That, according to a detainee who was there, is the conditions inside Olenivka, the notorious detention center outside Donetsk where dozens of Ukrainian soldiers were burned to death in a horrific incident late last month while in Russian captivity. Anna Vorosheva – a 45-year-old Ukrainian businesswoman – gave a harrowing account of her time in prison to the Observer. She spent 100 days in Olenivka after her arrest in mid-March at a checkpoint run by the pro-Russian Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) in eastern Ukraine. She was trying to deliver humanitarian supplies to Mariupol, her hometown, which was besieged by the Russian army. The separatists arrested her and drove her in an overcrowded police van to prison, where she was held until early July on “terrorism” charges. Now recovering in France, Vorosheva said she had no doubt that Russia “cynically and deliberately” murdered Ukrainian prisoners of war. “We’re talking about absolute evil,” he said. The militants blew themselves up on July 29 in a mysterious and devastating explosion. Moscow claims Ukraine killed them with a US-made Himars precision-guided missile. Satellite images and independent analysis, however, suggest they were obliterated by a powerful bomb detonated from inside the building. Russia says 53 prisoners were killed and 75 wounded. Ukraine was unable to confirm these figures and requested an investigation. The victims were members of the Azov battalion. Until their surrender in May, they had defended the Mariupol Azovstal steel plant, holding out in the basement. The day before the explosion, they were moved to a separate area in the industrial zone of the camp, some distance from the filthy two-story concrete block where Vorosheva shared a cell with other female prisoners. Video aired on Russian state television revealed charred bodies and twisted metal bunks. “Russia didn’t want them alive. I’m sure some of those “killed” in the explosion were already corpses. It was a convenient way to account for the fact that they had been tortured to death,” he said. Male prisoners were regularly removed from their cells, beaten and then locked up again. “We heard their screams,” he said. “They were playing loud music to cover the screams. Torture happened all the time. Interrogators used to joke about it and ask prisoners, “What happened to your face?” The soldier would answer: “I fell” and they would laugh. “It was a show of strength. The prisoners understood that anything could happen to them, that they could easily be killed. A small number of the Azov guys were arrested before the mass surrender in May.” Vorosheva said there was constant traffic around Olenivka, known as penal colony No. 120. A former Soviet agricultural school, it was converted in the 1980s into a prison and later abandoned. The DNR began using it earlier this year to house hostile civilians. The captives arrived and left daily at the camp, 20 kilometers southwest of occupied Donetsk, Vorosheva told the Observer. About 2,500 people were held there, with the number sometimes rising to 3,500-4,000, he estimated. There was no running water or electricity. The atmosphere changed when about 2,000 Azov fighters were bussed in on the morning of May 17, he said. Russian flags were raised and DNR colors were removed. The guards were initially wary of the new prisoners. They later talked openly about how they were going to blackmail and humiliate them, he said. “We were often called Nazis and terrorists. One of the women in my cell was a doctor from Azovstal. She was pregnant. I asked if I could give her my portion of food. They said, “No, he’s a murderer.” The only question they ever asked me was, ‘Do you know any Azov soldiers?’” Conditions for female prisoners were grim. He said they were not tortured, but received almost no food – 50 grams of bread for dinner and sometimes porridge. “It was fit for pigs,” he said. He suspected that the prison governor had siphoned off the money allocated for the meals. Toilets overflowed and women did not receive sanitary products. The cells were so overcrowded that they slept in shifts. “It was tough. People were crying, worried about their children and their families.” Asked if the guards ever showed sympathy, she said an anonymous person once left them a bottle of shampoo. According to Vorosheva, the camp staff were brainwashed by Russian propaganda into believing that Ukrainians were Nazis. Some were local villagers. “They blamed us for the fact that their lives were terrible. He was like an alcoholic who says he drinks vodka because his wife is no good. “The philosophy is, ‘Everything is horrible to us, so everything must be horrible to you.’ It’s all very communist.” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy called the explosion a “deliberate Russian war crime and deliberate mass killing of Ukrainian prisoners of war.” Last week, his office and Ukraine’s defense ministry detailed evidence they say points to Kremlin culpability. Friends and relatives of Azov battalion soldiers protest in Kyiv after the explosion at Olenivka prison killed dozens of prisoners of war. Photo: Dimitar Dilkoff/AFP/Getty Images Citing satellite images and wiretapping and intelligence, they said Russian mercenaries from the Wagner group carried out the killings in cooperation with Vladimir Putin’s FSB spy agency. They point to the fact that a number of graves were dug in the colony a few days before the explosion. The operation was approved at the “highest level” in Moscow, they claim. “Russia is not a democracy. The dictator is personally responsible for everything, be it MH17, Bucha or Olenivka,” said an intelligence source. “The question is: when will Putin acknowledge his atrocities.” One version of events being considered by Kyiv is that the blast may have been the result of intra-service rivalries between Russia’s FSB and GRU military intelligence wings. The GRU negotiated the handover of Azovstal with the Ukrainian military, according to sources – a deal the FSB may have wanted to destroy. The soldiers should have been protected by guarantees given by Russia to the UN and the International Committee of the Red Cross that Azov prisoners would be treated appropriately. After the explosion, the Russians refused to give international representatives any access to the site. Voroseva said the Red Cross was allowed into the camp in May. He said the Russians took the visitors to a specially renovated room and did not allow them to speak independently with the prisoners. “It was a show,” he said. “We were asked to give our clothing size and said the Red Cross would distribute something. Nothing reached us.” Other prisoners confirmed Vorosheva’s version of events and said that Azov soldiers were treated worse than civilians. Dmitry Bodrov, a 32-year-old volunteer worker, told the Wall Street Journal that guards took anyone they suspected of misbehavior to a special disciplinary section of the camp for beatings. They appeared limping and moaning, he said. Some prisoners were forced to crawl back to their cells. Another prisoner, Stanislav Hlushkov, said a prisoner who was regularly beaten was found dead in solitary confinement. Orderlies placed a sheet over his head, loaded him into a hearse van and told fellow inmates that he had “killed himself”. Voroseva was released on July 4. It was, he said, a “miracle.” “The guards read the names of those who were to be released. Everyone listened in silence. My heart skipped a beat when I heard my name. I packed up but didn’t celebrate. There were cases where people were on the list, went out and then came back.” He added: “The people running the camp represent the worst aspects of the Soviet Union. They could only behave well if they thought no one was watching.”
