Lights, camera, action

Olha Kayova, together with her husband Yury and their children, spent the first four months of the war under occupation. When the Russian forces took over Kherson, Yury Kayov took the family to Zaporizhzhia and returned to Kherson, not wanting to leave his home, his business, and his employees. Kayov became a Red Cross volunteer and would use his large car to take people in need of medical assistance to Ukrainian-controlled territory and return to Kherson with medicine and food.

“In November 2022, Russian media showed a video in which I saw my husband Yury,” says Olha Kayova. “He was allegedly detained in the streets of Kherson by Russian security forces. But he was actually kidnapped by Russian soldiers on 5 August 2022 near a checkpoint in Vasylivka on the way from Kherson to Zaporizhzhia. And all this time I knew nothing about his fate.”

The Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) told Russian reporters that on 8 November in the Kherson region they had arrested a Ukrainian sabotage group consisting of nine people, all Ukrainian citizens. Three more — officers Samir Shukyurov, Viktor Khomyak and Dmytro Sidiy of the Ukrainian Security Service (SBU) — were put on the wanted list.

In the FSB’s version, the group had unsuccessfully attempted to assassinate Kirill Stremousov, deputy head of the Russia-installed administration of the region. The day after the video depicting the arrest was published, the collaborator Stremousov was unexpectedly killed in a road accident, the cause of which has not yet been established.

Later, the FSB reported finding more than five kilograms (10 pounds) of plastid, electric detonators, actuators, three IEDs, grenades, small arms, and ammunition, as well as special reconnaissance equipment in Kherson. An “international terrorism” case was soon opened.

The road to hell and beyond

On August 5, 2022, Yury Kayov, 39, a Kherson-based businessman and volunteer with the Ukrainian Red Cross, stopped for the night together with humanitarian mission staff in the village of Skelky, Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia region.

Kayov claims that two men in unmarked military uniforms armed with a rifle arrived at their parking place late at night. Without identifying themselves, they checked the volunteers’ documents and told Yury Kayov and the head of the Red Cross convoy, Oleh Akimchenko, to go with them to the pre-trial jail in Vasylivka.

The soldiers looted Kayov’s car, taking expensive medical equipment and all the money that people had collected to buy medicine and other humanitarian aid: 81,000 hryvnias (€2,000), $200 and €3,000. No confiscation documents were drawn up. Later on, they also stole the car itself.

The volunteers spent the night in the detention centre. In the morning, their captors put plastic bags over their heads, wrapped them with duct tape, leaving a small hole for breathing, and tied their hands behind their backs with zip ties. According to a source familiar with the case file, the men were taken to Melitopol in Zaporizhzhia region. There, they were taken to a small room in one of the administrative buildings, put against a wall, and told to wait.

“This went on for about five minutes, then they left. Half an hour later, more people came in and said that we were going back to Kherson with them and that we ‘had time to think about what to tell them’.”

The volunteers were put in the boot of a van and taken to Kherson. On the way, the soldiers who were in the back seat would occasionally hit them on the head and “laughed while doing so”. They forced the hostages to press themselves against plastic canisters of petrol and actively sniff them so that “the smell wouldn’t be as bad”.

Four guns

In Kherson, they were taken to the basement in the building of the regional office of the Ukrainian Interior Ministry. Kayov was led into a small room measuring approximately 2x4 metres (6x12 ft), with wooden pallets all over the floor, a chair in the centre, a desk to the left under the window, and several chairs along the wall to the right of the entrance.

“I was put in the centre, my hands were tied and fastened to the back of the chair, and they put something on my finger,” Yury continued. “Four or five people entered the room and started interrogating me, shouting, touching my head with a metal object and electrocuting me. During these moments, I was unable to move or say anything, and there was intense pain in my muscles. They asked me questions: where are the weapons and explosives hidden, where are the Ukrainian security officers, territorial defence battalions, Donbas veterans, those who don’t support the special operation or who take part in pro-Ukrainian protests… And they didn’t tell me what I was being accused of.”

During the interrogation, Kayov, who spent over six hours with a bag over his head, admitted that he had hidden four pistols near his house. Ukrainian security officers left the weapons with him before leaving town because they would be unable to pass the checkpoints otherwise. During that period it was common for security officers to ask their friends and acquaintances to hide their weapons. After the interrogation, the Russians took Kayov to retrieve the hidden weapons. Since he had to show them the way, the bag was removed from his head, and Yury finally saw his tormentors. One went by the nickname “Gloomy”, and he asked Yury why he was so supportive of the Ukrainian government. Kayov admitted he was a patriot of his homeland, at which point another officer, nicknamed “Tyson”, started hitting him in the face and on the head with his fists, shouting that he would “teach him to love his motherland”.

“Gloomy, who was driving, turned to me and asked: Do you know why he’s called Tyson?” Kayov recounts. “Because when he served in Syria he chewed off the ears of prisoners. He’s a Wagnerite.”

After retrieving the guns, the Russians took Kayov back to the basement. Yury recalls that at the entrance not far from the torture chamber there was a gate that the Russians locked at night and occasionally kept someone handcuffed to it during the day. The cells were on the floor below. There was a long, damp, dimly-lit corridor with doors on the right, each leading to a cell. The doors were old, wooden, lined with metal. They had no locks and so had to be blocked with a piece of pipe from the outside. What they did have were inspection windows and feeding hatches.

The prisoners next door

“I was taken to the third cell. There were more cells along the corridor to the left, but the doors were broken down and there were piles of rubbish, empty bottles, food packages, tins of canned stew that we were sometimes given to eat,” Kayov says. “There was a disgusting, strong smell of rot, and lots of gnats were flying around. My cell had no windows and very poor lighting, which was on round the clock. Occasionally during shelling the lights went off and we would be in impenetrable darkness. There was a wooden bench in the cell with several jackets with the word ‘police’ written on them, and we wrapped ourselves up in them and slept.”

When Kayov was led into the cell, he saw a man who was lying motionless. Yury touched his leg to see if he was alive or not. The man turned around and Kayov recognised Oleksandr Kraynik, an employee of his grocery shop. He was badly beaten, had several broken ribs, and a large bruise stretching across his chest to his stomach. He said that he had been in the basement for several days and that he and Oleksandr Ovcharuk (a delivery driver at Kayov's shop) had been captured by armed men. He recalled that the men burst into the shop while the employees were taking stock, beat them, and stole 190,000 hryvnias (€4,700) from the safe.

and then they strapped him to the gate near the entrance and made him stand, having beaten him on his feet and knees with sticks beforehand. He stood there groaning, begging them to take him down, saying he was sick and in pain. He stood like that for a couple of hours until he lost consciousness. The door of our cell was some five or six metres from there and we could hear everything. We could always hear the torture, the questions and the soldiers’ conversations outside and on the floor above us. And they kept the torture room open on purpose so we could hear the screams.”

After a while, Denys was taken off the gate and dragged to another cell. He spent the next two months there with Konstantin Reznik and Serhiy Kabakov. The latter had already been in the basement for about four weeks.

Torture 

The torture itself lasted for a week, the men were taken in turns, sometimes twice a day. According to Kayov, the tormentors electrocuted their captives, fastened wires to their genitals, kicked them, beat their backs, hands, and feet; waterboarded them, and tied them up in the so-called “monkey” position. The latter involved tying the prisoners’ hands, making them embrace their knees, after which a stick would be passed under the knees and its edges placed on two chairs, making the prisoners hang down, straining his muscles and sinews.

“One of the interrogators was particularly brutal. He seemed to be the youngest, about 27-30 years old, small in stature, thin, with a dark beard and brown eyes, call sign ‘Eagle’,” Kayov says. “He had a speech defect and never hid his face. He would regularly show us really low-quality propaganda: I take it he made it himself, and he lacked creativity. He liked to film our interrogations and made us learn the Russian national anthem.”

During two months in the basement, Kayov lost 25 kilograms (55 lbs). Every morning a soldier known as “Raven” came over and allowed them to get some water, pour out the collected urine, and go to the toilet.

Kayov recalls that Raven was very fond of rock music — he always had it on and always wore a balaclava. The faucet that the prisoners drew water from was in the middle of the corridor; there too was a large gate to which prisoners would be handcuffed for five to seven days, always with a police cap covering their face. Those strapped to the bars were beaten by any soldiers who passed by. Occasionally, Raven didn’t come — then the prisoners had to stretch their water supplies and relieve themselves in a cut-off five-litre bottle since there was nobody to let them go to the restroom.

After a couple of days, Kayov and Kraynik were joined by Serhiy Ofitserov, who said that he had been cuffed to the gate for five days and had not slept due to constant torture and beatings.

Martyrs and frozen dumplings

“We wrote our names and dates of arrival on the cell walls, and the lads in the neighbouring cell wrote down the names of all those who were brought in and tortured during that time,” says Kayov. “There also were young girls and women. All were tortured without exception.

Unlike us, he spoke Ukrainian so we concluded that he was from the countryside. I don’t know what happened to him, he was taken away about a day before we left for Simferopol.”

Prisoners brought to the cellars during Kayov’s stay there included journalists, priests, the head of the Kherson branch of the Right Sector, a history professor, activists, bloggers, the head of emergency services of Oleshky, a prosecutor, and the former head of the Hornostayivka administration.

In late August 2022, Kayov was taken to his home to “conduct a search” and allowed to eat “whatever he finds”. His wife and daughter were in Zaporizhzhia at the time. Yury found a handful of dumplings left for him by his daughter in the freezer and ate them raw. Four soldiers went around the house, packing things into bags and loading them into the SUV of Kayov’s father-in-law, which was parked in the yard. The soldiers told Yury to take some clothes and drove him back to the basement in the stolen car.

A couple of days after the “search”, Kayov was taken to the shower room for the first time. He was told to wash and shave. After that he was given a clean T-shirt and shorts, which he had brought from home. Four soldiers in balaclavas took him to Kherson, where they gave him a black bag with his passport, phone, and his Red Cross ID card.

They then ordered him to walk along the pavement, explaining that they were going to stage his arrest. It was important to fall down in such a way as not to hurt his face, because the fake arrest was going to be filmed. They managed to film everything on the first take, and the footage was included in the aforementioned video published by the FSB. Kovalsky and Kraynik, Kayov’s employees, were taken to their shop and forced to shoot a video of how one of them was handing the other a package with a “bomb”.

Revenge on a veteran

After 10 September, Ukraine began striking enemy positions in Kherson more and more frequently with HIMARS, Kayov recalls. “The Russians went berserk. Sometimes the soldiers would come into our basement during the day, hiding from the shelling and complaining about heavy losses, saying they had truckloads of bodies but that their commanders wouldn’t listen to them and that they didn’t understand why they were here at all. They kept telling us that the Ukrainian army was going to hit us, that they wouldn’t spare us. To be honest, we wanted it very much at that moment,” Kayov wrote in his testimony.

In mid-September, former Ukrainian intelligence officer and veteran of the Anti-Terrorist Operation in Donbas (2014-2018), senior lieutenant Anatoliy Zubritskiy was put into Kayov’s cell where he was tortured and beaten till the prisoners were taken to Crimea. The Russians tormented him to the point where he was simply left at the entrance to the cell and his cellmates had to drag him in and lay him on the bunk because he was unable to walk. He was blue from head to toe and by the end of it he couldn’t feel his ears.

“When they went to his home, they brought some of his books, documents, certificates of service, university diplomas and made him sign them as ‘SBU Captain’’ and write his wishes to them,” Kayov says. “They also made a video of him telling him that on 9 May all SBU officers would go to the Eternal Flame monument where WWII veterans were gathering and allegedly beat them and rob them of their medals.”

Several days after Zubritskiy was brought to the basement, his elderly uncle came looking for his nephew. The soldiers dragged the man into the basement, blindfolded him, and handcuffed him to the gate. Then they gave him a stool to sit on and a bottle for water and urine. He spent a fortnight like this until the soldiers left for Crimea, taking the captives with them. Several times, the elderly man was taken to the torture room. He screamed a lot. Then he was shackled to the bars again. All the soldiers who passed by beat him: they wanted Zubritskiy to hear it.

Kherson — Crimea — Moscow

After 20 September, the mood of the Russian soldiers became worse with every day, and they took it out on the prisoners. They took them to the torture room one by one, saying they didn’t need witnesses, and fired shots into the ceiling, while the other prisoners waited for their to be “executed”. Everyone underwent these mock executions.

“They also demanded that we put our heads to the feeding hatch in the cell door. They would stick a revolver into the cell and play what they called ‘Russian roulette’ .They shot us in the head and after the misfire said we were lucky,” Kayov recalls. “At night, young soldiers, aged 19-20, would come down to the basement very drunk. They would wake us up and shout ‘Glory to Ukraine’ through the doors, and we had to respond with ‘as part of the Russian Federation’. They would beat those who were hanging on the gate and randomly take someone to the torture room, beat them, ask ‘historical questions’, which mainly concerned World War II and our patriotic feelings towards ‘the non-existent state’, as they called Ukraine. They did all this to the tune of [Soviet patriotic song] “Arise, Great Country”. We had the impression that all this was happening without the higher-ranking officers’ knowledge.”

In the last days of September, the Russian soldiers started hurriedly packing up and took the prisoners into a room which held various weapons, grenades and explosives, all of which they were told to hold in their hands and leave fingerprints. Kayov was given a grey substance that looked like Play-Doh and told to knead it. Someone was forced to leave prints on cars.

In early October, everyone was made to sign papers where the text was covered with a blank sheet. After that, Kayov and his fellow inmates were taken to the FSB office in Simferopol where they were photographed and fingerprinted. Kayov was introduced to his lawyer, who said that no one guarantees his safety and that the methods of “investigation” here are not very different from those in Kherson.

It was only here that Kayov learned that he was being charged with “international terrorism”. He was forced to sign a deposition which he was not even allowed to read. The next day — 7 October, 2022 — a court in Simferopol arrested Kayov on charges of international terrorism that had been brought the day before.

“When we were brought to the pre-trial detention centre in Simferopol, a young Tatar guy came up to the car. He chatted nicely with the officers and asked how we were to be received here — ‘well or very well’ — to which one of the officers replied with a smile that they shouldn’t overdo it because we had been ‘processed’ in Kherson for two months,” said Kayov. “When they took the three of us to the first floor and put us against the wall, the officer came in and immediately started hitting us and pushing us into different rooms. He hit me in the chest and then hit my head against the wall a few times. I lost consciousness and woke up in his office. He gave me some papers to sign, took me to a room on the ground floor and left me alone.

After the beating, Kayev was taken to a cell where Ukrainian nationals had already been held captive for over six months without any legal grounds. Cell mates gave Yury clean clothes from their supplies.

“Every morning there was a ‘raid’, during which we were taken out of the cell and put against the wall with our arms and legs spread, searched and beaten in the kidneys,” Kayov continues. “There was a whole floor filled with Ukrainians: policemen, soldiers, volunteers. Every night you could hear the Russians bursting into neighbouring cells, beating people, stunning them. My cell mates told me that they had already experienced all the torture that was used here in the FSB office in Simferopol. They would also occasionally get beaten up in the pre-trial detention centre.”

On 14 October 2022, Kayov was transferred to Lefortovo, a prison in Moscow. Less than a month later — on 11 November 2022 — Ukrainian forces took back Kherson.

Empty house and news from her husband

The last time Kayov saw his family was a week before he was abducted. He was driving to Zaporizhzhia for another humanitarian shipment. “It was a very difficult trip,” he told his wife at the time, “we were searched like never before”. The Russian military at the checkpoints told the volunteers to completely unload the car, opening every box and bag — “things were strewn on the road”. The soldiers said this was the last time they would let volunteers through.

“The last time I talked to him was on August 4, 2022. I knew that he was going from Kherson to Zaporizhzhia, Olha says. “He called my daughter the next evening when they were queuing at Vasylivka [checkpoint]. There was no further contact with him, but I did not worry, because the network coverage in the area was always very bad — you had to climb a hill to catch a signal. The next day I got a call from Serhiy, who was in the same volunteer group as him. He told me that my husband and the head of the group were captured last night and taken to Melitopol for questioning. Serhiy waited for them for several days, going to checkpoints and asking about the captives’ fate. He got no answer. Finally, he had to leave.

For two months, Olha searched for her husband all over Melitopol, Enerhodar, and Kherson. Her relatives in Kherson went to the local occupation administration, but got nowhere.

Later, neighbours reported that “Buryats” in civil dress had stolen the car from the Kayovs’ yard. They had the keys to the house and the car — this is how Olha realised that her husband was somewhere in Kherson. After the city was liberated, she went to their house and discovered that the Russian soldiers had also stolen Yury’s documents (his volunteer certificate and contract) and his Red Cross volunteer uniform. Only the cap was left — the Russians didn’t notice it on the clothes dryer.

“We didn’t even have the time to settle into our house. We had just finished construction and moved in,” Olha says. “The house is empty without my husband. It feels as if you are suspended in space. It’s empty here, and the place where the children and I live now is also empty. Nowhere feels like home.”

In September, the Russians let go a man who contacted the family and said he had been in a cell with Yury.

“He confirmed that Yury is alive,” Olha continues. “The next news came in early October:

She asked me to collect some clothes for him. But the next day she told me that after the pre-trial detention hearing he was immediately taken to Moscow, to Lefortovo. I didn’t even know what condition he was in. I thought to myself, “Oh God, I hope he is okay.”

Olha says that state-appointed lawyers from Moscow had also contacted her and given her news from her husband. But they have refused to hand over any papers on her husband’s case, claiming that is forbidden.

Exchange is the only hope

“These men, detained under fictitious pretext of suicide bombings, should be exchanged, that’s their only hope,” said a source familiar with the case materials. “Kayev and a group of others are accused of assembling explosive devices for an attempt on Kirill Stremousov’s life, allegedly under the guidance of the Ukrainian Security Service. It is good that they are now in Lefortovo, where they are no longer tortured, are given food, and can receive medical treatment if necessary. Of course this is good compared with their previous place of detention where they were fed and allowed to use the restroom only once in three days. They are under a lot of pressure and extremely distrustful of everything that is going on. They do not trust the appointed public lawyers either.

Another source familiar with the case is also convinced that a prisoner swap is these Ukrainians’ only way into freedom. As an example, he recounted the story of one of the prisoners — former Kherson customs officer Yury Voznyansky who was arrested during a “big investigation into international terrorism” in Kherson. In August 2022, he was standing at a bus stop. A car pulled up next to him, men in civil dress jumped out, forced him inside, covered his eyes with a cap, and took him away. But the official documents state he was only arrested in October 2022.

“Later, he realised that he had been brought to the local police headquarters”, says the source. “He saw a uniform with ‘police’ written on it in Ukrainian. He was kept in a basement until 6 October. Voznyansky was added to the case of Stremousov’s attempted assassination. Like all the others, he was tortured so that he would confess to being involved in preparing the attack. It is unlikely that the court will prove his innocence, even though all the other defendants say they have never spoken to him or even known him.”

The investigation pinned on Voznyansky the role of keeping an eye on potential victims of terrorist attacks and accused him on two occasions of handing over 5,000 hryvnia (around €120) to one of the group’s members, a wanted SBU officer. The source claims there is no evidence that the money was used for criminal activities.

At the beginning of the war, people in the Kherson region had issues withdrawing money from their bank cards; ATMs and payment terminals had stopped working. People made arrangements: a person would make a transfer from their card through an app while the recipient would give it back to them in cash. As Voznyansky’s father was a farmer and traded on the local market, he always had plenty of cash and helped his acquaintances to cash out their cards.

According to the source, the lawyers of almost all the detainees in the “attempted murder of Stremousov” case made official complaints about torture, but “this is a double-edged sword. You can get charged with knowingly making a false report of a crime. There is no evidence of the torture because there was no medical examination immediately after the beatings.”

“It is obvious that in Russia you cannot count on the impartiality of justice. The only hope is an exchange,” says Olha Kayova, Yury’s wife. “I have knocked on all the doors and written to all the authorities, and everywhere I’m told that they do not swap civilians. They say that there may be such exchanges in the future — but we must wait. So we are waiting.”