give his last name to protect his identity and the identities of his relatives, some of whom still live in the separatist-controlled Donbas.
Sergiy speaks to the Kyiv Post at a special meeting room of Bakhmut prison No 6. (Anastasia Vlasova)
“The scariest thing was the fact that we couldn’t complain anywhere,” said Sergiy, 30. “The administration took the side of the separatists, and the lawlessness started.”
Speaking with the Kyiv Post in Bakhmut prison No. 6, Sergiy fidgeted with his feet when talking about the worst of his experiences. He said he had experienced many bad moments during the 22 months he spent in a prison under the control of Kremlin-backed separatists.
Scarred by mining and heavy industry, the Donbas is also a land of prisons, with 29 penitentiaries. Before Russia started its war against Ukraine in 2014, 20 percent of all Ukrainian prisons were located in Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts.
Almost all of the Donbas prisons ended up in separatist-controlled territory, with more than 15,000 inmates there as of December 2014, when Ukraine admitted it had no control over them and stopped their financing.
Locked in their prison cells, the inmates had nowhere to take cover from shells, and no escape from hunger, cold and the cruelty of the new prison regime.
Some lost their lives, and most are now deprived of even basic human rights, serving their prison terms in two lawless, Russian-backed territories.
Return to Ukraine
Sergiy is one of the lucky ones.
He was among 110 inmates sent from the separatist-controlled part of Donetsk Oblast to the government-controlled area in one of six transfers mediated by Ukrainian ombudswoman Valeria Lutkovska, along with Elena Radomskaya, the self-declared executive justice minister of the part of Donetsk oblast where Russian-backed gangs have seized control.
While Sergiy confused many dates, he clearly recalled Feb. 5 of this year when he was brought from the separatist-controlled Donetsk to the prison No. 6 in the government-controlled city of Bakhmut, 700 kilometers southeast of Kyiv with 77,000 people. Bakhmut used to be known as Artemivsk until February of this year.
“They allowed us to take one bag with personal belongings, and they brought us in a police van to the (meeting) point. I heard my name, I got out of the van, I said my name, my sentence details, they checked the data and told me to sit down in a Ukrainian police van. Then I was brought here,” he said briefly of his transfer.
A prison guard walks across the yard of Bakhmut prison No 6. (Anastasia Vlasova)
Sergiy said the separatist prison guards initially demanded 3,000 Russian rubles (about $45) from him for the transfer, but he didn’t have any money. He believes he was rescued from Donetsk through the persistence of his relatives, who sent letters to the Presidential Administration, Ukraine’s ombudswoman and the International Committee of the Red Cross.
There are some 10,000 to 12,000 prison inmates currently being held in the separatists-controlled area, Lutkovska estimated. Most want to go back to Ukraine, but usually they don’t know how, Sergiy said.
He also claimed the separatist authorities often use the inmates as a lure for humanitarian aid from international human rights organizations. The bulk of the aid is then stolen.
He added that in contrast to common belief, most inmates in Donetsk prison refused to fight for insurgents in exchange for freedom when separatist commanders started offering it at the beginning of the war.
“They (the prisoners) understood perfectly well exactly where they would be sent. Nobody wanted to become cannon fodder,” Sergiy said.
Storming, shelling, kidnapping
Since early May 2014, the Russian-backed separatists also used prisons as a source of weapons, prison officials say.
On May 31, 2014, a group of armed separatists drove to prison No. 27 in the city of Horlivka, north of Donetsk, and invited the prison authorities to their headquarters for talks – which they said would be on security issues.
But Ruslan Bilenko, who was then a deputy head of prison No. 27, said the Russian-backed fighters instead took him, together with the prison director, to the basement of their base and threatened to execute them both unless the prison staff handed over weapons to the separatists.
Prison head Ruslan Bilenko (right) together with his subordinate talks to the Kyiv Post in his office of Bakhmut prison No 6. (Anastasia Vlasova)
“So the colony’s security chief had to hand over some of the weapons,” said Bilenko, who now heads Bakhmut prison No. 6. “On the next day after that incident, some 40 percent of the prison staff didn’t come to work. By August 2014, only some 20-30 percent of the staff remained at work.”
The even more dramatic event happened at prison No. 28 in Torez.
On July 9, 2014, the separatists took hostage some 50 prison staff, including many women. They threatened to shoot the captives, and handed over to the chief prison guard a list with eight names of inmates who had to be released in exchange for the lives of the hostages. Prison officials were forced to release the inmates.
And in several cases, conflicts between the separatists and prison guards turned deadly.
Bilenko said that on Sept. 16, 2014, drunken insurgents came to his jail in Horlivka and started an argument with prison staff. It ended in a shootout, leaving one prisoner dead and 19 wounded.
Several sources told the Kyiv Post that in Horlivka, Donetsk and Yenakiyeve the separatists had offered the inmates their freedom if they agreed to join separatist armed gangs. However, very few prisoners agreed.
Living to their own prison rules, the inmates didn’t like the “bespredel” – prison slang for disorder – that they saw among the armed gangs.
Bilenko said that none of the prisoners in his prison in Horlivka agreed to fight.
He added that while the prisons guards were split 50-50 in support of Ukraine or the separatists, some 90 percent of the prisoners remained loyal to Ukraine.
“The prisoners aren’t stupid,” Bilenko said. “In this case, they were way smarter than many residents of the Donbas.”
Survival in frontline prisons
In December 2014, the representatives of Ukraine, Russia and Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe inspected prison No. 52 in Yenakieve. This prison, with some 1,000 inmates, was unlucky enough to be located right on the front lines between the two warring parties.
The members of the joint center for cease-fire implementation observed cooking fires burning in the prison yard, the bombed-out dining room, the lack of food, and the severe cold in the prison cells.
After a shell destroyed an electric cable to the prison, prisoners and staff were left without electricity, water and heat. Some inmates even burned their own spare clothes to keep warm, ombudswoman Lutkovska said.
Valery, a 50-year- old prisoner, served his life sentence in that colony until Dec. 16, 2015, when he was evacuated by the prison guards to government-controlled Bakhmut.
In an interview with the Kyiv Post in prison, where he is now serving his sentence, Valery said the hardest thing to bear had been the stress of living under constant shelling.
Valery after the interview with the Kyiv Post in Bakhmut prison No 6. (Anastasia Vlasova)
“Can you imagine — about 500 meters from us was one side, and 500 meters away the other side. The whole of our territory was exposed,” he said.
Valery also refused to give his last name.
When a shell destroyed the dining room it also wounded the prison chefs. After that, prisoners started cooking for themselves on open fires in the prison yard. Most of the prison’s windows were broken by blast waves from the shelling.
“How did we keep warm? We drank a lot of hot tea,” Valery said.
The prisoners survived on the last of the prison’s food and medication. Sometimes they ate only cereal for days.
In the end, the prison administration allowed even the life prisoners, normally kept under the most restrictive conditions, to leave their cells and hide in the basements when there was shelling.
The constant danger made the prisoners and their guards join forces for survival. “What kind of restrictions can there be when there’s a war on. We thought only about how to survive together,” Valery said.
The Ukrainian authorities were planning a total evacuation of the Yenakieve prison in December 2014. But the fighting meant that no more than 30 prisoners were able to be taken to the government-controlled side, said Kateryna Denysiuk, a spokeswoman for the state penitentiary service.
The authorities also failed to evacuate almost 400 prisoners in the Chornukhine prison in Luhansk Oblast. In early February 2015, after the prison was hit by shelling, the staff released all the prisoners in order to save their lives. In the following months, the state penitentiary service picked up about 50 of the inmates, who had come to Ukrainian checkpoints to finish their prison terms in government-controlled areas.
Doing time under Russian law
In the summer of 2014, when the fighting in the Donbas reached its highest peak, many locals survived only thanks to humanitarian aid sent by international donors and local oligarchs.
But many prisons on the separatist-controlled side, forgotten by everyone, started running out of food, sanitation and medical supplies.
The situation became desperate in November 2014, and human rights activists appealed to Aleksandr Zakharchenko, the leader of the armed gangs that have seized control of part of Donetsk oblast, to help the prisons, where some inmates already had nothing to eat but cabbages.
A week after that, the prisoners received food from the Russian humanitarian convoys, including canned meat and processed milk, Kyiv Post sources in separatist-controlled territory said. The ICRC also started providing prisons with hygiene supplies.
But soon after that, all of the supplies started decreasing.
A convict lies on a floor of his prison cell in Bakhmut prison No 6. (Anastasia Vlasova)
Sergiy, who was in prison in Donetsk, said he saw how food from the Russian aid convoys was brought by some trucks to the prison yards, then reloaded to other trucks and driven away. He said the prison guards were using shampoo from the humanitarian supplies to wash their cars, or to sell at local markets.
Meanwhile, the prisons started changing their rules to match the Russian Criminal Code, which has harsher regulations and fewer freedoms for prisoners. The prisons in separatist-controlled areas are now overseen by the Russian penitentiary service based in Rostov, Russia, Bilenko said.
The prison guards have started putting sacks on the heads of life prisoners – a practice banned in Ukraine since the 1990s, Sergiy said. “Now they can beat you up, and can threaten you with dogs,” he said.
In January 2015, Ukraine cut off any links with the penitentiary institutions in separatists-controlled areas. It offered prison guards a choice — work in Ukraine-controlled territory, or be fired.
But most of the guards were loyal to their prisons, rather than Ukraine.
Out of 5,621 prison guards who worked in Donetsk Oblast, only 1,664 came to work for the Ukrainian authorities, while in Luhansk Oblast only 596 prison guards out of 5,621 remained loyal to Ukraine, Denysiuk said.
Punishment for relatives
In late October 2015, at a Ukrainian checkpoint near separatist-controlled Horlivka, the Kyiv Post spotted soldiers ordering several men to put their hands up and turn their faces to a wall.
They were the former prisoners, set free by the separatists after their prison term was over, who were trying to return home, into government-controlled territory, but who only had papers issued by the pseudo authorities in the separatist-controlled parts of the Donbas.
Lutkovska, the ombudswoman, said the problems with documents had been common for former inmates in 2014-2015, before the state penitentiary service officials assured her the former prisoners wouldn’t have any more problems when crossing the separation line.
Under Ukrainian law, a convict should serve their sentence in a prison close to his home or where his relatives live. But since more than 1 million people have had to leave their homes due to the war, many prisoners were left without any support from the families in the separatist-controlled parts of the Donbas.
Segiy said his hometown of Yuvileyny, located in the suburbs of Donetsk, was almost totally destroyed by the war. His family had to leave the region for another part of Ukraine, so they had no means to visit him or send him any parcels to the Donetsk prison.
A woman hands over a parcel for her imprisoned husband in Bakhmut prison No 6. (Anastasia Vlasova)
Hundreds of inmates lost contact with their relatives because of the war, and they now desperately want to be sent to serve their sentences in Ukraine.
Lutkovska said she has had 260 requests from prisoners in the separatist-occupied parts of Donetsk Oblast and 350 requests from prisoners in separatist-occupied parts of Luhansk Oblast who want to serve their prison terms in government-controlled territory.
But the transfers from Donetsk Oblast are going very slowly, and there have not yet been any transfers from Luhansk Oblast. The inmates are told to write appeals to the prison management, but it’s up to the separatist authorities to decide who exactly will be transferred.
Lutkovska said she had been criticized for putting so much effort into helping prisoners, when so many people who have never committed any crimes are suffering in the war-torn Donbas. She said this was a weak argument, as the prisoners are also citizens of Ukraine. She added the suffering of inmates also causes suffering for family members who are not to blame for their crimes.
“No matter how good or bad this person is, he is still someone’s father, or brother or son,” she said. “The prisoners’ relatives don’t deserve to endure such a punishment just because we’ve got a military conflict.”
Project undertaken with the financial support of the Government of Canada provided through the Global Affairs Canada.
