It was not the call that Oleg Buryak was waiting for. He was hoping to hear that his 16-year-old son, Vlad, had escaped safely from the Ukrainian city of Melitopol, where Moscow forces were rapidly approaching. Instead, he was a Russian soldier on the other side of the line. They had taken his son, the soldier said, and he was being held at an unknown location. Almost overnight, Buryak, head of the Zaporizhzhia Regional Military Command, was caught up in a frantic detective-like pursuit, searching for clues, trying to figure out where he was being held back by Russian soldiers. Vlad soon found a guard who allowed him to make occasional calls. The teen was becoming desperate, his father said. At home, Vlad loved computer games. In his cell, he was surrounded by the constant, terrifying sound of torture of other detainees. “What are you doing to get me out of here?” Vlad asked his father. For almost four months, people have been watching with horror as Russian forces level Ukrainian cities, with images of massacred civilians in Bukha and Mariupol sparking international outrage and pushing Western powers to increase their military aid. But all this time a less visible phenomenon was happening in homes, at checkpoints, during street demonstrations: Russian soldiers were holding and abducting hundreds — perhaps thousands — of people. of civilians. Across the country, people are being ignored. A teacher who refused the demands of the Russian soldiers to speak their language. A volunteer paramedic takes care of the injured in the port of Mariupol. The father of a journalist, who was led to blackmail his daughter to provide access to the website of her news station. A village leader who was accompanied by a government building with a bag on his head. And other unspeakable. Human rights activists and advocates say the cases are part of a broader pattern of Russian abductions and disappearances, a military tactic aimed at terrorizing communities and discouraging civil resistance. Many of the missing are victims of enforced disappearances – a detention followed by silence, the kidnapper even refuses to admit that he has captured anyone. Others are locked up in Russian-controlled prisons, sometimes used to exchange Russian prisoners of war or gather information. For many more, their whereabouts are unclear: Some are just undisturbed, others are probably dead. And for every person who is ignored, one expert said, there are “concentric rings of damage” that ripple through their communities. The Ukrainian government has recorded at least 765 cases – involving more than one victim – of what they call enforced disappearances, an umbrella term to describe various forms of unlawful deprivation of liberty. Experts and officials agree that the actual number is almost certainly much higher. How high? No one really knows, but Ukraine’s national police have filed more reports of 9,000 missing since Russia invaded. “It’s just the tip of the iceberg,” said Oleksandra Matviichuk, head of the Center for Civil Liberties, one of Ukraine’s most prominent human rights organizations, which has documented 459 cases of civilians being held captive since the beginning of the invasion. It was late March when it became clear that Russia was going to occupy Melitopolis. But despite Buryak’s desperate appeals, Vlad refused to leave his grandfather, who was bedridden and battling cancer in the fourth stage. “I will stay with my grandfather until the end,” Vlad told his father. About a week later, his grandfather died. Still mourning the loss, Vlad was ready to leave. Buryak found his son in a car with two women and three children, all trying to escape the city. They left early and reached about 45 miles north of the town of Vasylivka, where they ran to the last Russian checkpoint. Soldiers went from car to car interrogating passengers. Vlad was in the back seat looking at his phone when one of the Russian guards picked up his device and soon learned that his father was a government official. The other passengers in the car were released, but Vlad was arrested. Buryak immediately started calling all his friends and met with high-ranking officials, asking for help in organizing an exchange of prisoners, which the Russian soldiers had said was the only way to secure Vlad’s release. But talks with Ukrainian authorities led nowhere, he said. Ukraine’s security service has commissioned an investigator into his case, but Buryak says little progress has been made. The Security Service did not respond to a request for an interview. Vlad’s case sheds gloomy light on the obstacles Ukrainians face in finding their loved ones, when even a prominent government official with connections is struggling to arrange for his son to be released. “Apart from my friends, no one is helping me,” Buryak said in a recent interview.. About 300 miles north of the point where Vlad was driven, Viktoria Andrusha, a 25-year-old teacher, managed to send one last message to her sister: “They just crossed the street.” Shortly afterwards, a group of Russian soldiers driving an armored vehicle stormed her parents’ house in the village of Staryi Bykiv, about 60 miles east of Kiev. They tore down the house and found Andrusha’s cell phone with the message to her sister, Iryna. Their parents later told Irina the scary moments that followed. The soldiers accused Andrusha of sharing information with the Ukrainian army and blamed her text for Russian casualties. As they interrogated her with drawn weapons, they asked her to speak Russian. Denied. “You are not here, this will not happen in your own way,” Androusa told the soldiers, Irina said. “We are on our land, you are not welcome here.” That day in late March would be the last time her family saw her.
Flood of disappearances Yuri Belusov, Ukraine’s chief prosecutor for human rights abuses, said his team was shocked. Ukrainian authorities have opened more than 13,000 investigations into possible war crimes, an unprecedented effort during a bloody and ongoing conflict. They have recorded almost 800 cases of enforced disappearances. In just one case, Russian soldiers took 70 Ukrainians from their homes and held them in a basement for weeks, Belushov said. Officials and non-governmental organizations say they are struggling to keep up with the flood of reported disappearances, and some experts say Ukraine’s criminal justice system is not ready to deal with the huge number of cases. They have also proved particularly difficult to investigate, as many of the missing have been hiding in Russia or in Russian-controlled territories, putting them out of reach of authorities, activists and officials say. “But that does not mean we can do nothing,” Belusov said in a recent interview. “We give instructions and tell our staff at our regional offices not to wait for the Russians to leave.” Belusov’s focus is on ensuring that Russian perpetrators are convicted of possible war crimes trials. When they can, investigators rush to the scene and gather evidence: talking to witnesses and relatives, searching for fingerprints and forgotten items of Russian soldiers. They also scan social networks and the Russian media, where they often find videos of captured Ukrainians offering tiny information to combine cases and interviewing victims who have been released. Before the war, Belusov led a small unit of 45 people investigating crimes committed by Ukrainian law enforcement agencies. Now, almost every prosecutor in the country has been called in to investigate war crimes, he said. The scale of the atrocities prompted international organizations, including the International Criminal Court and the International Commission on Missing Persons, to assist in documenting the reported cases. The United Nations has recorded 210 cases of enforced disappearances since the start of the war, its mission to Ukraine said in a statement to The Post last month. The researchers found that the victims were usually taken home, to work or to checkpoints. Many men disappeared after being taken to “filter camps”. In most of these cases, the United Nations mission said, the victims were “held without communication in makeshift detention facilities” – schools, government buildings, warehouses, barns and police stations. After days or weeks of detention, many victims were transported to Russia or to Russian-controlled areas such as Crimea and parts of Donetsk and Luhansk, areas controlled by armed groups linked to Russia before the February invasion. Only in rare cases did relatives receive information directly from Russian military officials, the UN mission said. The United Nations has also documented 11 cases of enforced disappearances committed by Ukrainian law enforcement agencies. Russian officials have in the past denied reports of abductions and forced relocations, calling the alleged use of the filter camps a “lie” and accusing Ukrainians of harming civilians. The Russian embassy in Washington did not respond to a request for comment on the reported disappearances.
“The crime of absence, the crime of invisibility” In recent history, scholars have traced the tactics of enforced disappearances in Nazi Germany, when Adolf Hitler’s “Night and Fog” decree ordered the occupation of anyone in the occupied territories that “endangered German security.” They were transported to Germany and virtually disappeared without a trace. Since then, the disappearances have been “the gateway to authoritarianism for the violation of fundamental human rights with impunity,” said Elisa Massimino, executive director of the Georgetown Law Institute for Human Rights. Tetiana Pechonchyk, director of ZMINA, a Kyiv-based human rights organization, said most of the disappearances she had recorded came from Russian-occupied or recently …
