“They tied me to a chair with duct tape and started torturing me with electricity”: Testimonies of Ukrainian women abducted by Russia

Доступно на русском языке

“I was hit on the head for every word I spoke in my native Ukrainian”

Yulia Koveshnikova (in a letter from prison)

I want to tell my story. I’m from Melitopol, known around the world as the city of cherries. I have a daughter and two grandsons. I have a husband. I won’t deny that I’m the wife of a Ukrainian soldier. That’s why I’m in this dungeon. It’s been 16 months, or 486 days, since I was taken from my home. As I stepped out of the building, I remember turning to look up at the windows. I had the clear feeling I would never return to that apartment. I want to cry, but there are no tears left.
In the first few days, I spoke to them [the Russian soldiers] in my native language. Then they began telling me not to use it. Every time I said a word in Ukrainian, the masked men would hit me on the head.

In September 2023, the Wagner guys showed up to guard us. They handed out five anthems: Russia’s, the LNR [Luhansk “People’s Republic”], the DNR [Donetsk “People’s Republic”], the Soviet Union — and, get this — a new Ukrainian anthem, written by your country. A month later, the boss came in and said, “When I walk in, you get on your knees and start reciting the anthems.”

I’m a size 42-44 now. Even a size S nightgown is too big for me. I’ve developed a nervous tic — my eye used to twitch only when I was extremely stressed, but now it won’t stop. It’s constant.

It’s freezing in here. My feet are always cold. It’s just as cold at night — I can’t sleep from the chill. I know someone out there probably has it even worse. But I can’t pull myself together. This past month drained me completely. They gave me one pair of socks. Just one. They took my warm ones. To give you an idea — of all my belongings, the only thing I have left is one pair of underwear.

I broke down crying when I was brought into the prison. I’m scared I won’t make it to the exchange. I’m trying to stay strong. But honestly? Sometimes I think they should’ve just thrown me back in the pit and shot me there.

[After I’m freed], of course we’ll meet again. We’ll sit down at the same table, somewhere by the sea, with a bottle of something good, maybe a little barbecue. We’ll be free. And we’ll talk about anything we want.

Anastasiya, daughter of Yuliya Koveshnikova

When the war began, I was living in Melitopol with my husband and our young son. We came under occupation almost immediately. My mom, Yuliya Koveshnikova, was in Melitopol too. We stayed in constant touch, trying to figure out what to do. She insisted we leave with the child. At the time, I didn’t even know I was pregnant with our second. We thought we’d be gone for two weeks at the most. We didn’t even take anything with us. But Mom stayed behind. She didn’t want to leave — she had her dogs (including a little Pekingese) and a parrot. She even taught the parrot to curse at Putin.

We kept calling each other, but the connection would cut out all the time. Sometimes I wouldn’t hear from her for days, even a week. Mom was always waiting for de-occupation. She kept saying, “Any day now, it’s coming — it has to end soon.” She hadn’t worked in years because of an arm injury. Barely left the apartment. The only thing she really did was help out some elderly neighbors in her building. She even trained the dogs not to go outside. She kept to herself, didn’t argue with anyone. But she was very active on social media. And I guess someone reported her for being the wife of a Ukrainian soldier. In April 2023, she disappeared. For over a year, we knew nothing. We didn’t even know if she was alive. But deep down, I had a feeling she’d been taken prisoner.

Now we know: they came for her at home. They tore the place apart looking for phones — anything that could be “evidence.” At first they kept her and a few others in a pit. Just a hole dug in the ground. When it rained, the pit would flood. There was nothing down there. She spent several months like that. We know a few people who were held with her — they were later returned to Ukraine. They told us my mom was incredibly brave. She kept everyone’s spirits up. They said they were like a family in there — with her at the center of it all.

In her letters, Mom writes that they beat her on the head, told her Ukraine had already lost, starved her or gave her spoiled food. She lost a lot of weight. Later they moved her to a basement. She says some people there were tortured to death. She constantly heard the screams of others being tortured. We only found out she was in a detention center in the summer of 2024. A lawyer for another woman contacted me and said his client was being held in the same place as my mom. That’s when I was finally able to write to her and send a few things. She had absolutely nothing. No clothes, no hygiene products, no proper food. She asked me to send anything I could — sneakers, coffee, a water boiler.

But then the woman who had been helping us with deliveries was stopped at a checkpoint on her way from Crimea to Melitopol. They started interrogating her — held her there for three hours, saying: “Do you know what charges she’s facing? Why are you sending her packages? You’ve got children in the car. Use your head, or you’ll end up in the cell next to hers.”

They charged Mom with espionage. They said she had passed information about Russian troops to my stepfather — he’s in the military. But it’s not true. Mom never went anywhere, and everything they accused her of was already publicly available in local Telegram groups. But in June 2024, the Zaporizhzhia Regional Court sentenced her to 13 years in a penal colony. The prosecution had asked for 18.

Her health has seriously deteriorated. Her stomach hurts constantly. Her vision’s failing. She says it’s like there’s a veil in front of her eyes. She can barely see. Her hands and joints ache terribly. She’s started having memory problems.

Then they transferred her. Now she’s at Penal Colony No. 15 in Samara Oblast. I pray she won’t have to serve the full sentence there. I’m already thinking about how we’ll treat her, how to help her recover. We’re all clinging to hope for a prisoner exchange. Every time one is about to happen, we wait for a call from an unknown number, hoping it’s her voice saying she’s back. Every time we think ‘this is it.’ But nothing happens. Mom writes that all she wants is to return to Ukraine. She misses us so much. She dreams about going back to our Azov Sea.

“NATO instructors taught you how to beat the polygraph”

Vira Biryuk, political prisoner, returned to Ukraine in a prisoner exchange

My name is Vira Biryuk. I lived in the village of Bakhmutivka in the Luhansk Region. We came under occupation right away. On Feb. 26, 2022, Russia declared that we had been incorporated into the Russian Federation. In early March, they began selective “filtration measures.” The list for filtration was submitted by the head of the local village council, Tatyana Yurova. It mostly included families of Ukrainian servicemen.

I wasn’t working. I was on maternity leave and taking care of my bedridden mother. They came to our house because my brother had served in the Ukrainian army. Four men with assault rifles entered the house, asking where he was. Everyone knew he hadn’t lived there for over eight years. Still, they searched the place, demanded all the phones for inspection. They were looking for a uniform, anything with Ukrainian symbols. They wanted a recent photo of him. Then they left.

I was detained during the night of Sept. 4, 2023. I still don’t understand how they got into the house without breaking the lock on the front door.

I woke up to people in balaclavas lifting me up by both arms. I looked down, and there was a red laser sight dot on my chest. No explanations. Right there, they started questioning me: “Where’s your phone? How many phones have you got? Where are your relatives? Where’s your mom? Where are your kids?” If they didn’t like my answers, they hit me. Right away.

The last thing I saw before they covered my eyes was a convoy of white vans pulling up outside the house. Then they blindfolded me, forced me onto the floor of one of the vans, and we drove off. As I later found out, they took me to Luhansk — to the former building of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), which now houses [Russia’s] FSB. They led me straight to a new round of interrogation, in the basement. No one explained anything. They just kept repeating that I was a Ukrainian spy.

Down in the basement they sat me on a chair, taped me to it with duct tape, and started asking questions. If I answered, they'd shock me. If I didn’t, they'd shock me as well. If I told the truth and they decided it was a lie, they would give me another jolt of electricity. They asked where I grew up, what my nationality was, how many phones I had, who in the Ukrainian army I’d spoken to. The questioning went on all night and into the next day, until about 5 p.m. Eventually they made me sign some papers. I was still blindfolded, I couldn’t see what I was signing. They only lifted the blindfold just enough for me to see where to put my signature.

After that, they took me to the Investigative Committee, to a formal investigator. That’s where they told me they'd put me away for a long time, but that if I confessed, maybe not as long. I asked them to notify my family. They told me, “There’s no need to notify anyone. No one’s going to make any calls. You’re not hiring your own lawyer either.” I was assigned a public defender.

They held me in a temporary detention center for the next month — without a court order. They brought me there that same evening. The officers on duty said it was too late, so they didn’t have any food to give me. The ones who brought me just shrugged and said, “It’s fine. Feed her tomorrow. We didn’t feed her either.” Then they took me to a medical exam room and told me to strip naked and squat. In front of male officers.

The next day I was taken to the detention center warden. But before that, once again, they made me undress for another search. They even took my hair tie. The warden told me that, “since you’re a girl,” I was required to do cleaning duties around the facility: in the morning I had to mop the corridor floors, and in the afternoon I cleaned a second floor. I also had to clean outside in the yard.

A week later they took me for a polygraph test, again to the FSB building. They said they needed the test so they would “know how to treat me” — “if you tell the truth, we won’t beat you every day; if you lie, we’ll keep beating you.”

The main questions were whether I worked for the SBU and whether I had ever contacted the SBU to pass them any information. I said no. And that was the truth. Afterward, they brought me to the office of the same officer who had been escorting me everywhere. That’s when he said I had passed the polygraph only because “NATO instructors trained you.” I wasn’t taken to court to have my pretrial detention authorized until early October. That’s when they officially charged me with attempted murder.

[Vira was accused of attempting to assassinate the head of the “republic’s” customs committee, Yuriy Afanasyevsky. Allegedly, she delivered a smartphone rigged with explosives to the Luhansk region and handed it to Afanasyevsky, and his son was injured in the blast after opening the package containing the phone.]

The entire case was too far-fetched. The only thing they had was that I had supposedly been somewhere in the general vicinity [of where the phone was handed to Afanasyevsky].

I spent the next 11 months in pretrial detention. In my first cell, I was held with another girl from Ukraine, Aliona Sytnyk. She was also accused of espionage and later sentenced to 11 years. She’s still serving her time. Before that, she spent a full year in a basement prison. Her family had no idea where she was, because no one tells your relatives anything until the FSB gives permission.

[Like many other detained Ukrainians, Biryuk had no contact with her family and was left without even basic hygiene items or a change of clothes. These can only be bought from the prison store or received in parcels.]

I was wearing exactly what I had on when I was arrested. It might sound minor, but it meant I had nothing to wash with, nothing to dry off with. Only at the end of October — during a hearing on extending my detention — did I finally speak up. When the judge asked if I trusted the court, I said: “How can I trust you if you’re hiding me from my own family? You can change your clothes — I can’t. It’s cold outside, November is starting, and I was brought here in thin leggings, a T-shirt, and no socks. That’s what I wore out on the street.” After that, they actually allowed my court-appointed lawyer to contact my family and let them know where I was.

Later they moved me to a cell with a woman who had schizophrenia. She had killed her daughter and thrown her granddaughter off a balcony. She would have episodes at night. I’d wake up and see her perched naked on the top bunk across from me, clutching a water boiler, jumping around like an Amazon. I’d bang on the door, call for the guards — “Help me, please!” But they’d just say, “Deal with it. What do you expect us to do?” They only transferred her to a psychiatric facility at the end of December 2023.

Then I was moved in with another woman. Her name was Nastya, and she was a separatist, she supported the independence of the so-called “republics.” We shared a cell until the end of May. After that, I ended up with a group of women charged with drug distribution. They were full-on Putin fanatics. They had portraits of him, prayed to him morning and night, kissed his pictures.

I was told ahead of time — even before they handed down my sentence — that I’d be part of a prisoner exchange. On August 27, 2024, I had a full day of court hearings. The next day, August 28, they sentenced me to 15 years in a penal colony. Immediately after that, they started prepping me for the exchange. First they brought in a photographer to take pictures. Then they took me to the medical unit for a checkup. They returned some of the items from care packages that had previously been denied. And they told me someone would come for me at night. Around 7 p.m., they brought another woman into the cell and said we’d be going together.

But the mood in the cell was tense. Those women, the Putin devotees, started whispering to each other: “why are we praying to Putin when she’s the one going home? Clearly, she’s not staying here.” Then one of them, Ulyana, turned to me and said, “So you’re getting traded, go ahead and kiss Uncle Vova [Vladimir Putin] for letting you go.” I kept packing my things, trying to ignore it. But she wouldn’t stop: “Time to kiss Uncle Vova.” I said, “I’ll go home and kiss my own Uncle Vova there.”

I’d heard stories about people being taken for exchanges, driven around, then sent back to their cells. But I was sure this time it was real, that we wouldn’t be going back. The trip took three days: first to Rostov-on-Don, then Voronezh, then Bryansk, and finally to the border. When we saw those buses outside the detention center windows, we knew for sure — it was the exchange.

I felt hurt when we saw the prisoners from the other side. They stood there well-fed, happy. Our guys were all thin, beaten down, barely able to move. But of course, there was joy in finally being home, free.

“Nonna weighs just 30 kilos, they don’t give her the meds we've been sending”

Nonna Galka, 46, was detained in July 2023. In December 2024, the Rostov Regional Court sentenced her to 15 years in a penal colony on charges of espionage. Her nephew, Viktor Meshnyakov, received the same sentence. The prosecution claimed Nonna was passing information about Russian troops to her son.

Iryna, Nonna Galka’s godmother

Nonna lived in the city of Dniprorudne, Zaporizhzhia Region. That’s where she came under occupation in 2022. We’re not blood relatives — I’m her godmother — but I baptized her youngest child, and she means a lot to me. I left the occupied territory almost immediately, but Nonna stayed. Our communication was poor, but we exchanged messages occasionally. She had a common-law husband and two minor children from her first and second marriages. Her husband forbade her from leaving. Then, in June 2023, she disappeared — along with her sister Natalia and nephew Vitya.

I started searching for her, writing letters to every organization I could think of. I was convinced she’d been taken. I contacted the Dniprorudne police department, and they told me they had no record of her. Then someone said she was in Crimea working at a sewing factory. I sent an inquiry to that factory, but they said they never had an employee by that name and had never heard of her. For eight months, they kept leading me around in circles. No one seemed to know anything about her.

Four months later, we found her sister Natalia in the morgue. She was beaten badly, exhausted, her hair turned gray. Her body was in such a condition that she couldn’t be buried in an open coffin. She had simply been tortured to death in a basement. The morgue staff said they just found the body, but the official cause of death was listed as heart failure.

As for Nonna herself, there was no information about her for a long time. At some point I stopped believing we would find her alive. My heart hoped, but my mind didn’t. Then, after eight months, we learned she was in a detention center in Rostov and that her trial was coming soon.

Now we know that after her arrest, she spent six months “in the basement.” She likely endured the same torture as her sister. They forced them to confess to passing information about the positions of Russian soldiers and correcting fire, all because Nonna’s son and Natalia’s son had served in the Armed Forces of Ukraine. But by then, that information was already outdated. Nonna was accused of espionage, even though she had become a Russian citizen.

Nonna writes letters, but she can’t say much because of censorship. She finds out many things much later. For example, her mother died in February, but Nonna only learned about it in May. A lot of information simply doesn’t reach her.

She is now being transported to another colony. Where exactly, we don’t know. We hope that once she arrives at the colony, she will be able to contact us. Nonna has had two stomach surgeries. She has always struggled with her weight, and now she weighs just 30 kilos. It’s horrifying. In detention, they don’t give her medications, not even the ones that we manage to send. She needs treatment, but no one cares.

We’re really holding onto hope for a prisoner exchange. I wake up and go to sleep thinking about it. But right now, they rarely exchange civilians. Still, we’re counting on bringing her home. Then we’ll fight to get her children back. Her boys are currently with her former common-law husband. He refuses to communicate with us. He ignores everyone.

It’s terrifying. The children have lost their mother. Their grandmother is dead, their aunt is dead. Taking the kids out without Nonna is just impossible. I write to every organization I can — the UN, the Red Cross, anywhere — just to get her exchanged, because she won’t survive there.

“The Russian authorities try to hide this information”

Nikolay Polozov, a lawyer and co-founder of the public organization Search. Captives, told The Insider that Russia is holding around 16,000 ordinary Ukrainians captive. “The Russian authorities have deliberately created new terminology. They say these people are being detained ‘for opposing the special military operation,’” Polozov says. “This actually means the creation of secret prisons where thousands are held without court rulings and without contact with the outside world. These people are de facto in detention centers or colonies repurposed for prisoners of war. They may be held for months, even years.”

In practice, appeals to the Russian Federal Penitentiary Service yield no results. “Our organization, Search. Captives, has had many cases where inquiries about missing persons were sent to the Ministry of Defense, and the response was: ‘yes, they’re alive, detained for opposing the special military operation, held somewhere on the Russian territory.’ But they don’t say exactly where,” the lawyer explains.

“The Russian authorities try to hide this information as much as possible, to confuse everyone. Very often Ukrainians are shuffled around, transferred from one facility to another with a bag over their heads. They don’t tell them where they’re going — or they lie. For example, they put them on buses, saying, ‘We’re going for an exchange.’ But then they’re just taken somewhere else. That’s how they torment them.”

Yevgeny Smirnov, a lawyer with the human rights project Perviy Otdel (lit. “Department One”), agrees with his colleague:

“These people endure brutal torture in those basements. They are subjected to electric shocks, beaten, hung by their limbs, and even subjected to sexual violence. There have been cases where family members were forced to watch — such as a wife made to witness her husband being raped. These tortures serve no purpose other than to force confessions that the detainees supposedly passed information to Ukrainian intelligence.

The charges are often based on mundane correspondence with relatives or publicly available social media posts. For instance, someone might have written in a message: ‘Yesterday there was a missile strike here, we were all scared because of what happened.’

Realistically, the only — and quickest — hope for these people is a prisoner exchange. For the past month, there has been talk about a planned exchange of civilian prisoners. This is discussed in Russian colonies, and rumors circulate among human rights defenders. We are all waiting for it.”