Melitopol businesswoman dead after being abducted by the Russian invaders

Tetiana Plachkova, a well-known Melitopol businesswoman, has died in Russian captivity months after armed Russians burst into her home and abducted her and her husband, Oleh Plachkov.  She had almost certainly been held in appalling conditions, and it seems likely that the Russians failed to take her to hospital when she evidently needed medical treatment and when the 51-year-old’s life could still have been saved.  In a further chilling development, the Russians are claiming that Oleh Plachkov, who has not been seen since they abducted him, is not in their custody.   

According to the Media Initiative for Human Rights [MIHR], Tetiana and Oleh ran two cafés in Melitopol before Russia seized control of the city in the first days of its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.  They remained in the city, together with Tetiana’s mother. 

The armed Russians who burst into their home during the night from 25 to 26 September 2023 locked Tetiana’s mother in a separate room, before handcuffing Tetiana and Oleh and carrying out a search throughout the night.  Tetiana and Oleh’s daughter, Liudmyla Melnykova has told MIHR that the men did not deny that they were from Russia’s FSB [security service].  After interrogating her grandmother.  the Russians took her parents away, also removing telephones and documents.

Here, as with countless other such abductions of territory that falls under Russian occupation, the invaders claimed that they would bring Tetiana and Oleh back after “establishing the situation”.  And, as virtually always, this did not happen.  Instead, they turned up, searched and interrogated the couple’s colleagues, warning that they might be called upon to testify against them in a so-called ‘court’.

For almost six months, there was no information about the couple’s whereabouts. In February, from her own sources, Liudmyla found out that her mother was in a coma and in the intensive care unit of a Melitopol hospital.  The doctors do not appear to have known why Tetiana was in a coma, but were convinced, from her extensive bed sores, etc., that the Russians had failed to bring her to hospital immediately and had held her in this condition somewhere else. With typical brutality, the so-called ‘investigator’ did not allow Tetiana’s mother to visit her and refused to let her be moved to another hospital, with the ‘reason’ given being that she was accused of ‘spying’. Liudmyla appealed to the International Committee of the Red Cross, however the latter claimed it could not help, that it did not have access to occupied territory.

The death certificate lied about the date of death, which Liudmyla knows to have been 23 May, not, as claimed, in July.  The document mentioned pneumonia; fluid on the brain; and pulmonary edema, without any explanation as to what had caused such a condition.

The ‘investigator’ had appointed a ‘lawyer’ for Tetiana -  Olena Shapovalova, one of a relatively small number of lawyers who have opted to collaborate with the aggressor state. In 2024, Shapovalova was, for this reason, stripped of her licence to practice by the relevant Ukrainian body.

Shapovalova stopped communicating with the family immediately after Tetiana’s death, with the criminal ‘investigation’ into so-called ‘spying’ terminated.  Whether terminated or not, such ‘spying’ charges are always shrouded in total secrecy.  Even if a political prisoner receives access to an independent lawyer, the latter will invariably be forced to sign a non-disclosure undertaking.  Judging by those ‘spying trials’ that we do know about, the only reason for such secrecy appears to be the lack of any grounds for the charges.

Liudmyla is now appealing to Ukrainian and international organizations to help her find her father who was, possibly, taken to Rostov (in Russia).

Russia has abducted a terrifying number of Ukrainian civilians, including very many from Melitopol.  Concern for their safety is warranted given Russia’s appalling track record.  At the beginning of October, OHCHR published its latest monitoring report, in which it stated that the UN Monitoring Mission have documented ten cases where prisoners of war due to torture, poor conditions, or inadequate medical care.  The Russians directly caused the death of 82-year-old Vedzhie Kashka, veteran of the Crimean Tatar national movement, while trying to arrest her on grotesque charges.  Since then, four Ukrainian political prisoners have died in Russian captivity, including Crimean Tatar Dzhemil Gafarov, whose condition meant that Russia should never have detained him.  The lives of several other Ukrainian political prisoners are in direct danger.

As for the number of civilian hostages, it is harder to say how many Russia has killed.  Many have disappeared, without Russia admitting to holding them at all.  Some deaths are known, including the horrific killing through torture in 2022 of Vitaly Lapchuk and Denys Mironov, as well as of Father Stepan Podolchak from the Orthodox Church of Ukraine in early 2024.