Along with war trophies and plunder from private homes that even included toilets, they dragged off hundreds of captured Ukrainian civilians, most of whom remain incarcerated to this day in jails scattered across the vast Eurasian landmass.
Natalia Yaschuk, a senior manager at the Kyiv-based Center for Civil Liberties, is tasked with identifying and locating these hapless victims of war, in the hope of one day bringing them home.
"Sometimes you had a person who was detained and imprisoned just for bringing water to a village that had been cut off because of fighting," she recounted.
The centre has identified around 200 ordinary non-combatants who were forcibly taken toRussiafrom the scores of villages and small towns that surround the Ukrainian capital, and 1800 more taken from other parts ofUkrainewho are being held in Russia or Russian-held territory.
Altogether, Natalia estimates there are as many as 16,000 Ukrainian civilians languishing in Russian-controlled jails, prisons or penal colonies.
She said: "There was one woman, a 25-year-old schoolteacher from Kyiv Region, who was imprisoned for six months at a remand centre in the Russian Kursk region for texting her sister that she had seen Russian tanks in her town."
The vast majority of those detained are treated as criminals, she said: "They are charged with spying or terrorism and often kept isolated from each other."
Read more:Civilians in Ukraine face daily terror from brazen drone and missile attacks
The vast majority of those detained are treated as criminals, she said: "They are charged with spying or terrorism and often kept isolated from each other."
In Russia alone, there are upwards of 100 different places where civilian prisoners are held.
Source: Daily Express :: World Feed
