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Ukraine war: The Kherson prisoners stolen by Russia [1]
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Date: 2023-11
Since the beginning of the year, more than a hundred Kherson prisoners have been released from Russian colonies. All that openDemocracy was able to speak with, as well as all encountered by various human rights organisations, have reported similar experiences to Oleksandr. After they are taken to police stations and fined, the prisoners are issued with a forced deportation order from Russian courts – despite the Kremlin officially considering the entire Kherson region as Russian territory.
But as deportation from Russia to Ukraine is impossible, the men are placed in immigration detention centres, which have slightly better conditions than Russian prisons.
Two NGOs have been looking for a way to bring home these Ukrainian citizens all year: Tsvilyi’s Protection of Prisoners of Ukraine and UnMode, which works to support prisoners and ex-prisoners with a history of drug use in several former Soviet countries.
Tsvilyi suggested a route through Kolotilovka, the last semi-official checkpoint on the Ukraine-Russia border. But crossing without a passport is banned and most of the prisoners either did not have a passport at the time of arrest or lost it while being moved to Russia – meaning the Russian migration service would not facilitate their crossing.
Aidana Fedosik, the executive director of UnMode, said activists then focused on a route through Latvia, as “it was used by many civilian Ukrainians who were leaving Russia or the occupied territories”. But after Latvian border guards stopped 14 Kherson prisoners in February because of their criminal convictions, Fedosik organised a new route through Georgia.
She even opened a shelter for Kherson prisoners on the outskirts of Tbilisi, Georgia’s capital. There, Olexandr waited for the Ukrainian consulate to issue him a so-called ‘white passport’, a certificate to return home. But the process dragged on: in April, the Ukrainian government decided that the simplified procedure for processing such documents did not apply to prisoners, and confirming the identity of prisoners from Kyiv took many months.
In October, these Kherson prisoners were held for days in the transit zone between Russia and Georgia | Image: Meduza
Georgian authorities have already stopped former Kherson prisoners crossing the Verkhnyi Lars land crossing with Russia several times, but after the intervention of the Ukrainian consulate and human rights activists, they were eventually allowed into the country. The last group was allowed through on 25 October, but only after the six prisoners spent 15 days in a room at the Verkhnyi Lars crossing.
That process, according to another prisoner's lawyer, Anna Skrypka, “forced” the Ukrainian foreign ministry to move quickly and confirm the prisoners’ identities. The very next day after crossing the border, the six Kherson prisoners received “white passports” at the consulate, Skrypka said, and a day later the six left for home.
Skrypka hopes that a new Russian procedure for confirming the identity of foreign citizens, signed off by Vladimir Putin in October, will speed up the transfer of Ukrainian prisoners who have been released in Russia.
However, neither human rights activists, nor official ombudspersons, nor the heads of the Ukrainian and Russian penitentiary systems are yet to find a solution to the problem of returning all Ukrainians deported from Kherson’s prisons.
As of November 2023, there are at least 1,500 Kherson prisoners whose sentences have not yet ended being held in Russian prisons, according to estimates by human rights activists. Oleh Tsvilyi suspects that some of them will be sent to new prisons that Russia is building in the parts of Kherson that are still under occupation. Vadym worked at one of these prison construction sites until his release in September 2023. He now lives in Kyiv, earning money through day-to-day work.
Although Tsvilyi does not have exact figures, he notes that many Ukrainian prisoners in Russia are increasingly agreeing to receive a Russian passport and stay in the Russian Federation.
“[Russian] propaganda convinces them that, back in Ukraine, they will be punished for having a Russian passport, sent back to prison to finish out the sentence they’ve already served in Russian camps, or, on the contrary, immediately sent to fight. But this isn’t the case,” he said.
*Names have been changed, or surnames withheld, to protect identities.
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[1] Url:
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/odr/ukrainian-prisoners-stuck-in-russia-forced-deportation-kherson-stolen-liberation/
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