While most Ukrainians will be free to celebrate 27 years of the country’s independence on Aug. 24, at least 183 Ukrainians are paying a high price for their compatriots’ liberty: They are being held in prisons in Russia, Russian-annexed Crimea, and Russian-occupied parts of the Donbas.
Activists from the Media for Human Rights organization estimate that there are at least 31 Ukrainians being held as political prisoners in Russia, and another 39 in Ukraine’s Russian-occupied Crimea.
While the sham charges issued by Russia’s Kremlin-controlled courts against the hostages vary, all are in prison for one basic reason — they actively opposed Russia’s war against Ukraine.
Another 113 hostages, including both soldiers and civilians, are kept in jails by Russia’s proxy forces in the Russian-occupied parts of Donetsk and Luhansk Oblasts, Vasyl Hrytsak, the head of State Security Service (SBU), said in June.
Many have been subjected to torture. Their prospects for release are vague: With the prisoner exchange process being linked to the stillborn Minsk peace process, their fate now hangs on backroom talks between state leaders.
Meanwhile, some of Ukraine’s political prisoners have become symbols of resistance to the Kremlin regime — even though it may ultimately cost them their lives.
Imprisoned in Russia
“Cowardice is the main and the worst sin on Earth,” said Ukrainian filmmaker Oleg Sentsov in his final statement at a Russian show trial in 2015, where he was sentenced to 20 years in prison.
On Ukraine’s Independence Day on Aug. 24, Sentsov will be on 103rd day of his hunger strike, which he declared in a Russian prison in Siberia. Sentsov is demanding that Russia release all of its Ukrainian political prisoners, with the exception of himself.
Sentsov has since suffered three periods of deterioration of his health, and has developed heart and kidney problems, but he has refused to end his hunger strike. He survives by taking a small amount of a nutritional substance orally, in addition to an intravenous drip of nutrients.
The Ukrainian filmmaker has lost almost half of his weight, according to Zoya Svetova, a Russian human rights activist who visited Sentsov in mid-August.
“I’ve seen several prisoners in my life who were as resilient (as Sentsov),” Svetova later wrote on MBKH Media. “But Oleg, perhaps, is one of the strongest.”
Despite there being a worldwide campaign to release Sentsov, which has even reached the White House, and the personal efforts of French President Emmanuel Macron, who has urged his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin to release the Ukrainian director, the Kremlin appears ready to let Sentsov die.
In early August, Sentsov’s mother, after asking Putin to pardon her son, received a letter from the Kremlin saying the director should ask for it personally.
Sentsov himself has refused to ask for pardon.
Imprisoned in Crimea
Sentsov is not the only Ukrainian on hunger strike in a Russian-controlled jail.
Crimean farmer Volodymyr Balukh on Aug. 24 will be on the 159th day of his hunger strike.
Balukh, 47, refused to accept Russian citizenship after Russia began its occupation of Ukraine’s Crimea, and twice hoisted a Ukrainian flag atop his house on the peninsula. In December 2016, Russia’s FSB security agency, the successor of the notorious and sinister Soviet KGB, alleged that he had kept weapons in his attic and arrested him.
In August 2017, a court in Crimea sentenced Balukh to three years and seven months in prison.
“I don’t want my descendants or children all over Ukraine to reproach me for being scared, or showing weakness,” Balukh said in his final address to the court.
On the 25th day of his hunger strike, Balukh started taking a small amount of solid food so as to avoid being force-fed. But on the 96th day of his hunger strike, he announced he was switching to water only.
Balukh, now very weak, has already lost 30 kilograms and is suffering from headaches and dizziness, his lawyer said. His mother, who visited him in prison on Aug. 10, said he is just “bones covered with skin.”
Activists take part in a rally to protest against Russia’s imprisonment of Ukrainian filmmaker Oleg Sentsov and Crimean Tatars on May 24 next to the Russian Embassy in Kyiv. (Kostyantyn Chernichkin)
Jailed in the Donbas
On mainland Ukraine, Stanislav Aseev, a 29-year-old journalist, blogger, and writer from Donetsk, has been held in captivity for 14 months by Russia’s proxy forces in the Donbas.
Aseev was captured for writing blogs about life in the Russian-controlled Donbas for several Ukrainian media under the pen name of Stanislav Vasin.
In early June 2017, Russian-proxy forces captured him in Donetsk, depriving him of any legal process and reportedly torturing him. In late June, Aseev started a hunger strike in protest of his mistreatment, according to his friend and former lawmaker Yegor Firsov.
On Aug. 17, pro-Kremlin TV channel Russia 24 showed an interview with Aseev, who “confessed” to spying for Ukraine’s SBU security service in Donetsk — a claim his friend Firsov believes was “beaten” out of him so that he could be sentenced to years in prison.
Pale and lean, Aseev told a pro-Kremlin journalist that a phrase “Ukraine is united” means a lot to him.
“I admire the way he behaved during the interview,” said Anna Mokrousova, head of the Blue Bird volunteer project, which helps hostages held in Russian-occupied parts of the Donbas and their families.
Mokrousova said the number of hostages recorded by her organization is close to the one given by the SBU. However, the number changes almost every week as Russian proxy troops capture and release people.
In the latest case, a man who was accompanying his sister on the way to Russian-controlled Donetsk was taken prisoner at a checkpoint last week, Mokrousova said.
Meanwhile, about two months ago another man was released from a Donetsk detention center. International organizations put him in contact with Mokrousova’s organization, who helped him with medication and paperwork.
But there have been no major prisoner exchanges since 73 Ukrainian hostages were released in late December, and there is little prospect of any more exchanges soon, Mokrousova said.
“Talks are being held all the time. But I don’t see any will from (the Russian) side to give back our people,” Mokrousova said.
Prospects of release
Meanwhile, Ukrainian officials are still working to achieve the hostages’ release: the office of Ukraine’s ombudswoman Liudmyla Denisova is now visiting the 36 Russian nationals and residents of Crimea, whom Russia considers its citizens, that are held in Ukrainian prisons, asking them whether they want to be exchanged.
Twenty-two of them have already signed pleas to be exchanged, Denisova reported. Some have refused, however.
Russia appears to show little interest in the fate of its citizens. Only a few of the 36 Russians held by the Ukrainian side have ever been visited by a Russian consul, said Olga Reshetylova, a human rights activist who has visited some of the imprisoned Russians.
Russia did release Ukrainian prisoner Oleksandr Kostenko earlier in August. But this was only because he had completed his prison sentence of three years and six months.
Ukraine’s Ministry of Justice has in August filed a 3,000-page submission to the European Court of Human Rights asking for a ruling on Russia’s persecution of 71 Ukrainians the government believes are illegally held prisoner in Russia or in Ukraine’s Russian-occupied Crimea.
While this is the sixth case Ukraine has filed against Russia in the international courts since 2014, it is the first one related to Ukrainian political prisoners.
The filing is significant, according to human rights activist Maria Tomak, because it will at least define these people as political prisoners in international court documents.
But in the face of Russian intransigence, that recognition may make little difference to the fates of Sentsov, Balukh, and all the other Ukrainian hostages held in Kremlin jails.
