Screams from troopers being tortured, overflowing cells, inhuman situations, a regime of intimidation and homicide. Inedible gruel, no communication with the exterior world, and days marked off with a home-made calendar written on a field of tea.
This, in accordance to a prisoner who was there, is what situations are like inside Olenivka, the notorious detention centre outside Donetsk where dozens of Ukrainian troopers burned to death in a horrific episode late final month whereas in Russian captivity.
Anna Vorosheva – a 45-year-old Ukrainian entrepreneur – gave a harrowing account to the Observer of her time inside the jail. She spent 100 days in Olenivka after being detained in mid-March at a checkpoint run by the pro-Russian Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) in japanese Ukraine.
She had been attempting to ship humanitarian provides to Mariupol, her residence metropolis, which the Russian military had besieged. The separatists arrested her and drove her in a packed police van to the prison, where she was held till early July on prices of “terrorism”.
Now recovering in France, Vorosheva stated she had little question Russia “cynically and deliberately” murdered Ukrainian prisoners of conflict. “We are talking about absolute evil,” she stated.
The fighters have been blown up on 29 July in a mysterious and devastating explosion. Moscow claims Ukraine killed them with a US-made precision-guided Himars rocket. Satellite pictures and impartial evaluation, nevertheless, counsel they have been obliterated by a strong bomb detonated from inside the constructing.
Russia says 53 prisoners have been killed and 75 injured. Ukraine has been unable to verify these figures and has referred to as for an investigation. The victims have been members of the Azov battalion. Until their give up in May, they’d defended Mariupol’s Azovstal metal plant, holding out underground.
A day earlier than the blast, they have been transferred to a separate space in the camp’s industrial zone, a ways from the dirty two-storey concrete block where Vorosheva shared a cell with different ladies prisoners. Video proven on Russian state TV revealed charred our bodies and twisted metallic bunk beds.
“Russia didn’t want them to stay alive. I’m sure some of those ‘killed’ in the explosion were already corpses. It was a convenient way of accounting for the fact they had been tortured to death,” she stated.
Male prisoners were regularly removed from their cells, beaten, then locked up again. “We heard their cries,” she said. “They played loud music to cover the screams. Torture happened all the time. Investigators would joke about it and ask inmates, ‘What happened to your face?’ The soldier would reply, ‘I fell over’, and they would laugh.
“It was a demonstration of power. The prisoners understood that anything could happen to them, that they might easily be killed. A small number of the Azov guys were captured before the mass surrender in May.”
Vorosheva said there was constant traffic around Olenivka, known as correctional colony No 120. A former Soviet agricultural school, it was converted in the 1980s into a prison, and later abandoned. The DNR began using it earlier this year to house enemy civilians.
Captives arrived and departed every day at the camp, 20km south-west of occupied Donetsk, Vorosheva told the Observer. Around 2,500 people were held there, with the figure sometimes rising to 3,500-4,000, she estimated. There was no running water or electricity.
The atmosphere changed when around 2,000 Azov fighters were bussed in on the morning of 17 May, she said. Russian flags were raised and the DNR colours taken down. Guards were initially wary of the new prisoners. Later they talked openly about how they were going to brutalise and humiliate them, she said.
“We were frequently called Nazis and terrorists. One of the women in my cell was an Azovstal medic. She was pregnant. I asked if I could give her my food ration. I was told, ‘No, she’s a killer’. The only question they ever asked me was, ‘Do you know any Azov soldiers?’”
Conditions for the female inmates were grim. She said they were not tortured but received barely any food – 50g of bread for dinner and sometimes porridge. “It was fit for pigs,” she said. She suspected the prison governor siphoned off money allocated for meals. The toilets overflowed and the women were given no sanitary products. The cells were so overcrowded they slept in shifts. “It was tough. People were crying, worried about their kids and families.” Asked if the guards ever showed sympathy, she said an anonymous person once left them a bottle of shampoo.
According to Vorosheva, the camp’s staff were brainwashed by Russian propaganda and considered Ukrainians to be Nazis. Some were local villagers. “They blamed us for the fact that their lives were terrible. It was like an alcoholic who says he drinks vodka because his wife is no good.
“The philosophy is: ‘Everything is horrible for us, so everything should be horrible for you’. It’s all very communist.”
Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, has referred to as the explosion “a deliberate Russian war crime and a deliberate mass murder of Ukrainian prisoners of war”. Last week, his workplace and Ukraine’s defence ministry gave particulars of clues which they are saying level to the Kremlin’s guilt.
Citing satellite tv for pc pictures and cellphone intercepts and intelligence, they stated Russian mercenaries from the Wagner group carried out the killings in collaboration with Vladimir Putin’s FSB spy company. They level to the truth a row of graves was dug in the colony a number of days earlier than the blast.
The operation was accredited at the “highest level” in Moscow, they allege. “Russia is not a democracy. The dictator is personally responsible for everything, whether it’s MH17, Bucha or Olenivka,” one intelligence supply stated. “The question is: when will Putin acknowledge his atrocities.”
One model of occasions being examined by Kyiv is that the blast could have been the consequence of intra-service rivalries between Russia’s FSB and GRU army intelligence wings. The GRU negotiated Azovstal’s give up with its Ukrainian military counterpart, sources counsel – a deal the FSB could have been eager to wreck.
The troopers ought to have been protected by ensures given by Russia to the UN and the International Committee of the Red Cross that the Azov detainees can be correctly handled. Since the blast, the Russians have refused to give worldwide representatives any entry to the web site.
Vorosheva stated the Red Cross have been allowed into the camp in May. She stated the Russians took the guests to a specifically renovated room and didn’t permit them to discuss independently to the prisoners. “It was a show,” she stated. “We were asked to give our clothes’ size and told the Red Cross would hand out something. Nothing reached us.”
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Other detainees confirmed Vorosheva’s model of occasions and stated the Azov troopers have been handled worse than civilians. Dmitry Bodrov, a 32-year-old volunteer employee, informed the Wall Street Journal the guards took anybody they suspected of misbehaviour to a particular disciplinary part of the camp for beatings.
They emerged limping and moaning, he stated. Some captives have been pressured to crawl again to their cells. Another prisoner, Stanislav Hlushkov, stated an inmate who was frequently overwhelmed was discovered lifeless in solitary confinement. Orderlies put a sheet over his head, loaded him right into a mortuary van and informed fellow inmates he had “committed suicide”.
Vorosheva was freed on 4 July. It was, she stated, a “miracle”. “The guards read out the names of those who were going to be freed. Everyone listened in silence. My heart leaped when I heard my name. I packed my things but didn’t celebrate. There were cases where people were on the list, got out, then came back.”
She added: “The people who run the camp represent the worst aspects of the Soviet Union. They could only behave well if they thought nobody was looking.”
