It is early March. Just a few weeks into President Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and in three different corners of the country, a group of civilians are being ‘vanished.’
In Trostyanets, a town then under Russian occupation close to Ukraine’s northeast border, Andriy 35, a furniture marker and his father-in-law are making a rare trip out to search for dwindling supplies. A Russian military vehicle quietly pulls up beside them, and the soldiers order them to get in.
Some 140km east in Kharkiv city, Igor, 33 is finishing a day volunteering with evacuees in the city’s train station when he realises he has forgotten the keys to his flat. He decides to take shelter during curfew hours in a family summer home just outside the city but is stopped at a checkpoint on the way.
Meanwhile, 500km south, in Nova Kakhovka, an occupied town on the coast, Serhiy, 60, a journalist, activist and ex-soldier, is trying to cross a Russian-controlled bridge to deliver supplies to elderly friends. He is pulled to the side when the men at the checkpoint recognise him.
In three corners of the country – in unrelated incidents on a random day, 12 March, these civilians are quietly disappeared by Russian soldiers.
All of them will eventually end up in prisons in Russia, which rights groups say is evidence of enforced disappearance and forcible transfer, potential war crimes.
Their families will spend weeks and months desperately, and vainly searching for them.
Only one of them – Andriy – has returned.
“The soldiers said ‘get into the car’. They put bags over our heads, they handcuffed us, they wanted to “check” us,” the father of two says, describing the moment where his nightmare began to unfold.
“They told us they would take us to Russia where someone more senior would decide what to do with us.
“When they loaded us into a truck from Trostyanets and started to drive out of the town, it was terrifying.
“I sat down next to my father-in-law and said, that’s it, we will never return home again.”
Andriy and his father-in-law were subjected to mock executions, beaten, interrogated and moved between various detention centres, including a tented camp in Shebekino, a Russian town close to the border. There he was held with dozens of soldiers captured from Snake Island.
He was eventually interned in a prison in Stary Oksol, around 180km east of the Ukraine border, where he found himself in a cell with civilians who had been taken from not only his region Sumy, but also Kharkiv and Kyiv. He said the prison appeared to have been emptied of Russian inmates and filled instead with at least 500 Ukrainians.
“During the journey they almost killed us. One soldier accused us of being members of the military and attacked my father-in-law with a shovel. They shot twice next to our heads. “
The three key routes where civilians are being disappeared to Russia
He was held in Stary Oskol until mid-April when he was inexplicably chosen to be included in a prisoner swap. To this day he doesn’t know why.
After an odyssey around Russia, where 66 civilian detainees and PoWs were gathered from different prisons, he was dumped back in Ukraine.
But his father-in-law and his six fellow cell mates – which included Igor – remain behind bars.
The last eyewitness account of Serhiy, meanwhile, places him in a Russian-run prison in Crimea which Moscow illegally annexed in 2014. But his wife says there are new reports he was moved to Voronezh, a southwest district of Russia, just next to Stary Oskol.
I sat down next to my father-in-law and said, that’s it, we will never return home again
Maria spends every day trawling the internet for any news about her vanished husband
