Mother courage

Havryshchenko has been looking for her husband all this time. She followed the trail from Nova Kakhovka, in the Russian-occupied part of Ukraine’s Kherson region, to Simferopol, in annexed Crimea, and from there to the Russian city of Rostov-on-Don where the trail went cold.

An unexpected occupation

Havryshchenko, now 24, met Torytsia, 12 years her senior, while she was still in college. They fell in love and got married, after which she got a job as an accountant, while he worked as a security guard at an oil depot. However, the Russian invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022 ended up changing the trajectory of their previously unremarkable lives dramatically.

“They were saying on TV the day before that war was possible,” Havryshchenko recalls. “I couldn’t believe it. War in the 21st century? But my husband said: ‘pack a bag, just in case.’ We started hearing explosions at 5am on 24 February. My husband took me to his parents’ village in the Kherson region, thinking it would be safer there. He went back to the city to enlist, like all the other guys who wanted to protect the city.”

It turned out to be no safer in the countryside, though, as Russian troops were passing through the village on their way to capture Kherson.

Torytsia took his wife back to the city the following day, only to find out that it too was now occupied. Though it was ultimately recaptured by Ukrainian forces in November that year, at the time locals were organising anti-Russian rallies. 

Havryshchenko was afraid and suggested they leave and despite the fact that young men were already disappearing with unnerving frequency, Torytsia refused to flee his own home, and the couple dared to hope that the war would only last for two or three weeks.

“I would go to the market and feel disgust when I saw the occupiers. That’s not how it was before the war. … Russians would come here, we went there, and everything was fine. We could never have imagined they could behave this way. I learned a lot during the occupation, including how women were taken into basements and raped. But there was no one to complain to, nowhere to seek justice and punishment for the guilty.”

Abducted in broad daylight

Though it was soon common knowledge that those who took part in anti-Russian rallies in Kherson would often be identified, abducted and held in basements somewhere before being moved on to an unknown destination and fate, Torytsia continued to attend rallies. In May, the couple found out they were expecting a baby.

Torytsia tried to persuade Havryshchenko to leave for an unoccupied part of Ukraine or to go to Poland. He said they could meet there, and that if ever he were taken, he would at least know that she was safe. However, she refused to leave him alone in an occupied city where men were disappearing on a daily basis. She still thinks it was the right thing to do, and says that at least this way there was a witness to his abduction, which she saw happen. 

She still doesn’t know how the occupiers identified her husband. She thinks it could have been neighbours or friends who had been abducted earlier, but she doesn’t hold anybody responsible, rationalising that anyone being tortured will say anything to make it stop.

“I went to hospital for an ultrasound on 9 August, when I was four months pregnant. I was on the way home when my husband called to say he had seen a car outside our house and ran away. I got off the bus and ran to where I thought he’d be. We met in a high-rise courtyard. We were both panicking, didn’t know where to go. We knew they would come and terrorise our parents. But we didn’t have time to think. We’d walked a couple of streets when two jeeps pulled up, people got out and put a bag over my husband’s head. I screamed: ‘What are you doing? Has he killed anyone? We’re just living our lives in our city! … Let him go!’ I started hitting the car and they said: ‘How many months pregnant are you?’ They knew everything.”

They put her in one of the jeeps, took her home, took a key, and took Torytsia with them. She ran around the city’s basements the next day. Everyone knew where abductees were being held. But Torytsia was nowhere, at least that’s what she was told.

She did see her husband one more time. Coming home after yet another unsuccessful search, she saw that the door to the house was open and there were cars in the yard. They had brought her husband with them as they searched the house. His hands were blue from torture.

Torytsia was a hunter and had weapons at home, all of which were taken. The Russians also took all the money the family had put aside for their unborn child. All hunters had their weapons confiscated as the occupiers feared guerrilla warfare. Havryshchenko hasn’t seen her husband since, except on video.

Dogged persistence

Havryshchenko has now been searching for her husband for two and a half years. She knows that he was first taken from Kherson to Nova Kakhovka, where civilian prisoners were kept in garages, as Havryshchenko heard as much when a stranger who was held with him called her out of the blue on day upon his own release, having remembered the number Torytsia had dictated to him and told her that her husband was being taken to Crimea.

“I started calling Crimea … but nobody would tell me anything. All I knew is that he was held in Crimea for about a month, and then taken to the Rostov region. I heard that from a prisoner of war being held in the same penal colony who was freed in a prisoner swap. … He then found me online and told me … that there had been no criminal case or sentence. Andriy was simply being held with other prisoners. They were fed water and onions. There were beatings and electric shocks. They’re holding both military and civilian prisoners there. And I don’t know where my husband is now. The guy who was exchanged told me that those from the penal colony would be split up and sent to different locations.”

In late 2022, relatives took Havryshchenko and her mother to Kryvyi Rih, a city under Ukrainian control. It too was also coming under fire. Havryshchenko gave birth to their daughter to the sound of explosions on 20 December. 

Running with a baby from the fourth floor down into the basement every time there was an air raid warning wasn’t easy. Her nerves were shot and she hardly slept. But then she moved to the relative safety of Lviv, in western Ukraine, where she remains today.

Havryshchenko receives a monthly “resettlement” payment of 5,000 hryvnias (€115 euros) plus a small child allowance. Without help from her relatives, life would be much more difficult. Meanwhile, she keeps looking for her husband and is trying to bring him home.

“I wrote to the Russian authorities multiple times and a couple of times I received a reply in which they said that they had no one by that name in the country at all. I often call the coordination centre in Kyiv … and people involved with prisoner exchanges.” 

Ray of light

Quite unexpectedly, Havryshchenko received a letter from her husband in August in which he said that he loved her and hoped they would meet again soon. A video of Torytsia appeared on a Telegram channel affiliated with the Russian intelligence services on 29 October in which he looks skinny and hunched as he says words he has clearly been made to learn by heart.

Torytsia said that he had been treated well, provided with three hot meals, medical care and appropriate clothing. All the videos on the channel from the same period are exactly the same: prisoners of war and civilian prisoners, all dressed the same, sitting against the same wall, saying the same thing. They are presumed to be prisoners from the same penal colony in the Rostov region.

Five days later, on 4 November, Havryshchenko was at the Verkhovna Rada in Kyiv with other prisoners’ relatives, calling on the authorities not to be silent. What more can the authorities do to release captured Ukrainians, I ask her. Havryshchenko believes civilian prisoners are less of a priority than their military counterparts.

“There are people we could exchange the civilians for!” she says. “We have any number of collaborators behind bars. They’d be happy to go to Russia. Why not swap them for our civilians? It’s time to get our prisoners back.”

“I’d at least like to let him know we’re alive. The last time we saw each other was when Kherson was still occupied. He doesn’t know anything about my current situation.”