Screams of tortured soldiers, overflowing cells, inhumane conditions, a regime of intimidation and murder. Inedible pata, no communication with the outside world and days marked with a homemade calendar written on a tea box.
According to a prisoner who was there, these are the conditions inside Olenivka, the notorious detention center outside Donetsk where dozens of Ukrainian soldiers were burned to death in a horrific episode late last month while in Russian captivity.
Anna Vorosheva, a 45-year-old Ukrainian businesswoman, gave the Observer a harrowing account of her time in prison. She spent 100 days in Olenivka after being detained in mid-March at a checkpoint run by the pro-Russian Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) in eastern Ukraine.
He had been trying to deliver humanitarian supplies to Mariupol, his hometown, which the Russian army had besieged. The separatists arrested her and drove her in a full police van to prison, where she was held until early July on charges of “terrorism”.
Now recovering in France, Vorosheva said she had no doubt that Russia “cynically and deliberately” murdered Ukrainian prisoners of war. “We’re talking about absolute evil,” he said.
The fighters were blown up on July 29 in a mysterious and devastating explosion. Moscow claims Ukraine killed them with a US-made precision-guided Himars rocket. Satellite images and independent analysis, however, suggest they were obliterated by a powerful bomb detonated from inside the building.
Russia says 53 prisoners were killed and 75 injured. Ukraine has been unable to confirm these figures and has called for an investigation. The victims were members of the Azov battalion. Until their surrender in May, they had defended Mariupol’s Azovstal steel plant, holding out underground.
A day before the explosion, they were moved to a separate area in the industrial area of the camp, some distance from the grimy two-story concrete block where Vorosheva shared a cell with other female prisoners. Video shown on Russian state television revealed charred bodies and twisted metal stretchers.
“Russia didn’t want them to stay alive. I’m sure some of those “killed” in the blast were already corpses. It was a convenient way of explaining the fact that they had been tortured to death,” he said.
Prisoners were regularly removed from their cells, beaten and then locked up again. “We heard their screams,” he said. “He played loud music to cover my screams. The torture was going on all the time. The investigators would joke about it and ask the prisoners, ‘What happened to your face?’ The soldier would say, ‘I fell,’ and they laughed
“It was a show of power. The prisoners understood that anything could happen to them, that they could easily be killed. A small number of the Azov boys were captured before the mass surrender in May.”
Vorosheva said there was constant traffic around Olenivka, known as Correctional Colony No. 120. A former Soviet agricultural school, it was converted in the 1980s into a prison and later abandoned. The DNR began using it earlier this year to house enemy civilians.
The captives arrived and left every day at the camp, 20 km southwest of occupied Donetsk, Vorosheva told the Observer. About 2,500 people were held there, with the number sometimes rising to 3,500-4,000, he estimated. There was no running water or electricity.
The atmosphere changed when some 2,000 fighters from Azov were bussed in on the morning of May 17, he said. Russian flags were raised and DNR colors were withdrawn. The guards were initially suspicious of the new prisoners. They later talked openly about how they were going to brutalize and humiliate them, he said.
“They often called us Nazis and terrorists. One of the women in my cell was a doctor from Azovstal. I was pregnant. I asked if I could give him my ration of food. They said, “No, she’s a murderer.” The only question they asked me was: ‘Do you know any Azov soldiers?’”.
The conditions for female inmates were unpleasant. He said that they were not tortured, but that they received almost no food: 50 g of bread for dinner and sometimes porridge. “It was suitable for pigs,” he said. She suspected that the prison governor misappropriated the money intended for meals. The toilets overflowed and the women were not given any sanitary products. The cells were so crowded that they slept in shifts. “It was hard. People were crying, worried about their children and families.” Asked if the guards ever showed sympathy, she said an anonymous person left them a bottle of shampoo.
According to Vorosheva, Russian propaganda brainwashed the camp staff into believing that Ukrainians were Nazis. Some were villagers. “They blamed us for the fact that their lives were terrible. It was like an alcoholic who says he drinks vodka because his wife is no good.
“The philosophy is: ‘Everything is horrible for us, so everything should be horrible for you.’ It’s all very communist.”
Friends and relatives of soldiers from the Azov battalion protest in Kyiv after the explosion at Olenivka prison that killed dozens of prisoners of war. Photo: Dimitar Dilkoff/AFP/Getty Images
Citing satellite images and wiretapping and intelligence, they said Russian mercenaries from the Wagner group carried out the killings in collaboration with Vladimir Putin’s FSB spy agency. They point to the fact that a row of graves was dug in the colony a few days before the explosion.
The operation was approved at the “highest level” in Moscow, they allege. “Russia is not a democracy. The dictator is personally responsible for everything, be it MH17, Bucha or Olenivka,” one intelligence source said. “The question is: when will Putin acknowledge his atrocities.”
One version of events being examined by Kyiv is that the blast may have been the result of intra-service rivalries between Russia’s FSB and GRU military intelligence wings. The GRU negotiated the surrender of Azovstal with its counterpart in the Ukrainian army, sources suggest, a deal the FSB may have wanted to destroy.
The soldiers should have been protected by assurances given by Russia to the UN and the International Committee of the Red Cross that the Azov detainees would be treated appropriately. Since the explosion, the Russians have refused to give international representatives access to the site.
Vorosheva said the Red Cross was able to enter the camp in May. He said the Russians took the visitors to a specially renovated room and did not allow them to speak independently with the prisoners. “It was a spectacle,” he said. “They asked us to give the size of our clothes and were told that the Red Cross would distribute something. Nothing came to us.”
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Other detainees confirmed Vorosheva’s version of events and said that Azov soldiers were treated worse than civilians. Dmitry Bodrov, a 32-year-old volunteer worker, told the Wall Street Journal that guards took anyone suspected of misbehavior to a special disciplinary section of the camp for beatings.
They came out limping and moaning, he said. Some captives were forced to crawl back to their cells. Another prisoner, Stanislav Hlushkov, said an inmate who was beaten regularly was found dead in solitary confinement. The attendants put a sheet over his head, loaded him into a mortuary van and told his colleagues he had “killed himself”.
Vorosheva was released on July 4. It was, he said, a “miracle.” “The guards read aloud the names of those who were going to be released. Everyone listened in silence. My heart skipped a beat when I heard my name. I packed my things but didn’t celebrate. There were cases where people were on the list, left and then came back.”
He added: “The people running the camp represent the worst aspects of the Soviet Union. They could only behave well if they thought no one was watching.”