When Ukrainian paramedic Tetyana Vasylchenko was released from Russian captivity and handed a Ukrainian flag on the bus back to freedom, she finally broke down.
“I never cried even when I lost comrades,” Vasylchenko told journalists. “But when I got a Ukrainian flag on the bus, I burst into tears.”
Vasylchenko and 107 other women were freed from Russian custody last week as part of a long-negotiated prisoner swap with Moscow.
Four of the women spoke to journalists in Kyiv on Wednesday about what they experienced: overcrowded prison cells, starvation, physical abuse and humiliation.
“The detention conditions were appalling,” said Viktoria Obidina, a military nurse arrested at the Azovstal Steel Plant, which has become a symbol of the Ukrainian resistance.
Inmates are “packed like sardines” at the prison, the food is repulsive and they are rarely allowed to go outside for a walk, she said.
Speaking to AFP earlier this week, Obidina said she was being held in the notorious prison in the Russian-occupied town of Olenivka.
Her captors told her that her daughter, who had left the steel mill with Ukrainian civilians, had been sent to an orphanage.
– ‘These people are monsters’ –
Female prisoners were subjected to “intense psychological pressure” and constantly humiliated, Vasylchenko said.
“They liked to say: ‘Ukraine doesn’t want you. Nobody exchanges you because everyone has forgotten you. Who needs you, women?’” Vasylchenko recalled.
The prisoners were “held in an information vacuum, they told us how bad things were going in our country”.
Authorities in Kyiv estimate that Russia is still holding several thousand Ukrainians as prisoners of war.
Guseynova, a volunteer from the eastern Donetsk region, spent three years in captivity. She was arrested in 2019 by pro-Russian separatists who were accused of making pro-Kyiv statements to orphans she cared for.
Guseynova was too traumatized to talk about what she went through.
“Too little time has passed since my liberation, it’s difficult,” she said.
The trauma was also painfully fresh for Inga Chikinda, an Army Marine.
“I’m not ready to talk about physical abuse just yet,” said Chikinda, who lost eight pounds and started stuttering after her incarceration.
“These people are monsters.”
