Tortured by the Russians, abandoned back home in Ukraine
Almost two years after public calls for Yury Armash to be declared a Hero of Ukraine following his release from Russian captivity, the former military medic is still forced to fight simply to receive the status and financial support that he is owed. Huge numbers of other Ukrainians whom the Russians held hostage encounter even greater problems due to flaws in the present system for recognizing such victims of Russia’s war of aggression.
Yury Armash spent just over a year in Russian captivity, first in occupied Kherson oblast, then in a Russian prison. While he too experienced at first hand Russia’s methods of torture, his medical training meant that the Russians used him to resuscitate or provide what treatment he could to other Ukrainian prisoners of war and civilian hostages after the Russians had subjected them to torture. He has provided vital testimony of the methods used in occupied Kherson oblast, including the cell which the Russians used for raping female prisoners, including a 14-year-old girl.
As reported, Armash, who is from Vinnytsia oblast, had served as a medic for Ukraine’s Armed Forces, but was due to leave, after completing his contract, on the eve of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. On 24 February 2022 he was in Oleshki, in the part of Kherson oblast which swiftly fell under Russian occupation. On 3 April, he and two young soldiers tried to escape to government-controlled territory, but were captured, with all three taken to a prison set up by the invaders in occupied Nova Kakhovka. He was held there for five months, and then imprisoned for three weeks in occupied Sevastopol, before being taken to Russia’s No. 12 prison colony in Kamensk-Shakhtinsk (Rostov oblast).
Armash was released in an exchange of prisoners on 26 April 2023. According to Oleh Baturin from the Centre for Journalist Investigations, it soon transpired that Armash had been declared missing without trace at home, with his military unit suggesting that Armash backdate a request to be discharged. He was refused not only payment of his remuneration in arrears, but also of the amount designated by the government as compensation for time spent in captivity.
It was asserted that, Armash “had been discharged from the military on 17 February 2022, and that no payments were due. Armash took this to court and won. He was able to demonstrate that, although his contract had come to an end and he was planning to transfer to the reserves, he had not signed any discharge application and was still serving when Russia began its full-scale invasion. It is also important that no such discharge was, effectively, possible. On 24 February 2022, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky imposed martial law and declared general mobilization. This meant that Armash’s contract was extended for the duration of the mobilization. The court in its ruling stressed that Armash had been a prisoner of war during his lengthy captivity.
In October 2023, the document stating that Armash had been discharged on 8 February 2022 was revoked, with this meaning that all the above-mentioned payments were due to him. He was, in fact, discharged on 25 October 2023, but because of his state of health which had been badly affected by the conditions and treatment he received while a prisoner of war.
According to Yury Armash, he has yet to receive any money although the court ruling came into force on 19 March 2024. (Details here about why so many Ukrainians asked President Zelensky to declare Armash a Hero of Ukraine and why his treatment since seems so shocking).
“Not all are heroes” but they were victims
During a recent discussion at the Centre for Civil Liberties, Mykhailo Savva, from the Centre’s Expert Council, spoke of the problem being that the Ukrainian authorities “support heroes – people who carried out resistance, who did something against the invaders. However not everybody is a hero. My neighbour in Bucha was detained and remains in captivity because he repaired cars and you couldn’t get the car oil off his hands. There are very many such cases”.
Oleksandr Panchenko has experienced this firsthand, since he was seized in Prymorsk, but eventually released, without any involvement by the Ukrainian authorities. He told the meeting that he filled in the relevant applications to Ukraine’s Security Service, providing the information recorded in the Single Register of Criminal Investigations. This was not enough, and they demanded that he produce documents confirming his captivity. The Russians, he says wryly, do not provide such documents. Although Russia has been abducting civilians since 2014, and on a mass scale from February 2022, it seldom admits to holding civilians hostage.
Yevhen Zakharov, Head of the Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, proposes that Ukraine’s Commission responsible for establishing whether people were deprived of their liberty change its criteria for establishing such illegal imprisonment. He believes that the civilians whom the Russians abduct and hold prisoner should be viewed as political prisoners whom the Russians have seized without any grounds and who have not committed any crime. While the Commission’s work was adequate for the situation prior to 24 February 2022, ihe says, t does not meet the needs of the situation resulting from Russia’s full-scale invasion.
Human rights groups have long criticized the Commission for refusing to provide assistance to former prisoners without any explanation. They say that the process by which such imprisonment is confirmed is unclear and non-transparent. While they often mention a lack of documentation, neither the members of the Commission, nor lawyers, know what such documents should be.
The problem, as mentioned by Oleksandr Panchenko, particularly applies to those civilians who were abducted, but later freed without being included in the official exchanges carried out by the Coordination Headquarters on Prisoners of War. They have not, therefore, been designated official status as prisoners held as a result of Russian aggression, and they do not, therefore have the right to state assistance and protection.
Zakharov suggests that those civilians abducted from occupied territory and / or illegally detained be viewed as political prisoners. The Commission should recognize that these are people who were abducted and imprisoned for no reason, without having committed any crime.
As noted earlier, if there is very strong evidence that the vast majority of Ukrainian prisoners of war are tortured in Russian captivity, there is no chance that civilian hostages are not subjected to equally savage treatment, or worse. Soon after his release in April 2023, Armash spoke of what he had seen in Russia’s No. 12 prison colony in Kamensk-Shakhtinsk (Rostov oblast). He estimated that around 40% of the Ukrainians held prisoner there were civilians, and said that they were treated particularly badly. He mentioned that they had not been able to keep up when their tormenters demanded that they ‘march’ quickly, however it seems likely that their lack of any status was a major factor. The Geneva Convention clearly prohibits any such abductions, deportation or imprisonment of civilians. International law did not stop Russia launching a war of aggression against Ukraine, nor has it stopped it from taking civilians hostage on any area that fell under its occupation. Such illegality does, however, mean that Moscow seldom admits to holding civilians, unless it decides to fabricate surreal charges of ‘spying’, ‘international terrorism’, etc. It also leads to difficulties for Ukraine since there are no mechanisms for securing the release of civilians.