On the third day of the war, on February 26, 2022, Russia had taken the city with around 150,000 inhabitants. Initially there were demonstrations against the occupiers: people obstructed unarmed military vehicles and videos on social media showed slogans such as “Go home!” Occupants! Fascists! Murderer!” The city, where more than 90% of all residents speak Russian, was considered quite friendly to Russia before the war.
Almost three weeks after the occupation began, Mayor Ivan Fedorov was kidnapped and kidnapped. He was released a few days later as part of a prisoner exchange. Since then, he has lived in Zaporizhzhia, but also reports on events in his hometown when he travels around Europe. In a report to the US delegation to the OSCE, among other things, he spoke of arbitrary arrests, torture during interrogations and deportations. Melitopol is the “largest prison in Europe”, he said earlier this year.
Occupant resistance
A report by the Russian dissident investigative platform iStories now confirms this information – and describes the fate of some Ukrainians in the city as an example. The occupiers faced resistance from the population only briefly, with impotence.
At the latest when the city revealed itself to be one of the partisan centers with acts of sabotage against military installations, the Russians “showed their teeth”, as the report says: “They put special services into action, opened headquarters, opened torture centers . They started kidnapping people,” Maxim, a 29-year-old landscape architect from Melitopol, told iStories.
Kidnappings are common
Kidnappings were already the order of the day in March. Citizens created a hotline where people could report the kidnapping of relatives. “They received advice on how to behave, where to contact them and were also able to receive help from a psychologist,” the report said.
Natalia, a hotline worker, describes that initially law enforcement officials were kidnapped. In the fall, when the occupation authorities wanted to introduce Russian curricula, they deported school principals and teachers who continued to teach according to Ukrainian standards. Then it was the farmers’ turn. For a while, the occupiers focused on veterans of the war in Donbas from 2014 to 2018. “And many businessmen were kidnapped for ransom,” Natalia said.
Several torture centers in the city
311 kidnappings have been recorded on the hotline since the start of the war, 107 people are still in Russian hands and the fate of 56 is completely uncertain. And these are just the documented cases. The hotline estimates the number of unreported cases to be three to four times higher. Exiled mayor Fedorov wrote in his letter to the OSCE that more than 1,000 civilians were arrested in one year.
He reported five locations in the city where people are detained, interrogated and tortured. This corresponds to iStories research, which, after conversations with kidnapped people and family members of those kidnapped, also cites five specific addresses in the report, most of them former police stations.
Weeks of torture
What is happening in these locations is described in horrific detail by those affected and their families in the iStories report. Landscape architect Maxim and his girlfriend Tatjana were arrested several times, including for distributing leaflets about Ukrainian Independence Day.
The 29-year-old said he was tortured with beatings and electric shocks. He reports suicides in torture prisons. Seriously injured, he was taken to the front line after two months in prison. Somehow he managed to cross the contested terrain into Ukrainian-controlled territory.
Deportation Protection Money
According to the iStories report, businessman Sergej, owner of a repair service, was also allowed to leave. He reports that they wanted to force him to change sides and take a position in the city’s Russian occupation administration. When he continued to refuse, after hours of interrogation and beatings, he was given a two-day ultimatum to leave the Russian-controlled area – for payment of $6,000.
500,000 rubles for reporting “saboteurs”
Several of those affected expressed to iStories their suspicion of having been reported. Occupants must offer at least 500,000 rubles (currently around 4,800 euros) if “saboteurs” are caught after reporting them. IStories describes several cases in which men were captured and tortured because they were believed – wrongly – to be Ukrainian spies.
The case of 23-year-old Leonid is shocking. According to the report, the young man was arrested several times without any reason. After disappearing for several weeks, his parents found him in a hospital, emaciated, weighing 40 kilos. As soon as he got home, he was kidnapped again. Since then, his fate has been unclear; His parents encountered a wall of silence when they asked, describes iStories.
Similar reports from other occupied regions
There are reports similar to those from Melitopol, coming from other Russian-occupied areas. According to a map drawn up by the NGO Media Initiative for Human Rights of places where Ukrainian civilians are actually held hostage, in September there were around 80 active prisons and police stations in parts of Ukraine currently occupied by Russia and on Russian territory. Federation. The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) listed a total of 161 such facilities in the summer, some of which are no longer in use.
Melitopol as a strategic objective
The fact that the Russian occupiers are taking particularly harsh measures in Melitopol is probably not just due to acts of sabotage by the region’s population. The city is considered to be of enormous strategic importance. On the one hand, it is the logistics center for Russian troops in southern Ukraine. On the other hand, it is also the target of the Ukrainian counteroffensive. If Ukrainian troops managed to take the city at some point, they would not only gain access to the Sea of Azov, but also cut off the Russian army from supply routes west of it. However, it is currently not entirely clear whether this will be successful.