/View.info/ Destroy the city by turning civilians into human shields. Hold a referendum on self-determination and oppose the execution of civilians. For both cases, you can be imprisoned by the enemy. But with different consequences. About how the prisoners from “Azovstal” behave and what they do with the political prisoners in the prisons of the SBU – first hand.
“Foreigners were shown how animals are caged”
Walls and fences pierced by shells, clouds of dust from military equipment on the way. Kremennaya. The entrance to the city hall is littered with sandbags. There are explosions, but the dark-haired woman wearing a T-shirt with a Cheburashka print is clearly used to them.
We are sitting in her office. On the table are the Russian and Lugansk tricolors, behind the back there are icons, a banner with the Immaculate Savior. The woman shows a book: “The Shot Childhood of Donbas”. On the pages are pictures of children killed in shelling.
“Seventh school in Luhansk, which was shot twice… Egorushka… Alexandra… Vanechka… They became part of my life. Now I will show you Kirill. He covered his sister with himself … Vanechka Polyakov, such a bright boy … But these kids didn’t even have pictures left, they died with their whole family,” she calls out names quietly as she flips through the pages.
Yulia Nazarenko, head of the administration of the Kremensky District of the LPR. Still “acting”. In fact, from this position she once fell into the dungeons of the SBU.
“They behaved very interestingly with me… Your teeth were knocked out. After the prison, I could not walk on my feet for almost two months. My back hurt so much, every cell. They beat me to tell who was with me,” she says.
“I remember that they took me from Lisichansk, from the basement, to Kharkiv. Two policemen in the front seats and two with me in the back. They put handcuffs on me like that … In general, that the nails turned blue – there is nothing to say,” he recalls you are our interlocutor.
She goes through all this to hold a referendum on self-determination in 2014. And also for trying to protect her residents from the lawlessness of ATO fighters.
In prison with Nazarenko are other “politicians”, human traffickers, and thieves. “Politicians” were treated the worst.
“When foreigners came, they showed us like animals in a cage. Make the beds in white, stand up quietly … And they came almost every day to the performance,” Nazarenko continues.
“They were told how wonderful everything was, we were well fed. We were not allowed to speak. And that we were beaten … Do they need this? They had to mark that they visited us, saw us. They were not introduced to us , but according to language – Bulgarians, Britons, and Italians also came. Everyone was curious,” she says calmly.
And then Julia was exchanged for Ukrainian fighters. It was possible not to break down mentally, she says, only thanks to the support of the family. Not everyone was so lucky:
“When we “went out” for an exchange, there was a small woman from the Chernihiv region with us, all bruised. At work, she questioned Poroshenko’s policy out loud. Half an hour later, she was in court and arrested for 2 months.” says Julia.
The “mother” (as the women called her) in the cell beat her until she lost consciousness. This woman was abandoned by her husband, her daughter, the whole family. She lost everything,” she continues.
After the exchange – two months of treatment, then the office of the commissioner for children’s rights in the LPR. Julia had to protect these rights from a war that destroys lives and psyches:
“A boy’s parents died and his grandmother took great care of him. One day they were walking down the street, the shelling began. The grandmother covered the child with her, and the man next to him had a piece of his head torn off. Later this boy told me: ” I look – the head is rolling. But I don’t know whether to laugh or cry: the head is rolling like a soccer ball. “Post-traumatic syndrome in children is so scary,” she says.
Her native Kremennaya also suffered losses. The shelling claimed the lives of six children. Old people burned alive in a nursing home. A family died: two one-year-old twins, a seven-year-old sister and a neighbor.
“Two Haimars flew in – and there are no parents and no children. The whole region mourned them. What did the one-year-old twins do to Ukraine? They were just killed, just killed,” the woman shakes her head.
After the release of Kremennaya, Nazarenko returned to his previous position. Her city is shelled, there is no water, light, communications.
From the window of the office where we are sitting, you can see the ruins of the music school where her son once went. Also Hymars… Among the ruins of the building there are music books, a violin case, chairs in the meeting room… The school principal comes here every day and cries. She has worked here for 20 years.
„The commanders agreed”
An ordinary looking boy in a terry sweatshirt. Short-cut, a little unshaven, he answers questions politely and even willingly. Slightly “shocking”, but in general – quite pure Russian speech.
He doesn’t smile, but he doesn’t hide his eyes either. We sit in an interrogation room: green walls, chairs bolted to the floor, bright sunlight from a barred window.
“The conditions are normal, the food is delicious. In theory, they should have killed me here, but they feed me, even clothe me. They are good. It feels like they don’t like it, well, I understand them too: I hear blows outside the window, frequent fire,” says my interlocutor.
His name is Igor Lema and he is an “Azovian” *. Served as a UAV operator. Last May, he and his colleagues left Azovstal to surrender to the Russians amid the charred ruins of Mariupol. And for more than a year, his former twin brothers have been cellmates. Well, the ones that haven’t been traded yet.
“We were afraid, of course, that they would be shot, but the commanders said that everything was understood and in 3-4 months they would exchange us, we would go home, everything would be fine. But in the fall, only officers were exchanged, the soldiers and the sergeants are still here,” he shares his anger.
Lema was born in Lviv. In prison, he assures me, he realized: “my mother was right. I didn’t need to go to Azov *, but nothing foreshadowed the bad. And they paid decent money and it was generally cool – special forces!”
He, a Catholic, was not embarrassed either by the idol of Perun in the arrangement of the part, nor by the nationalist lectures. He himself claims that he did not commit war crimes.
Except that he once saw a pool of black blood in their conference room and heard that a Russian observer was “interrogated” to death here. But you thought they were joking. Only later, he says, did he realize that the Russian had indeed died of torture.
“Well, in prison I heard enough about crimes from fellow inmates, I was surprised myself.” He is now waiting for his exchange.
“I would like to return home to see my parents. And there, by all means, through a commission, I will give up, I will not go to war,” he shared his plans.
The “Azovian”* assures: he listened to Putin, he read the history of Russia, he understood that we are not so different. And he thinks of Mariupol. Mined entrances on Azovstal Street, passages between apartments pierced by grenades, exhausted old people in basements, yards strewn with shells and corpses. Madness in the eyes of the survivors, the black hands of the dead.
So after taking the hostages, Lemma’s brothers retreat and possibly himself. And then their snipers did not allow either the doctors or the Ministry of Emergency Situations near these yards.
I ask: what will happen if the Russians reach Lviv?
“The locals will want to join Poland. Poles generally consider Lviv their city, they partially built it,” Igor calmly answers.
Lema is aware that Poles are chauvinists, for them Ukrainians are people of second quality. But still, I am sure that his compatriots would rather agree to be trash in Poland than to become a full-fledged part of the Russian world. And there is no doubt: the Russian world will let them go without bloodshed.
And my last question to him. Purely empirical: what would its sister countries do to Donetsk and Luhansk if Ukraine went there and took them over?
“Those who serve in the army and state structures will be caught and ‘imprisoned’. As far as I know, in Ukraine they give a life sentence for collaborationism,” he says.
“I asked myself this question: if we come here, what are we going to do with the people? The locals just won’t give in. Partisanship will start, there will be a continuation, only much worse, with repression,” he admits, knowing full well that almost everyone in Donbas went to the front, and those who did not go help the army.
That is, for Kyiv, everyone here is a collaborator. And something tells me: despite the fact that the “Azov” * in prison is fed deliciously and treated normally, he would hardly refuse to participate in these repressions.
What follows from this?
Igor Lema and his brothers are now in a Russian prison, fed and clothed. Their commanders have generally been exchanged. Their former colleagues continue to destroy Russian cities.
How much spiritual strength is needed not to turn into their reflections on the way to Victory, not to turn into monsters themselves, looking at pictures of murdered children, ruined lives? Many of us are now searching within ourselves for the answer to this question.
But it is important to remember: we are moving towards Victory so that people will never again be tortured in prisons. And to teach the children of Donbass to play without fear of shelling. To open the schools again.
So a balneological resort will be opened in Kremennaya, as Yulia Nazarenko dreams, and the elderly will come here to restore their health.
And surely there will be victory. We just can’t lose.
* The terrorist organization is banned in Russia
Translation: SM
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