What Volodymyr describes is a whole journey, a whole system of deportation. Once captured near Kozarovychi, north of kyiv, this civilian, who works in the humanitarian field, is forcibly embarked on a bus. His hands tied behind his back, gagged and an ill-positioned blindfold: he can then see the names of the towns passed through: Ivankiv, Chernobyl… He understands that he is heading north.
>> War in Ukraine: follow the evolution of the situation live
Finally, he identifies the Belarusian border which he crosses before being put in solitary confinement. “My hands were permanently tied behind my back. It was forbidden to look the soldiers in the eye, the head should always be as close to the ground as possible. We had no information, impossible to guess where we were. They treated us like inferior people and they imagined themselves to be gods.”
He was then transferred by plane to Russia, to the Rostov-sur-le-Don prison. There, the mistreatment continues for about two weeks. “They wrung our hands, we were undressed. Then beaten… If we moved too slowly, we were beaten. If we turned around, still beaten. They struck indiscriminately just to humiliate us, young or old, sick or healthy. They made no difference…”
His journey does not stop there: the Russians then transported him to Crimea. Another plane to Sevastopol, then a bus takes him north to the front line, near Zaporizhia.. There, he describes a scene worthy of World War II: “Our bus stopped at the edge of a river. There was another bus on the other side. Soldiers checked a list of people. It was a prisoner exchange. Everything went very quickly in a few minutes. I just saw the faces”. Faces of “russian soldiers“, he says.
Subject of an exchange of prisoners, Volodymyr is free. He was able to return to his region of origin. But it seems that some Ukrainians are less fortunate than him. Ukrainian civilians, who remained in Rostov-on-the-Don, boarded a train, to an unknown destination.
Oleksandra, a lawyer specializing in human rights, follows a lead that goes to the depths of Russia. She claims that these people were taken to remote corners of the Russian Far East. “At least 300 people were taken to Vladivostok. But not in the city, in small surrounding villages. Then they show these people on Russian TV, in propaganda videos. They’re doing this to show how the Russians supposedly saved these people from a hell like Mariupol. Without ever mentioning that they bombed their houses”. And without ever specifying that these people had no other choice to survive: “They were told: either you stay in a basement in Mariupol without water, without electricity, without food, without care and you will die… Or you go to Russia”says Oleksandra.
The treatment of these deportees varies from region to region. Some are mistreated, others are parked in schools or gymnasiums without the right to go out. These deportees are then used for Kremlin propaganda. In reports, the comments claim that if they were able to get out of the hell of Mariupol, it was thanks to Russia. The Kremlin also considers that they are not “deported” as the Ukrainians claim, preferring to speak of evacuees.