Viktor Kushyn knew Russian soldiers were after him. He sensed it from the first day of Moscow’s full-scale war on Ukraine in February last year, when Russians occupied his village in the Kharkiv region.
So when two Russian service personnel stopped him in the street one morning in May 2022, he didn’t resist. He spent the next few days locked in a cellar with other men who, like him, had fought against Russian-backed separatists between 2014 and 2022 in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine.
“They beat us savagely for days,” Kushyn, 59, told the Guardian. “Then they took a hot branding iron, pressed it on our skin and branded us with the symbol of a triangle, as is done with cattle. They did it for revenge because they hated us.”
The invading Russians carried lists of people to hunt down. Veterans of the Donbas war, vilified by Kremlin propagandists for committing a nonexistent “genocide” in the conflict, were at the top. The Russian military knew exactly where they lived, survivors have said.
The Guardian has spoken to Donbas veterans who survived Russian torture in occupied villages, the families of forcibly disappeared former soldiers and Ukrainian investigators. Some of the veterans – including Kushyn – were eventually released or escaped captivity but others were killed. The fate of hundreds remains a mystery.
“At the moment, more than 1,000 people in the Kharkiv region are considered missing,” said Spartak Borysenko, the head of the war crimes department at the Kharkiv regional prosecutor’s office. “We can say there are probably hundreds of Joint Forces Operation veterans [from the Donbas conflict] among them, who were civilians. They were the first people who were detained when the Russians occupied their cities.”
In April 2014, Russian-backed separatists seized government buildings in Donbas, sparking a reaction from the Ukrainian military, which launched an operation against them. More than 10,000 peopled died in the long conflict that ensued. A large part of Moscow’s justification for its full-scale intervention in Ukraine in 2022 was the claim – dismissed by the UN – that Ukrainian military action in the Donbas conflict amounted to genocide. Vladimir Putin, who financed and armed pro-Russian separatists in Donbas, has used the word on several occasions.
When Guardian reporters visited areas of Kharkiv and Kherson region newly liberated by Ukrainian forces in September, witnesses said collaborators had provided the Russians with the addresses of Donbas veterans, in addition to help with transportation, housing, fuel and food.
“The Russians spent some time finding out about the most active pro-Ukrainian citizens,” said Anastasiia Pantielieieva, a coordinator of the documentation department at the Media Initiative for Human Rights.
When the Russians approached Kushyn, the first thing they asked him was whether he had served in Donbas. “I did, in 2018,” Kushyn said. “I served as a driver in the 53rd brigade for a year. But they probably knew it anyway, so there was no point lying. They searched my house, seized my medals, my uniform and some documents.”
Kushyn said he was held in the cellar for five days. “They beat us with the butts of their machine guns or whatever they could find,” he said. “Then they took a branding iron and branded us all.”
Andryi Anisimov, 49, who served in Donbas as a sergeant from 2018 to 2021, was also kidnapped by Russian soldiers in the Kharkiv region and branded on his leg. “They told me it was a souvenir from Russia,” he said.
Kushyn and the other Donbas veterans were eventually transferred to Lyman, in the Donetsk region, and locked in a detention camp. Russian forces who had captured Lyman from Ukraine in May 2022 used the city as a logistics hub for their operations in the north of the Donetsk region. Kushyn and other Ukrainian civilians were moved to the city with a specific task: to dig Russian trenches.
The Russian hunt for the Ukrainian veterans of the Donbas did not only happen in Kharkiv. Throughout areas occupied by Russia, including northern Kyiv and Kherson, hundreds of former soldiers were captured, tortured and often executed.
“There are many testimonies from people who witnessed those being taken away,” Borysenko said. “They heard the sound of gunshots. They heard the screams from torture victims – some of whom never came back.”
“The problem is finding their bodies,” said Pantielieieva.
In September, in the woods a few miles from the centre of Izium, a north-eastern Ukrainian town recaptured by Kyiv, hundreds of burials were revealed after the Russian retreat. More than 440 decomposed bodies were discovered there. Among them were the bodies of at least 10 Donbas veterans that prosecutors said showed signs of torture.
According to forensic doctors, about 236 bodies of civilians have not yet been identified in the Kharkiv region alone.
Yulia Puhach is among the hundreds of Ukrainians engaged in the complicated effort to find missing brothers, fathers and sons who fought for Ukraine in Donbas. Her brother Denys Lalka, 34, a senior serviceman and mortar operator with the Joint Forces Operations in Donbas, was allegedly kidnapped by Russian soldiers at a checkpoint in Kherson in August last year.
“We tried to convince him to leave the region because we knew he was a target of the Russians,” Puhach said. “But he said he didn’t want to abandon his friends. I messaged him every day to check on him, and every day until 14 August last year he replied.”
For months, relatives of Donbas veterans kidnapped by the Russians have had no news of their loved ones. The search has been made even more problematic by the fact that their detention is in itself a war crime, meaning Russian officials would in effect be admitting they were in violation of international law if they registered the prisoners.
Anisimov said Russian soldiers forced the prisoners to wear Ukrainian uniforms in order to justify their imprisonment as PoW. On other occasions, Donbas veterans were accused by the Russians of collaborating with Ukrainian forces in the current war and sent to trial.
“Around mid-September, I received a call from Simferopol, in Crimea,” Puhach said. “A man presented himself as a lawyer and said my brother was under trial as he had been charged with preparing a terrorist act. I told him I could try to come there to see him. He replied: ‘Don’t bother – the prisoners have all been moved to Moscow.’”
At the end of November, Yulia hired a private lawyer in Russia in the hope that he could help get her brother out of jail. “We are worried about him,” Puhach said. “We want him back.”
Ukrainian investigators and human rights organisations have identified a few places where they are certain that Donbas veterans and other Ukrainian civilians are being detained in Ukraine’s occupied territories and in the Russian Federation.
“We believe they could be detained in Simferopol, in the occupied Crimean peninsula, in a newly built site, in Chongar village [in the Kherson region] and in the occupied police departments and other administrative buildings – all over the occupied part of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions,” Pantielieieva said.
Ukrainian prosecutors think some are being detained in a prison in the Russian city of Tula, about 120 miles south of Moscow. Many of the civilians accused of conspiring against Russian forces are on trial in the Russian capital.
Svitlana Moroz, the head of Tavilzhanka village in Kharkiv oblast, has not heard from her husband since last September. He is not a former soldier but at the time of his capture he was reportedly with a Donbas veteran, who has also disappeared.
Moroz, who was previously held by Russian forces in a prison in Kupiansk, managed to escape the village after the Russians threatened to kill her. “I talked to the prosecutors,” she said of the search for her husband. “I asked the Red Cross. I’m sure he is still alive.”
As for Kushyn, he was released after more than three months of detention. He learned that his father had had a stroke and asked the Russian officers to be allowed to return to his village of Pisky-Radkivski to help him.
“The Russian major who commanded the camp where we were being held agreed,” Kushyn said. “But the way I see things, they only released me because I was a simple driver in Donbas. They didn’t find any blood on my hands. I didn’t kill anyone. As for others, some of them managed to escape when Ukrainians stormed Lyman. Others … simply disappeared.”
Additional reporting by Artem Mazhulin.
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