Vitaliy Rudenko, a judge of the Luhansk Regional Court of Appeal, was released on July 29 after spending nine months as a captive of the Russian-backed separatists that control a part of Ukraine’s eastern Luhansk Oblast.
With his release, at least 137 Ukrainian citizens remain prisoners of the separatists in eastern Ukraine.
Rudenko was captured when he went from Severodonetsk, a Ukrainian-controlled city and a temporary capital of the Luhansk Oblast while Luhansk is controlled by separatists, to Krasnodon, a separatist-controlled city, for his father’s funeral.
When he was crossing a checkpoint at Stanytsia Luhanska on Oct. 15, militants stopped and seized him for unknown reasons.
But soon, Rudenko said, the separatists accessed a database of all Ukrainian court rulings and inspected the rulings that he had passed during his eight years of work at the Luhansk court. One of them made them really unhappy.
The separatists accused Rudenko of “high treason” because of his ruling that sentenced Serhiy Makhurenko, the general director of the state enterprise Luhansk Water for 20 years in prison for being an accomplice to the Luhansk separatists, whom Ukrainian law classifies as a terrorist organization.
The militants claimed that Rudenko’s ruling had resulted in disruption of the water supply in the separatist-controlled part of Luhansk Oblast.
In a video address published online on July 30, after his release, Rudenko said that he was being kept in a one-man cell for the first 46 days, and later was transferred to a shared cell. He was subjected to psychological pressure and threats against him and his family. He also said that he used to hear when people were taken at night for “interrogation,” and was aware what kind of torture hostages faced, with bags placed over their heads, beatings and the use of electric shocks.
Rudenko said that the separatists forced him into speaking in a propaganda video, rejecting Ukraine and saying that he wanted to remain in the separatist-controlled part of the country.
He said that at first, he rejected their offers, saying that he would wait for the prisoners’ exchange. However, the separatists allegedly said that he would not be exchanged, and that, in one way or another, they would “break him.”
Rudenko then agreed to be filmed for the propaganda video. He says that it was “an act of despair.”
“I’m a Ukrainian citizen. I want to live in Ukraine and I would never sell out my country,” Rudenko said after his release.
After the video was published online, the militants released Rudenko.
His release required help from Ukraine’s Minsk delegation, the Patriot volunteer group, and the SBU security service.
Head of the Patriot volunteer group Oleh Kotenko told the Kyiv Post that it’s most complicated to negotiate the release of the hostages who are valuable for the separatists as propaganda tools. Ukrainian officials and military fall under this category.
“(The release of Rudenko) was a successful case, but the rescue operation is still ongoing as we hope to release more people shortly,” Kotenko said. “Such operations (the release of hostages) require silence.”
According to Kotenko, their group assists the SBU to release hostages, up to three people a month.
“We try to stay in touch with the relatives of the hostage, check on their health conditions and monitor the exchange or release process,” Kotenko explains.
At least 137 Ukrainian citizens are still being kept hostage as of July 31, according to Yuriy Tandit, an advisor to the head of the Ukraine’s State Security Service.
“This number is going up because there are civilians who cross the contact line and they (Russia-backed separatists) detain those people, charge them with crimes they never committed,” Tandit was quoted as saying to Channel 112. “As for Vitaliy Rudenko, he was promised safety from the Luhansk side… But once he crossed the contact line, he was taken immediately.”
A 39-year-old Luhansk native Liudmila Surzhenko was released the same day as Rudenko after being kept hostage by the separatists for almost two weeks.
Surzhenko, who has a serious hearing impairment, was returning to Luhansk from the Ukrainian-controlled territory where she went to get humanitarian aid when she was detained at a militants’ checkpoint.
According to the Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, the woman’s finger was swollen after the militants squeezed it with tweezers for several days and held her in handcuffs trying to force her “to confess” to spying or acts of sabotage for the Ukrainian SBU Security Service. After release, Surzhenko was hospitalized.
