Ukrainian Female Prisoners Suffer Inhumane Conditions

Ganna Vorosheva was helping evacuate civilians in late March when she was arrested at a checkpoint in Zaporizhzhia by armed men she said were collaborating with the Russian occupying forces.

The 45-year-old from Mariupol spent the next 100 days in detention, repeatedly transferred from one prison to another including time in the notorious Olenivka colony in the Donetsk region. As a civilian, the entrepreneur was not supposed to be taken prisoner at all.

She described appalling conditions, with fellow detainees denied proper food and medical care.

“We had to sleep in the dust and dirt. You…walk through sewage, step on the sleeping places of people located right on the floor,” Vorosheva continued, recalling how many prisoners fell into deep depression and suffered insomnia.

As Ukrainian women have been released in prisoner exchanges between Russia and Ukraine – the most recent saw more than 100 freed from captivity - more details are emerging about the often inhumane circumstances in which both soldiers and civilians are held by Russian forces and their proxies.

"She was forced to wash sewage off the floor.”

Vorosheva said that malnutrition, cold, lack of sleep and poor conditions led to health problems among the women. They were not provided with painkillers or basic products such as HRT to alleviate symptoms of menopause, sanitary pads or tampons.

Women cut old clothes into pieces to make pads, which they then washed in their cells with their scanty water supply.

“There was a one-and-a-half-litre bottle of water a day…both for drinking and washing. And there, in the cells, we dried them," Vorosheva said.

Appeals for medical treatment came to nothing, although free and adequate medical treatment for POWs – let alone civilians - is guaranteed by Article 15 of the Geneva Convention.

"Two girls in [white coats] came to the disciplinary detention centre and asked if we had any complaints… We told them everything,” Vorosheva said. “They promised to pass the information on to the doctor. But no one else came to see us after that.”

In Olenivka, where she was held alongside many other civilians, detainees were joined in May by more than a dozen women taken prisoner in the defence of the Azovstal steel works.

One of them was 21-year-old Kateryna Polishchuk, whose videos of singing inside the Azovstal steel plant had been widely spread on social networks and the media.

According to Vorosheva, the prison wardens immediately recognised Polishchuk.

"They asked her to sing the DNR [so-called Donetsk People’s Republic] anthem, but she refused, saying she did not know this song,” Vorosheva continued. “Kateryna began to sing the anthem of Ukraine, which angered the wardens. She was forced to wash spilled sewage off the floor.”

Further punishment involved being woken every half hour and forced to clean the cells. One day, Vorosheva said, Polishchuk was forced to stand for hours in the position of a star, wiuth arms and legs spread wide.

In Olenivka, Vorosheva also met Mariana Mamonova, a 31-year-old military medic who was pregnant. According to the annex to the Geneva Convention, pregnant POWs should be offered hospitalisation in a neutral country.

Polishchuk and Mamonova were subsequently released in prisoner exchanges,

Even before the beginning of the full-scale invasion, numerous women were being held in detention by the Russian-controlled militias.

A recent study by the Media Initiative for Human Rights (MIHR) found no definitive list of female detainees. Those held in the occupied-territories frequently had very few opportunities to communicate with others outside, beyond accessing some legal support.

"In many cases, where we are involved, we have just started to hand over indictments, that is, cases have just reached the court,” said Andrii Yakovliev, a lawyer with MIHR. “That means that people have been deprived of their freedom for several years, and nothing has happened. People are isolated and held in inhumane conditions.”

Vitalia Lebid, a lawyer at the Centre for Strategic Affairs of the Ukrainian Helsinki Human Rights Union, said that despite Moscow’s refusal to respect international humanitarian law, campaigners still had to lobby for its implementation.

“This is the only effective mechanism that, although failing, works overall,” she said. “Even though states violate the requirements, international humanitarian law [mandates] universally accepted rules of warfare. And in case of its violation, the relevant persons should be punished.