The Ukrainian security services and Moscow-backed separatists in the east of the country are guilty of illegal detention, secret imprisonment and torture of civilians, according to two major international rights groups.
Ukraine's pro-western authorities have repeatedly denied such practices, but in May a United Nations panel cut short a visit to the country, saying it had been denied access to places of suspected secret detention and torture.
The UN team's suspicions appear to be confirmed in a report that Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch released on Thursday, which depicts a hidden, dirty war raging in and around separatist-held areas of eastern Ukraine.
Both government and separatist forces “have held civilians in prolonged, arbitrary detention, without any contact with the outside world, including with their lawyers or families”, the report reads.
“Most of those detained suffered torture or other forms of ill- treatment. Several were denied needed medical attention for the injuries they sustained in detention.”
The report alleges that Ukraine’s security service, known as the SBU, is operating secret and illegal detention facilities in several locations in eastern Ukraine, near a conflict zone where almost 10,000 people have died in more than two years of fighting.
Torture
People quoted in the report tell of being detained at checkpoints or at home by masked gunmen, and being kept prisoner in grim conditions and subjected to beatings and mistreatment that in some cases included electric-shock torture.
One interviewee, referred to as “Vadim” (39), said he was detained by Ukrainian forces for more than six weeks and beaten and tortured while being questioned about alleged links to the separatists.
When he was released and returned home to separatist-controlled Donetsk, he was immediately seized by militants who held him incommunicado for more than two months and beat him on suspicion of being an SBU agent.
The practice of illegal detention is closely bound up with the prisoner exchanges that are arranged in secrecy between the opposing sides.
A full exchange of prisoners is part of the so-called Minsk deal that is aimed at ending Ukraine's conflict, but there are no full and agreed lists of detainees, and the sides accuse each other of using prisoners as political bargaining chips.
This week Iryna Gerashchenko, a member of Ukraine's delegation to talks in Minsk, said 10 Ukrainians were being held illegally in Russian jails and 109 in separatist-controlled territory. She accused the militants of linking the release of these "hostages" to various concessions from Kiev.
“To make exchanges, the security services needed to create a so-called exchange fund. They must have people to exchange,” said Yevgeniy Zakharov, director of the Kharkiv Group for Human Rights Protection.
“A large part of [Ukrainian] society justifies this, unfortunately. We have plenty of ‘patriots’ who think it’s fine to use all methods against enemies, that the interests of the state override everything . . . and that we’ll sort out the rest later. It’s very bad.”
War crime
In their report, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch warned that any use of civilian detainees as “currency” for prisoner exchanges “could constitute hostage taking, a war crime”.
The allegations will increase pressure on Ukraine’s leaders amid rising public discontent, faltering reform and anti-corruption programmes, and resurgent fighting in the east against the Russian-backed insurgents.
"Torture and secret detention are not historical – or unknown – practices in Ukraine. They are taking place right now, on both sides of the conflict," said Denis Krivosheev, Eurasia research director at Amnesty International.
“Those countries providing support – to whatever side – know this perfectly well. They must not continue to turn a blind-eye to these abhorrent abuses.”
