JOEL ROSE, HOST:
Russia's deadliest strike on Ukraine this year killed at least 38 people this weekend. A Russian drone hit a military ammunition depot west of Kyiv on Friday, setting off massive explosions and fires that destroyed nearby homes. And Russia's war on Ukrainians has also been playing out far from the battlefield inside Russia's prisons. Human rights groups report that Russia is holding tens of thousands of Ukrainian civilians in prison, largely out of sight and outside the reach of international law. New Yorker writer Joshua Yaffa investigated the brutality of this system, telling the stories of a group of women who were held in one particular cell. He titled his piece "Inside Russia's New Gulag." I called him up and asked him what he meant by that.
JOSHUA YAFFA: Russia, from the very early days of the invasion, as I mentioned before, begins to, in large number, capture Ukrainian soldiers on the battlefield, POWs, but it's the civilian prisoners that fall into this legal, if not gray area, perhaps black hole is the better metaphor because there really shouldn't be a category of civilian prisoners, at least not en masse, in conflict. That sort of thing is prohibited by The Geneva Conventions, the set of norms and laws that came out of World War II that govern how nations essentially conduct themselves during wartime or during periods of conflict.
And one of those rules is that nations and their armies cannot arbitrarily detain civilians en masse. What Russia has done in - for example, in relation to the women who I write about in the cell in Rostov, it charges them with various criminal offenses - espionage, terrorism. Each one of these charges carries its own alleged specificity, which allows Russia to say we're not detaining civilians en masse, we're merely identifying, prosecuting and sentencing those who committed specific crimes.
ROSE: How are these civilians treated in detention? Is it different for civilians than it is for POWs?
YAFFA: There tends to be the worst, most harsh and brutal treatment early on in a person's detention, whether it's civilian or POW, right when they're captured, oftentimes in unofficial, off-the-books detention facilities - a cellar, a dugout, a warehouse. They're not registered in any official or formal way as prisoners. Their family doesn't know where they are. There the treatment is quite brutal. I'm just speaking here of the women who I spoke to, and so these are firsthand accounts I heard directly - everything from sexual assault, rape, to mock executions, beatings.
Then oftentimes they're brought to a detention facility which in some legal or formal sense does exist - the Donetsk jail - and the brutal treatment continues there - regular beatings. So violence is really ever present at a place like Donetsk. By the time they get to Rostov, which is where I capture this group in its totality, they are brought to Rostov to face trial. And there the Russian judiciary system becomes as coolly or coldly brutal in relation to these Ukrainian prisoners as in relation to anyone. In other words, there's neither particular excesses of terrible or gruesome brutality but nor are there great nods toward humanism or mercy. The machine kind of functions according to its own cold and cruel logic.
ROSE: You actually traveled to Ukraine to speak with some of the women who were held there. What did they tell you about what it was like?
YAFFA: It was really important for me to hear firsthand the stories of women who were held in this cell, and I wanted to know everything. I wanted to know how the cell was laid out physically, the looks, the smells, the games they played, the songs they sang, the meals they improvised from the meager food packages they got, and I traveled around the country to find these women.
And it was clearly difficult for all of these women to revisit this history. I could tell that it was both painful but also important to revisit not just these stories but to revisit their connection and relationships with the women who remain in custody - right? - that they became very, very close with but then have been completely cut off from since their release. And they enjoyed telling stories about the way they celebrated birthdays, the way they sang songs in the exercise yard.
That, essentially, was the main idea I heard time again. Yes, this is a painful history for us, but we're really doing this to keep attention on those who we left behind, not by choice. But there's a sense of care and a sense of responsibility to the women in the cell who were not freed and who remain in Russian custody and have very uncertain prospects for being released anytime soon.
ROSE: Joshua Yaffa is a contributing writer at The New Yorker magazine. Joshua, thank you. Thanks for your reporting, and thanks for talking to us.
YAFFA: Thanks for having me. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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