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Ukraine-Russia war: The desperate effort to bring captured civilians home [1]
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Date: 2023-12
“A year and seven months today – on her birthday, 13 May.”
Elena Korniy is calculating the time that has passed since her family last saw her younger sister, Iryna Horobtsova. Two letters and a short note are all the information the family has received since Iryna was kidnapped by Russian security services in Kherson in May 2022.
Many years ago, before social media became ubiquitous, Iryna and I knew each other. We lived in neighbouring apartment blocks in Kherson, and every morning we would take the minibus that went from the northern outskirts of the city to the centre to get to university.
A stern girl with blue hair and a book, we studied on different floors at the university, but later we would meet several times a week at the computer science department. We started communicating in my senior years: both her friends and my school friends hung out in the nightclub where I worked. Eventually Ira, as I knew her, graduated and began a successful career in IT development; she married, divorced, and got her own apartment in the city centre.
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She is one of thousands of Ukrainian civilians who are now held by Russia – without communication with lawyers, family, right to appeal or chance of exchange – and whose fate hangs in the balance as Moscow and Kyiv hold back-channel talks on exchanging them.
Stay behind
“War changes people a lot,” says Elena as she recalls the last days of February 2022, when the Russian army, advancing from Crimea, surrounded Kherson, and Ukrainian officials, police and security services quit the city in haste.
“Many of us did not understand what to do. But Ira got into the car and rushed to the pharmacies: she bought painkillers, anti-inflammatory drugs and syringes, and delivered everything to the hospitals,” Elena remembers.
The city’s hospitals were soon full: hundreds of volunteers, hastily armed the day before, unsuccessfully tried to hold back the advance of thousands of Russian soldiers on several approaches to Kherson. And victims of Russian shelling soon appeared in the emergency departments, too. Ira volunteered to take doctors and nurses home after long shifts; there was no public transport in the city any more.
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[1] Url:
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/odr/ukraine-russia-captured-civilians-prisoners-of-war/
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