After thirty minutes, guards took the women back to their cell. They were afraid to say anything to their cellmates, a half-dozen other women with whom they had spent the past year in a cramped concrete room, and who now greeted them with nervous, expectant faces. There was Iryna Navalna, a twenty-six-year-old with tattoos covering her arms, gauges in her ears, and a shaved head, who had been arrested on terrorism and explosives charges in Mariupol. Valentina Zayarnaya, a sixty-four-year-old English teacher, was being tried on similar charges. Natalia Vlasova, who’d been arrested in 2019, in Donetsk, was especially fixated on the idea of an obmin. She was forty-three, and among the longest-held Ukrainian civilian prisoners in Russian custody. Her only child, a daughter, was four years old when Vlasova was detained for allegedly taking part in an assassination plot. In Rostov, she kept a bag of clean clothes at the ready. When guards asked what it was for, Vlasova replied, “Obmin.”
The women from the Aidar Battalion and the Azov Brigade were enlisted members of the Ukrainian military, which meant that they had a chance of being included in exchanges as prisoners of war; the others, who were considered civilian criminals, likely did not. A few hours after the guards returned Prutian and the others to the cell, they came back and read out a list of names: all the women from Azov and Aidar would be moved that evening. “That’s when we knew,” Maryna Tekin, an Azov cook in her mid-thirties, said.
They began to pack up their few belongings: clothes, toothbrushes, diaries. The little food they had in the cell—cookies and tea, a few sticks of salami—was left behind for the others. Prutian gave Zayarnaya a bottle of shampoo. Another Azov cook, Iryna Mohitych, who was in her early forties, told Navalna that it was a great joy to have met her, regardless of the circumstances. “I’ll take your example with me,” she said. Vlasova, who during her years in Russian detention had watched countless times as others were freed and she was left behind, wept. “Her heart was heavy and aching,” Tekin said. She gave Vlasova a Ukrainian flag that she had drawn on a sheet of graph paper, telling her, “If I make it back to Ukraine, let this be a symbol that you, too, will soon return.” Vlasova tried to smile.
At three in the morning, after the guards ordered, “S veschami”—“With your belongings”—the selected prisoners exited the cell. For a moment, the women faced each other through the bars of the door. They had been a single group, bound by a shared reality; now a few inches separated those who were about to be free and those who were beginning another morning in captivity. Alyona Avramova, a fifty-one-year-old Azov cook, found it difficult to look the other women in the eye. “I walked out,” she said. “And they stayed behind.”
This spring, I travelled around Ukraine to meet with the women who’d been released from Rostov. I spoke with Tekin at a mall in Kyiv, where she now works at a flower shop; Avramova and I sipped tea at her apartment, in the Kyiv suburbs. In a small industrial city in eastern Ukraine, where a Russian ballistic missile had struck a hospital some months before, I took a long walk through a park with Prutian. She has rejoined the Aidar Battalion, but, owing to the trauma of her experience in prison, she no longer serves near the front line. “Usually, I don’t want to remember,” she told me of her time in jail. “It’s all very painful. I keep having dreams where I end up back in captivity.” Still, she and the others expressed hope that, by describing their time in prison, they could bring attention to the women who are still there. “For them, I’m ready,” Prutian said.
SIZO-1 is a single point in a constellation of detention centers and prison camps across Russia, a new Gulag that extends from the border with Ukraine to the permafrost zone above the Arctic Circle. In more than four years of war, roughly fifteen thousand Ukrainian soldiers have been taken prisoner; about two-thirds of them have been released in periodic exchanges between Ukraine and Russia. But women like Navalna, Vlasova, and Zayarnaya represent something else: the unknowable number of civilians who have been detained or arrested in occupied territory and taken into Russian custody. In some places, they are held with Russian inmates; in others, they are kept isolated, hidden not just from the outside world but from the rest of the prison population. At least thirteen hundred Ukrainian civilians have been formally charged with specific crimes, according to researchers. A larger number, believed to be more than ten thousand, have effectively disappeared—that is, been detained without any legal process or acknowledgment of their status. As one report last year by a Ukrainian parliamentary commission noted, “Civilians are taken from their homes—without trial, without explanation, without the right to make a phone call.”
