Return to the gulag: Russia opens new prisons for civilians captured in Ukraine

KYIV -- Rights activists are documenting a rise in the number of prisons in which the Russian regime is illegally holding Ukrainian civilians.

More than 100 such facilities are operating in Russia, according to the Media Initiative for Human Rights, a Kyiv NGO that tracks and investigates war crimes.

"The number of these prisons keeps growing," organisation director Olha Reshetylova told Caravanserai.

"We're seeing this based on surveys of captives who were released," she said. "They say that people are being transported deeper and deeper into Russia."

The Associated Press recently obtained a Russian government document stating that Russia plans to open another 25 new prisons in the occupied territories of Ukraine by 2026, along with six detention centres.

Members of the Russian forces in occupied cities and villages of Ukraine are reportedly detaining Ukrainians on the slightest suspicion of supporting the Ukrainian military or even for being pro-Ukraine or speaking Ukrainian.

The Russians are holding more than 25,000 "civilian hostages" at present, according to Ukrainian parliament commissioner for human rights Dmytro Lubinets.

"They're holding civilians in different locations," Reshetylova said.

Detainees may be taken first to a local police station in occupied territory or a detention centre, and are then transferred to long-term detention facilities, such as correctional facilities, in Russia.

"At every stage they are subject to torture or inhumane treatment," Reshetylova said, with captives describing the so-called "reception" as the most horrifying part of the ordeal.

"Whenever they are brought to a new place, they are subjected to a beating and torture that lasts for many hours," Reshetylova said.

Months of torture

Zaporizhzhia province resident Olena Yagupova spent six months in Russian captivity and miraculously managed to get out.

She described the torture she was forced to endure.

The Russians arrested Yagupova in her house because her husband is in the Ukrainian army.

"Russia welcomes having people inform on each other," she said. "They call it a denunciation. You get paid for snitching -- 10,000 RUB [$111] for one person."

"They did a search and said that someone had written a complaint about me. But they didn't find anything in my house, and they took me to the local police station," Yagupova said. "They tortured me there for several days."

The next few months were the most frightening of her life, she said.

"They smashed my head and inflicted a closed head injury," she said. "They hit me on the head with a two-litre bottle. It was the Kadyrovites [troops of Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov] who did it."

"Then [agents] from the 'Donetsk People's Republic' and FSB [Russian Federal Security Service] taped my hands and feet to a desk. I was in a half-bent position."

"One of them hit me over the head, while another one kept asking, 'Where's your husband? Tell us where he is!'" Yagupova remembered.

Although Yagupova did not know where her husband was, because soldiers are not authorised to share their location with their relatives, the Russian agents kept torturing her, she said.

"They kept saying to me, 'Should we jog your memory?' And they hit me over the head with a bottle, then put a bag over my head and wound tape around my neck," Yagupova said.

"They cut off the air until you fall down along with the chair and start convulsing."

The Russians also forced her and other "civilian hostages" to dig trenches for soldiers, Yagupova said.

"They would drive us like we were going to work, under guard, taking us there at 6am, and then bringing us back after dark. There were times when we dug until 4am. The riflemen would shine lights on us," Yagupova said.

Other prisoners who were freed share stories that back up Yagupova's descriptions of torture and worker exploitation.

Donetsk province rights activist Lyudmila Huseynova told Caravanserai she was arrested in 2019 for bringing Ukrainian literature to territory that was not controlled by Kyiv. She was released only last October.

"Since 2022, there have been tens of thousands of civilians like me who were arrested," Huseynova said.

"Those who have been transferred to a correctional facility already and who already have been sentenced are used as labour," she said.

"For example, women in the Snizhne correctional facility in Donetsk province forced to sew uniforms or underwear for Russian soldiers," she said.

"Then on weekends these women haul 50kg sacks of coal or buckets of water because there's no water there."

Kremlin returning to gulag system

According to human rights activists, the Kremlin is returning to the gulag system -- a Soviet era system of camps that were scattered across the Soviet Union and held thousands of dissidents.

The goal of the occupying authorities is to frighten the local population "so they don't speak out against the new rules and laws the authorities have put in place", said Kyiv human rights activist Eduard Bagirov.

These prisons for civilians are a method of psychological pressure to break public resistance, according to Bagirov, who heads the International League for the Protection of the Rights of Citizens of Ukraine.

"This is unambiguously an egregious violation of the [Geneva Conventions] and a violation of human rights," he told Caravanserai.

The Kremlin is using civilian hostages as an additional element of pressure on Ukraine, rights activists say.

"Russia is detaining them to extort both the Ukrainian authorities and the international community," Reshetylova said. "Ukraine maintains that the civilian hostages must be freed unconditionally."

"It's possible that Russia is holding them as a sort of final bargaining chip for negotiations," she said, noting that Russia engaged in a similar form of extortion during negotiations on the Minsk accords, which Russia and Ukraine signed in 2014.

Reshetylova and her colleagues have developed a plan for what Ukraine should do to effectively fight for the release of civilian hostages, which includes creating a special agency that will be responsible for this process.

"We need to do this because right now Ukrainian prisoners are just going through a never-ending circle of hell," Reshetylova said.