‘Refuse and you’ll be shot’ A former prison inmate in Donetsk describes how the separatists changed life behind bars

The war in eastern Ukraine has lasted more than a year now, and all public institutions in the Donetsk region—including prisons—have spent this period operating in a military emergency. The news agency MediaZona recently spoke to a former prisoner from Donetsk—a man who entered a penitentiary there when it was still under Kiev’s control. He explains what changed when the separatists took over.

MediaZona doesn’t reveal the name of its informant, and simply uses the pseudonym Andrei. He says he was sent to a penal colony on the outskirts of Horlivka in 2013 and freed two years later. Today, he lives in Kramatorsk, a city still controlled by Kiev.

According to Andrei, on September 16, 2014, one of the prison officials called the separatists when prisoners were making noise relatively late at night. The prison official claimed that the inmates were trying to take over the facility, though MediaZona’s source says the only reason prisoners were still making noise was because it had been agreed earlier to go “lights out” a bit later in the evening that day.

The separatists soon arrived at the prison, Andrei says, and killed a few inmates. Over the next several days, they subjected prisoners to humiliation and torture, dressing them in flak jackets and firing live ammunition at them, and jabbing the cleaning rods from their weapons into inmates’ collar bones.

Andrei also says certain armored vehicles made a base near the prison, and “Russian troops” later arrived and forced inmates to repair the equipment. “Refuse and you’ll be shot,” the soldiers allegedly told the prisoners.

There is a good deal of humanitarian aid coming into separatist-controlled Donetsk, Andrei says, but it doesn’t reach prison inmates, he adds. The rebels sell it, he says. 

When the commotion all started, half of the inmates were for the separatists, and half were for Ukraine. But after the executions in our camp, everything changed for us. By that point, anyone with common sense understood that we had it a lot better with Ukraine. Back then, we had somewhere to complain to, to keep the guards in check. [...] But now the guards have no backup of their own, and we prisoners have nowhere to turn.