Difficult waiting for the families of civilians kidnapped in Ukraine

2023-11-05 18:24:00, Kosova & Bota CNA

Ukrainian leaders and activists say Russia is holding 20,000 Ukrainians hostage since the attack on Ukraine began. As Voice of America correspondent Lesia Balalets reports from Warsaw, a Ukrainian woman is waiting in agony for her husband, who was arrested in October and later sent to a prison in Moscow.

"He sent me this picture and said, 'Look, now I'm officially a volunteer,'" says Mrs. Olga Kayova.

Ms Olga and her husband Yuriy Kayovy are from Kherson, a city in southern Ukraine. When the war began, Mr. Yuriy joined the local Red Cross initiative to send humanitarian aid from the Ukrainian-controlled city of Zaporizhia to Kherson, a city then under the control of Russian forces. On one of those trips, Mr. Yuriy was arrested by Russian forces.

"On August 6, 2022, an acquaintance who was with Yuriy called me and told me that my husband has been arrested."

Later, she learned that her husband was being held in the occupied cities of Melitopol and Kherson and later transferred to the detention center in Simferopol. She didn't hear from him anymore and was afraid he might be dead.

"On October 6, a lawyer called me from Simferopol. She sent me a picture of a note my husband had handwritten. That's when I realized that he was alive. The lawyer said that Yuriy was being accused of participating in international terrorism," she says.

She said that after a few weeks, the lawyer informed her that her husband had been sent to Lefortovo prison in Moscow.

This October, it will be one year since he was sent there. And there are many others like him, civilians whom Ukraine considers hostages held by the Russians. The United Nations says there are hundreds of such cases. Ukrainian leaders say it is about tens of thousands of kidnapped Ukrainians. Russia has rejected these accusations.

"The human rights commissioner of the Ukrainian parliament says that some 23-25,000 Ukrainian civilians are being held hostage in Russia. So it's a very high number," she says.

The story of the Kayov family is included in the film "HerSons", based on the testimonies collected at the Raphael Lemkin Center for the documentation of Russian crimes in Ukraine.

"The film contains four accounts of civilian hostages. Three of them are currently in prison in Russia – two of them in Moscow's Lefortovo prison. The third is in the city of Rostov. The fourth spent 54 days locked up in Kherson, since that time it was occupied and now he is free," she says.

Director Hanna Beregova says there is enough material for at least three sequels to the film.

Analysts say all that relatives and human rights defenders can do for the Ukrainian civilians being held hostage is to publicize their cases.

Unlike prisoners of war, abducted civilians, under international law, are not part of prisoner exchange operations.

"Prisoners of war at least have international status, based on the Geneva Convention. But when it comes to civilian hostages, holding them hostage has no legal basis," she says.

She says that in any case, exchanging Ukrainian civilians for Russian prisoners of war is not an option for Ukraine.

"Without exaggerating, there are millions of Ukrainians in the occupied territories. If the Ukrainian state allows the exchange of Ukrainian civilians with Russian soldiers, then by tomorrow, we will have at least 20,000 more civilian hostages."

Ukrainian authorities and human rights activists are calling for international mediation, with third parties, to help free the kidnapped civilians.

Mrs. Olga Kayova, meanwhile, has managed to hire a private lawyer for her husband.

With the help of the lawyer, she occasionally receives letters from her husband, which give hope that one day he will return home./ VOA