KYIV, Ukraine — At the beginning of the war in Ukraine, Mykola Zakhozhyi, a 37-year-old father of two young boys, jumped on his motorcycle and zoomed off from his house in the suburbs of Kyiv.
He told his wife he wanted to see what was going on with the Russian troops who had just invaded their area.
He did not come back that night. Or the next. Or that month. Or the month after that.
“I was in shock,” said his wife, Iryna Zakhozha. “And the kids kept asking: ‘When’s Dad coming home?’”
Dad, a heating and water technician, had become one of hundreds of Ukrainian civilians taken by Russian forces from occupied areas of Ukraine and shunted through a constellation of Russian prisons in a new kind of gulag.
Some have died in captivity, and relatively few have been released. Those who have been freed, like Zakhozhyi, say they were tortured, nearly starved and tormented constantly.
He described his nearly yearlong ordeal, which he said included regular beatings with a plastic pipe and a paltry diet of ground-up fish heads, in a series of face-to-face interviews from Makariv, his suburb outside Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital.
He also provided paperwork showing he had been incarcerated in Russia. Ukrainian human rights investigators and government officials corroborated that he had been taken prisoner by Russian forces and the accounts of a half dozen others like him who were interviewed by The New York Times.
The details of how Zakhozhyi said he was treated could not be verified independently, but everything he said fit with a growing body of reports and investigations into the abuse of prisoners in Russian custody. The other former prisoners interviewed by the Times shared similar stories.
The Ukrainians call these prisoners “civilian hostages.” Their fates are likely to be one of the most difficult issues to resolve if Ukraine and Russia agree on a peace deal.
Uniformed soldiers captured on the battlefield are routinely exchanged between the two sides. They are POWs — prisoners of war — and there is an established channel for them. Trading them is part of modern warfare.
Captured civilians are a different story.
Ukrainian officials say that they cannot start trading the Russian soldiers they have captured for their civilians. It would only incentivize the Russians to scoop up more civilians. And the Russians, occupying 20% of Ukraine, have a vast population to choose from.
That has made these cases particularly difficult to resolve, leaving families across Ukraine suspended in a black hole of confusion, anxiety and fear as they try to track down their loved ones.
Ukrainian officials say they have confirmed that at least 1,700 civilians are in Russian captivity. “The actual number,” U.N. investigators said in a new report, is “likely significantly higher” because it is difficult to get information on many cases.
Russian authorities have shared very little about where captives are being held or even if they are still alive. The only information often comes from a patchwork of accounts and fleeting glimpses from released Ukrainian POWs who were kept in the same prisons.
Emails to the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Russian Embassy in Washington to discuss these prisoners and their accusations went unanswered. In August, a Russian official said allegations of human rights abuses were “ridiculous” and “misinformation.”
Zakhozhyi said the abuse started from the moment he was captured on March 2, 2022.
He had ridden his motorcycle to the woods outside his town, trying to spot the Russian invaders. But they spotted him first.
Zakhozhyi said that Russian soldiers had dragged him to a frozen pit and kicked him in the head so hard that he was knocked out. When he came to, he saw Russian soldiers pouring diesel over him and some other captives, threatening to light them on fire.
The Geneva Conventions give occupying powers (like Russia in this case) the authority to detain civilians whom they deem security risks. The conventions specifically refer to spies and saboteurs, and the Russians have put some Ukrainians on trial for espionage and sentenced them to years in prison.
But legal scholars say that Russia and Ukraine often disagree on who should be considered a civilian or combatant, and that the Russians flagrantly disregard international law.
The fact that Russia refuses to call the conflict in Ukraine a war, but rather “a special military operation,” complicates matters further. According to a new report by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, Russia intentionally “blurs the line between POWs and civilian detainees.”
Zakhozhyi’s case is an example of the confusion. He was incarcerated with captured Ukrainian soldiers and civilians, he said, and the Ukrainian government originally gave him a document indicating that he had been held as a POW.
But in a recent interview, Petro Yatsenko, a spokesperson for the Ukrainian government’s agency that handles civilian and military prisoner issues, said he did not know exactly why that happened, but that Zakhozhyi was “a civilian for sure.”
Regardless of a prisoner’s status, the Geneva Conventions call for humane treatment. That is not what they have received in Russia, say U.N. investigators, human rights groups and Ukrainian officials.
“Ninety-four percent have claimed torture,” Yatsenko said. “It’s not rare cases. It’s policy.”
When Zakhozhyi failed to come home that first night, his wife, a kindergarten teacher, said she became crazed with tracking him down.
“This was the beginning of the invasion and there was a lot of confusion,” she remembered. “There were Russia troops in our area, air raid alarms, electricity problems.”
Several weeks later, a Ukrainian soldier who had just been released in an official prisoner exchange responded to a plea for information that Zakhozha had posted on Facebook.
The soldier told her that her husband was alive. He had shared a cell with him in a pretrial detention facility in Kursk, a Russian city not far from the border.
She contacted every agency she could think of, but none could confirm the information.
After an exchange of POWs in August 2022, Zakhozha said another Ukrainian soldier who had been freed contacted her. He said he had been held in the same facility as her husband in Kursk, but the Russians had taken Zakhozhyi somewhere else. But he did not know where.
That same month, Zakhozha said, she received an email from the International Committee of the Red Cross confirming her husband was in captivity in Russia but stating he was a POW.
Zakhozhyi’s wife did not know it, but after about two months in Kursk, he said, he was transferred to another facility. This time, he was sent to Tula, about 120 miles south of Moscow.
In Tula, the guards took a “white plastic pipe, maybe 30 centimeters diameter,” Zakhozhyi said. “Before they beat your back with it, they would tell you about the bruises they would leave. A British flag? Tic-tac-toe? A cross?”
One night in early 2023, Zakhozhyi heard cell doors banging open and guards barking out names.
“I said to myself, ‘Lord, let them call my name.’”
They did.
He was marched outside to a bus, blindfolded, driven to an airfield and put on an aircraft. He emerged at a tented camp where he and the other prisoners were treated to powdered potatoes and noodles.
Apparently, the Russians were trying to fatten them up — or least make them look less sickly. Zakhozhyi ate till his stomach hurt.
He was released as part of an exchange of POWs. It is not clear if the mistake in categorizing him as a POW helped get him out; in other exchanges. Ukrainian human rights groups and the Zakhozhyis said they still do not know why he was chosen to be freed.
The Russians never provided any explanation.