Almost exactly four years after the Russian invaders seized Oleksandr Kostiuk from Sumy oblast, the Ukrainian volunteer has been ‘found’ imprisoned in occupied Crimea. ‘Found’, it should be said, not because Russia has admitted holding him in captivity, but because Zarema Barieva from the Crimean Tatar Resource Centre has learned of his whereabouts through her own sources.
Barieva reported in late February that the young Ukrainian from Kyiv oblast is held at SIZO-2. This is one of the two remand prisons in Simferopol which Russia opened in the months after it launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. SIZO-2 is believed to be controlled by Russia’s FSB [security service] and used for the ever-increasing number of political prisoners Russia is holding, including civilian hostages abducted in large numbers since 2022.
Barieva has spoken with Kostiuk’s wife, Maryna who retraced the little known about the past four years since her husband was abducted. Oleksandr is a graduate of the Department of Turkic Studies at the Kyiv Shevchenko National University but was working for a logistics firm in Poland when Russia began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Maryna, who was living in Kyiv with the couple’s two young daughters, wanted him to remain in Poland, however he clearly felt he could not do so and returned.
In those first terrifying days, the priority had seemed to be to get out of Kyiv, and Maryna took the girls to her parents’ home in a village outside Borodianka. As Barieva notes, this proved to be the very epicentre of the Russian invasion of Kyiv oblast, and the family lived through hell until 9 April 2022 when they finally managed to get to relative safety.
Since they had been without any telephone link in the village, it was only then that Maryna learned that Kostiuk had reached Kyiv soon after the full-scale invasion began, and had become involved in volunteer work, helping to evacuate people. He had been seized by the Russian invaders in the village of Dzerkalka in Sumy oblast on 5 March 2022.
The first, scant, information came on 19 April 2022 when a man released during one of the first exchanges of prisoners of war told Maryna that he had been held for a while in the same cell with her husband in Stary Oskol (Belgorod oblast, RF). This former cellmate was able to tell Maryna that Kostiuk had been seized on 5 March 2022 and that the Russians had driven him, in a thin jacket, around in an armoured vehicle for two weeks, using him as a hostage. It was only after this that he ended up in a distribution camp in the Russian Federation, with his captors torturing him by, for example, subjecting him to mock executions, as well as endless interrogation, where he was grilling about Ukrainian defenders and so-called ‘spies’. Since they found nothing, he should have been released. Instead, on 19 April 2022, he was moved to a prison colony in the Russian city of Valuyki in Belgorod oblast, where he remained until the end of May 2022.
Over a year later, in September 2023, Maryna learned, almost certainly from other freed POWs, that her husband had been moved to SIZO-1 in Kursk. He was held there until August 2024, with this the last time that Maryna received any kind of letter from Kostiuk or any information about his whereabouts. Until February 2026 when it became clear that he is imprisoned, still without any charges or procedural status, and totally incommunicado, in SIZO-2 in Simferopol. Maryna says that most of all in the world she dreams of her husband’s release, and the release of all those Ukrainians illegally imprisoned and stresses that such captivity is devastating not only for the hostages, but for members of their families.
The Russians have taken huge numbers of civilians hostage in any area that came under occupation. Some were released after days, weeks or months of captivity and, usually, torture. Others, like Serhiy Tsyhipa, Iryna Horobtsova and many others who had openly expressed their opposition to Russia’s invasion, have been subjected to grotesque show trials and sentenced to huge terms of imprisonment. There are, however, also a large number of civilians, like Oleksandr Kostiuk, whom Russia is not even admitting to holding prisoner. Age and state of health are ignored, with there still no information as to the whereabouts of 77-year-old Spanish volunteer Mariano Garcia Calatayud [Mario]. Russia has also never admitted to holding Oleksandr Babych, Mayor of Hola Prystan (Kherson oblast) hostage, with the only information coming from former prisoners. It was thanks to such a former prisoner that Barieva was recently able to report that Babych is imprisoned in SIZO-2 in Tagenrog. This is a prison notorious for its torture and ill-treatment of Ukrainian hostages, including 27-year-old journalist Victoria Roshchyna, who was held and tortured there until just weeks before her death.
