October 2016: fighters of the "Donetsk People's Republic" during a planned retreat. (c) Igor Maslov \/ VisualRIA. All rights reserved.<\/i><\/p>\n
This article originally appeared in The Moscow Times.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n November Although But the war is far from over.<\/p>\n From 11 p.m. to 5 a.m. a curfew is still active in Donetsk. But \u201cPeople don\u2019t even speak to each other freely \u2013 they\u2019re scared [everyone is] reporting on them, their neighbors, their colleagues, the person sitting next to them on the trolley\u201d<\/p>\n The city center looks so normal. Yet, under the vestiges of A He He As the two were chatting casually, he said, the repairman suddenly asked him,\u00a0\u201cdo I Our\u00a0research findings\u00a0in rebel-controlled areas are very \u201cThe MGB is like this black hole, people A young man I meet in town the next day also has fear on his mind:\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cPeople don\u2019t even speak to each other We\u2019re walking slowly, leaves crunching softly under our feet. This A few days later, in government-controlled Mariupol, a colleague Scars from hand-cuffs on the wrists of a man held in incommunicado detention and tortured by Russia-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine (November 2016, Mariupol). <\/i><\/p>\n For His interrogators beat him, hung him \u201cHow can they do this?\u201d During I hope things will be different for that devastated man in \u00a0<\/p>\n Read the original here.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" October 2016: fighters of the "Donetsk People's Republic" during a planned retreat. (c) Igor Maslov \/ VisualRIA. All rights reserved. This article originally appeared in The Moscow Times.\u00a0 November was unseasonably warm this year in Donetsk, an eastern Ukrainian city under pro-Russian separatists\u2019 control. As you walk down Pushkin Boulevard, watching golden leaves gently drop…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1238","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1238","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1238"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1238\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1238"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1238"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1238"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nwas unseasonably warm this year in Donetsk, an eastern Ukrainian city under
\npro-Russian separatists\u2019 control. As you walk down Pushkin Boulevard, watching
\ngolden leaves gently drop to the ground, stop by a fancy coffee wagon and
\ninhale the autumn aromas mixed with the intoxicating smell of freshly ground
\ncoffee beans; it\u2019s hard to believe that the war is still happening right around
\nthe corner.<\/p>\n
\nthe sounds of shelling are no longer part of daily life in central Donetsk,
\nshelling and shooting still plague the city\u2019s outskirts \u2013 just like they plague
\nthe government-controlled towns on the other side of the contact line in
\neastern Ukraine.<\/p>\n
\nthe city is again full of life, kids are playing in the streets, expensive
\nboutiques have re-opened, a brand new department store started welcoming
\nshoppers just a few days ago, and music is blaring from innumerable bars and
\nrestaurants.<\/p>\n
\nnormalcy hides raw fear.<\/p>\n
\nman talking to me in a brightly lit caf\u00e9 looks stealthily over his shoulder at
\na group of women chattering merrily and sipping sophisticated cocktails, \u201cSorry, I know we\u2019re talking quietly,
\nbut I\u2019m just afraid that if they overhear a few words, they\u2019ll call the
\nsecurity services and we\u2019ll get dragged off to the basement.\u201d<\/p>\n
\nsmiles awkwardly, as if expecting me to be put out by his \u201cunmanly\u201d behavior. \u201cYou see, with the security ministry,
\nMGB, the fear gets the best of you, it\u2019s overwhelming.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n
\ntells me about a computer repairman who came to his home to fix his broken computer.\n<\/p>\n
\nyou by any chance know a good lawyer? My son was taken away by MGB. He\u2019s been
\nstuck in the basement there for weeks.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n Autumn in Donetsk. Photo courtesy of the author.My interlocutor sighs, \u201cI
\nhave no idea what to do. He is a nice guy, I really want to help, so I go to
\nthis acquaintance of\u00a0\u00a0mine
\nwho is a lawyer \u2013 and he says, if a man is taken into the basement, his only
\nway out is to get exchanged\u2026 unless his family or whoever can pay loads of
\nmoney and buy him out\u2026 If I\u2019m detained, God forbid, if one of my family members
\nis detained, what\u2019s to be done, where to go? It\u2019s hopeless…\u201d \u00a0<\/i><\/p>\n
\nwish I could offer a piece of advice, that\u2019s what people generally expect of
\nrights advocates, but to be honest, I\u2019ve nothing to suggest. <\/p>\n
\nclear on the issue: in the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk people\u2019s
\nrepublics, local security services operate without any adherence to any sort of
\nrule of law, subject to no checks and balances; anyone snatched by them is
\nfully at their mercy, and the victim\u2019s relatives have no one to turn to.<\/p>\n
\nsink into it and disappear, [you can] only sit there quietly and pray that it
\ndoes not happen to you\u2026 You cannot speak of those detentions, you cannot speak
\nof those basements\u2026 The [authorities] make it crystal clear: you must keep quiet,
\n[and] not ask questions.\u201d I nod dejectedly and sip on my orange juice. Freshly squeezed.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\nfreely \u2013 they\u2019re scared [everyone is] reporting on them, their neighbors, their
\ncolleagues, the person sitting next to them on the trolley\u2026 The fear is
\nparalyzing though actually, detentions as such aren\u2019t event frequent these
\ndays. They were\u00a0massive\u00a0back in 2014 when DNR was getting
\nconsolidated, but then gradually there were fewer and fewer people for them to
\n\u2018work on.\u2019 Pro-Ukraine activists fled, critically minded people, those who
\ncould not dare keep silent, left. But everyone who stays knows \u2013 if you breathe
\neven a word, you\u2019re off to the basement and they\u2019ll beat you and torture you
\nand no one can save you.\u201d<\/p>\n
\nautumn day is so beautiful and it almost hurts.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
\nand I listen to another man, a small-scale trader, tell about his experience in
\nthe MGB\u2019s basement prison in Novoazovsk, a small town in DNR-controlled
\nterritory. He spent five and half months there in late 2015 early 2016, on
\nsuspicion of collaborating with the Security Service of Ukraine.<\/p>\n
\nthree of those months his captors had him cuffed to a water pipe,so he could only sit, crouch,
\ncurl up on the floor, or crawl a short distance.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\nup in an extremely painful position, tortured him with electric shocks, and
\nstarved him. It was the indignity of being chained \u201clike an animal, a wild beast\u201d
\nfor months that seems to have shaken him at least as much as the extreme
\nphysical suffering. <\/p>\n
\nhe queries, \u201cHow can they do this to their fellow
\nhuman?\u00a0I want these people punished.\u201d<\/p>\n
\nthe two and a half years that Ukraine has been wracked by war, Human Rights
\nWatch interviewed scores of victims of arbitrary detentions and torture by\u00a0Russia-backed separatists\u00a0and\u00a0repeatedly\u00a0raised
\nthese issues with DNR and LNR de-facto authorities. So far, none of these
\nvictims has seen justice.<\/p>\n
\nMariupol.<\/p>\n