Yegor Ivanovich is a modern-day Odysseus, only his long journey to return home is no myth. From a temporary shelter in Tbilisi, Georgia, he recounted a twisted tale of being a victim of a war crime while serving prison time, exuding relief that the worst part of his ordeal seemed to be over.
Yegor’s story begins with a carjacking in 2019. Early the following year, he was convicted of the crime by a court in Ukraine’s Vinnitsa region and sent to a prison in Mykolaiv to serve a four-year sentence. There was nothing unusual about his time behind bars until Russia launched its unprovoked invasion of Ukraine two years later.
That’s when his punishment really began.
Very quickly Russian forces started shelling the area where Yegor was held. (He requested that his last name be withheld). Nearly all the prison guards abandoned their posts—except for two—leaving the prisoners confined.
“We survived fourteen missile attacks on our camp, and were left stranded without water or electricity,” Yegor recalled. They had some food left, but they didn’t know how long it would take for help to arrive, or if it would come at all. Russian soldiers arrived a week later.
The Mykolaiv facility was one of 11 prisons that came under Russian control during the first weeks of the war. None of the over 3,100 prisoners in the area were evacuated by Ukrainian authorities because the country had not yet established clear guidance for what to do with convicts caught in the war zone, according to an investigation conducted by Dignity, a Danish international human rights organization.
Under international humanitarian law, Russia assumed responsibility for the treatment of prisoners in areas occupied by Russian forces. All the convicts were soon forcibly transferred to Kherson, which had been captured in early March 2022.
The Ukrainian prisoners spent relatively uneventful months in Kherson before the area came under a Ukrainian counterattack. Shortly before Ukraine recaptured the city in November 2022, Russian forces removed approximately 1,600 Ukrainian prisoners, including Yegor, transferring them to prisons inside Russia in violation of international law, which forbids the forced relocation of individuals from an occupied territory.
Yegor, now 57, spent time in prisons in Rostov and Volgograd, cities in the south of Russia. The Ukrainian convicts were kept apart from Russian prisoners.
He was used as a forced laborer. Despite suffering from tuberculosis, a common convict malady, he worked 12-hour days constructing and maintaining sewers, earning a small income for his work. Once a month, Ukrainians were allowed to visit the jail store, but only after the Russian prisoners were finished shopping. “We sometimes begged Russians for cigarettes.” If guards caught a Ukrainian inmate talking to a Russian prisoner, the Russian would have to spend time in an isolation cell.
In Russian custody, guards never beat him, he said. “I’m old and sick, so they didn’t care for me.” He declined to answer when asked if he witnessed any beatings against other Ukrainian prisoners. “All I can say is, I was lucky,” said Yegor, a career criminal who has spent a total of 24 years behind bars. “I wasn’t treated as badly as some others.”
Investigators from Dignity support Yegor’s assessment. They have documented the routine use of violence, including beatings, electric shocks and other forms of torture, against Ukrainian convicts in Russian prisons.
In early 2024, Yegor’s four-year sentence was up. Nothing about Yegor’s experience in Russia had been lawful, yet Russian officials meticulously adhered to the Ukrainian sentence and released him at the appropriate moment. He doesn’t seem to be an exception: it appears to be the general Russian practice to set Ukrainian prisoners free when they have done their time.
But liberation comes with complications for Yegor and all others like him.
Given the ongoing warfare, it is impossible for forcibly deported Ukrainian ex-cons to return to Ukraine directly from Russia. To get home, most have to travel via Georgia. Russian authorities simply dump freed Ukrainian prisoners at the Russian-Georgian border and leave them on their own to make their way home.
Yegor was among a group of six Ukrainian prisoners on the day he was transported to the Georgian frontier. He was fortunate to still have his passport and managed to get across the border in short order. Many other Ukrainian ex-cons released by Russia lack identity documentation, having either lost it during their prison ordeal or had it confiscated somewhere along the line. Those who can’t prove their nationality can spend days, even weeks in limbo in the border no-man’s land, sheltering in an abandoned bunker while Ukrainian diplomats in Tbilisi confirm their identities.
“There were six of us in total,” Yegor recalled about his experience at the border. One called Viktor Aleksandrovich had a passport, like himself, and crossed the border relatively quickly. Another somehow vanished. “The other three men are still stranded at the border.”
The next stop for Yegor and Viktor was a shelter in Tbilisi operated by Volunteers Tbilisi—an organization that has helped more than two hundred former prisoners in Georgia to return home.
Kate Golubeva, a representative of Volunteers Tbilisi, said many Ukrainians who arrive at the shelter are traumatized, not just by their ordeal in Russia but also the travail of just getting into Georgia. “In some cases, people spent up to a month waiting,” Golubeva said, referring to the border delay. “It’s tough to live in that [bunker]; many ex-detainees have severe health problems.”
According to Golubeva, Georgian and Ukrainian authorities don’t have a plan for managing the many Ukrainians ex-cons who are bound to arrive at the border; the majority of the Kherson prisoners still remain in Russian prisons. The Ukrainian embassy in Georgia did not respond to requests for comment.
During his interview in Tbilisi with Eurasianet, shortly before he made the final leg of his journey home, Yegor seemed cautious. But when he spoke of home, he broke into a smile, his eyes sparkled and the deep lines on his face softened.
“I was one of the few lucky ones,” he said. “I still had my passport with me, and now I can finally go home.”
