{"id":32945,"date":"2022-06-19T18:54:22","date_gmt":"2022-06-19T18:54:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cjstudents.com\/?p=32945"},"modified":"2022-06-19T18:54:22","modified_gmt":"2022-06-19T18:54:22","slug":"hundreds-of-people-missing-in-ukraine-in-pattern-of-russian-abductions-ukraine-says","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cjstudents.com\/index.php\/2022\/06\/19\/hundreds-of-people-missing-in-ukraine-in-pattern-of-russian-abductions-ukraine-says\/","title":{"rendered":"Hundreds of people missing in Ukraine in pattern of Russian abductions, Ukraine says"},"content":{"rendered":"

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It wasn\u2019t the call Oleg Buryak expected.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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He was hoping to hear that his 16-year-old son, Vlad, had safely escaped the Ukrainian city of Melitopol, where Moscow\u2019s forces were quickly closing in. Instead, it was a Russian military man on the other end of the line.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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They had taken his son, the soldier said, and he was being kept in an undisclosed location.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Almost overnight, Buryak, head of the Zaporizhzhia Regional Military Administration, was thrust into a frantic, detective-like pursuit, scrambling for clues, trying to figure out where Russian soldiers were holding his son, and how to get him back.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Soon, Vlad found a guard who allowed him to make occasional calls. The teenage boy was growing desperate, his father said. At home, Vlad loved computer games. In his cell, he was surrounded by the constant, terrible sound of other prisoners being tortured.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cWhat are you doing to get me out of here?\u201d Vlad asked his father.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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For nearly four months, the world has watched in horror as Russian forces flattened Ukrainian cities, with images of slaughtered civilians in Bucha and Mariupol attracting international outrage and prompting Western powers to increase their military aid. But all the while a less visible phenomenon was taking place in homes, at checkpoints, during street protests: Russian soldiers were detaining and abducting hundreds \u2014 perhaps thousands \u2014 <\/b>of civilians.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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All over the country, people are missing. A schoolteacher who refused Russian soldiers\u2019 demands that she speak their language. A volunteer paramedic tending to the injured in the port city of Mariupol. The father of a journalist, taken to blackmail his daughter into providing access to her news outlet\u2019s website. A village leader who was escorted from a government building with a bag over his head. And untold others.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Authorities and human rights advocates say these cases are part of a larger pattern of Russian abductions and disappearances, a military tactic meant to terrorize communities and demoralize civilian resistance.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Many among the missing are victims of forced disappearance \u2014 detainment followed by silence, the captor refusing to even acknowledge they\u2019ve taken someone captive. Others are locked in Russian-controlled jails, sometimes used to barter for Russia\u2019s captured soldiers, or extract information.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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For many more, their whereabouts are unclear: Some are simply incommunicado, others are likely dead. And for each person missing, one expert said, there are \u201cconcentric rings of harm\u201d that ripple through their communities.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The Ukrainian government has recorded at least 765 cases \u2014 which can involve more than one victim \u2014 of what they call forced disappearances, an umbrella term to describe different forms of illegal deprivation of liberty.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Experts and officials agree the real number is almost certainly much higher. <\/b>How much higher? No one really knows, but Ukraine\u2019s national police have fielded<\/a> more 9,000 missing person reports since Russia invaded.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cIt is just tip of the iceberg,\u201d <\/b>said Oleksandra Matviichuk, head of the Center for Civil Liberties, one of Ukraine\u2019s most well-known human rights organizations, which has documented 459 cases of civilians held in captivity since the beginning of the invasion.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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It was the end of March when it became clear Russia was about to seize Melitopol. But despite Buryak\u2019s desperate pleas, Vlad refused to leave his grandfather, who was bedridden and battling stage-four cancer.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cI will stay with grandpa until the end,\u201d Vlad told his father.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Roughly one week later, his grandfather died. Still mourning the loss, Vlad was ready to leave.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Buryak found his son a seat in a car with two women and three children, all trying to escape the city. They left early and made it roughly 45 miles north to the city of Vasylivka, where they ran into the last Russian checkpoint. Soldiers went car to car, interrogating the passengers.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Vlad was in the back seat looking at his phone when one of the Russian guards took his device and soon after learned his father was a government official. The car\u2019s other passengers were released, but Vlad was detained.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Buryak immediately started calling all his friends and met with high-ranking authorities, pleading for help to arrange a prisoner exchange, which the Russian soldiers had said was the only way to secure Vlad\u2019s release. But conversations with Ukrainian authorities led nowhere, he said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The Security Service of Ukraine assigned an investigator to his case, but Buryak said she has made little progress. The Security Service did not respond to an interview request. Vlad\u2019s case sheds a somber light on the hurdles Ukrainians face in finding their loved ones, when even a prominent government official with connections struggles to arrange his son\u2019s release.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cExcept for my friends, nobody is helping me,\u201d Buryak said in a recent interview.<\/b><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Some 300 miles north of where Vlad was taken, Viktoria Andrusha, a 25-year-old schoolteacher, managed to send her sister one last text: \u201cThey just passed down the street.\u201d Soon after, they \u2014 a group of Russian soldiers driving an armored vehicle \u2014 stormed into her parents\u2019 home in the village of Staryi Bykiv, about 60 miles east of Kyiv.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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They tore through the house and found Andrusha\u2019s cellphone with the message to her sister, Iryna. Their parents later recounted to Iryna the terrifying moments that followed. The soldiers accused Andrusha of sharing intelligence with the Ukrainian military and blamed Russian casualties on her text. As they questioned her with guns drawn, they demanded that she speak Russian. She refused.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cYou\u2019re nobody here, this won\u2019t happen your way,\u201d Andrusha told the soldiers, Iryna said. \u201cWe are on our land, you\u2019re not welcome here.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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That day in late March would be the last time her family saw her.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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A flood of disappearances<\/p>\n<\/h3>\n<\/div>\n

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Yuriy Belousov, Ukraine\u2019s lead prosecutor for human rights violations, said his team is overwhelmed.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Ukrainian authorities have opened more than 13,000 investigations<\/a> into possible war crimes, an unprecedented effort<\/a> during a bloody and ongoing conflict. They have registered nearly 800 instances of forced disappearances. In just one of the cases, Russian soldiers took 70 Ukrainians from their houses and kept them in a basement for weeks, Belousov said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Officials and nongovernmental organizations say they are struggling to keep up with the flood of reported disappearances, and some experts say Ukraine\u2019s criminal justice system is unprepared to deal with the vast number of cases. They also have proved especially difficult to investigate, since many of the missing people have been secreted away to Russia or Russian-held territory, putting them out of authorities\u2019 reach, activists and officials say.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cBut it doesn\u2019t mean that we can\u2019t do anything,\u201d Belousov said in a recent interview. \u201cWe are instructing and telling our staff at our regional offices to not wait for the Russians to leave.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Belousov\u2019s focus is to ensure Russian perpetrators are convicted in eventual war crimes trials. When they can, investigators rush to the crime scene and gather evidence: they talk to witnesses and relatives, they search for fingerprints and forgotten belongings of Russian soldiers.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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They also scan social networks and Russian media, where they often find videos of captured Ukrainians that offer tidbits of information to puzzle cases together and they interview victims who have been released.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Before the war, Belousov led a small unit of 45 people, investigating wrongdoings committed by Ukrainian law enforcement. Now, almost every employee in prosecutors\u2019 offices across the country has been asked to investigate war crimes, he said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The scale of atrocities has prompted international organizations, including the International Criminal Court and the International Commission on Missing Persons, to help document the reported cases.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The United Nations has recorded 210 cases of forced disappearances since the beginning of the war, its mission in Ukraine said in a statement to The Post last month. Investigators have found that victims were usually taken at their home, workplace, or at checkpoints. Many men disappeared after being taken to \u201cfiltration camps.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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In most of these cases, the U.N. mission said, victims \u201cwere held incommunicado in improvised places of detention\u201d \u2014 schools, government buildings, warehouses, barns and police stations. After days or weeks of detention, many victims were transferred to Russia, or Russian-held areas like Crimea and parts of Donetsk and Luhansk, regions controlled by Russian-affiliated armed groups before the February invasion.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Only in rare cases have relatives received information directly from Russian military officials, the U.N. mission said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The United Nations also has documented 11 cases of forced disappearances committed by Ukrainian law enforcement agencies.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Russian officials have in the past denied reports of kidnappings and forced dislocations, calling their alleged use of filtration camps a \u201clie\u201d and blaming civilian harm on Ukrainians. The Russian Embassy in Washington did not respond to a request for comment on the reported forced disappearances.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u2018The crime of absence, the crime of invisibility\u2019<\/p>\n<\/h3>\n<\/div>\n

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In recent history, scholars trace the tactic of forced disappearances to Nazi Germany, when Adolf Hitler\u2019s \u201cNight and Fog\u201d decree ordered the seizure of anyone in occupied territory who was \u201cendangering German security.\u201d They were transferred to Germany and effectively vanished without a trace. Since then, disappearances have been \u201cthe authoritarian\u2019s gateway into violating people\u2019s fundamental rights with impunity,\u201d said Elisa Massimino, executive director of Georgetown Law\u2019s Human Rights Institute.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Tetiana Pechonchyk, director of ZMINA, a Kyiv-based human rights organization, said the majority of the disappearances she has logged have come from Russian-occupied or recently liberated regions, such as <\/i>Zaporizhzhia, Kherson and Kyiv. Once investigators gain access to occupied territory, the numbers are expected to soar.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Pechonchyk said Russian forces are targeting prominent community members, many of whom are actively involved in opposing the Russian invasion \u2014 journalists, activists, humanitarian volunteers and local officials.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cWhy? To break local resilience,\u201d she said. \u201cThe Russians saw how strong Ukrainian civilians were in opposing the war and so they have chosen precise people to send a signal to dissuade and stop this resilience.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Olena Kuvaieva, a lawyer with the Ukrainian Helsinki Human Rights Union, is compiling evidence of abductions for an eventual case in front of the European Court of Human Rights, where an emergency provision could compel Russia to release unlawful detainees or, at least, improve their living conditions. But there\u2019s no guarantee Moscow would comply.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cWe\u2019re trying to create a situation where Russia is pressed from every corner \u2014 from the journalists, from the European Court of Human Rights, the United Nations, the international community,\u201d Kuvaieva said. \u201cWe hope this pressure will work.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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But some human rights activists in Ukraine have said that the international outpouring has done little to deter Russian forces from committing such crimes. A case in The Hague\u2019s International Criminal Court is nice, they say, but a verdict in the distant future does not prevent Ukrainians\u2019 ongoing suffering.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cWe have a completely ineffective international system,\u201d said Matviichuck, of the Center for Civil Liberties. Despite the robust architecture of international courts and mandates \u201cwhat we have learned is that they can do nothing.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Massimino said the frustration is justified, but she argued <\/b>the international justice system has improved in recent years, both at the intergovernmental and state levels, pointing to tribunals set up to prosecute war crimes committed in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda and a growing infrastructure to support domestic prosecutions.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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It will take both international and local efforts to deter and prevent war crimes, she said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Ukraine took an important first step last month when it handed down a guilty verdict<\/a> in its first war crime trial. Investigating and prosecuting a kidnapping or forced disappearance will be even more difficult, experts say.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cYou can\u2019t see a picture of a forced disappearance,\u201d Massimino said. \u201cIt\u2019s the crime of absence, the crime of invisibility.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The practice has been used in Pinochet\u2019s Chile<\/a> and Argentina\u2019s Dirty War<\/a>. In Algeria, as many as 20,000 people disappeared during the civil war in the 1990s, and activists say<\/a> the government is still denying the practice and suppressing information about victims. In Bosnia, investigators are still finding bodies<\/a> of the roughly 30,000 people who went missing during the war there nearly three decades ago. And more recently, about 100,000 people have been reported disappeared in Syria<\/a> and Mexico<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The human rights nonprofit Freedom House bluntly declared last year: \u201cImpunity for perpetrators of enforced disappearances remains the norm.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u2018The silence scares us\u2019<\/p>\n<\/h3>\n<\/div>\n

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After weeks of frantic efforts and sleepless nights, Buryak recently managed to orchestrate a plan he thinks will get Vlad home. He said the Russian counterparts <\/b>have agreed to it, but declined to offer more details, fearing it could endanger his son and the negotiation process.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Vlad, who has been transferred to a different location, has slowly recovered his optimism and is \u201cholding up strong.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Buryak is hopeful, but with uncertain days ahead, he said emotion is a luxury he can\u2019t afford.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cVlad needs me like this: coldblooded, rational and wise,\u201d he said. \u201cI have no right to get into my feelings right now. When we free him up then we will cry, we will be happy, we will do everything.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The months since also have been agonizing for Andrusha\u2019s family. They have heard nothing from her Russian captors, but have learned through the informal whisper network of captured and returned Ukrainians that she was being held in a detention center in the western Russian region of Kursk, where human rights monitors say many others are also being kept. But their most recent information is from early May. Since then, nothing.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Andrusha\u2019s family has contacted the Security Service of Ukraine and the Ukrainian Parliament Commissioner for Human Rights, they have called every number they can find and filled out every online form available. They have plastered Andrusha\u2019s photo across their social media feeds.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cWhat reaction can there be? Anger!\u201d Iryna said. \u201cThe silence scares us. It\u2019s a dead end. Since we cannot go there on our own, we cannot get any information.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Still, the family has hope. A math instructor devoted to her work, Andrusha is beloved in the classroom.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cThe whole school is looking for her \u2014 all of her students, their parents, honestly, the whole country,\u201d Iryna said. \u201cEverybody keeps waiting until we can finally post that she\u2019s back home and she\u2019s okay.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Irynka Hromotska contributed to this report.<\/i><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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