In the early days of the Russian occupation of Staryi Bykiv, a Ukrainian village fifty miles east of Kyiv, Viktoria Andrusha embarked on a bold act of resistance: she took note of the Russian armored vehicles and weapons systems rumbling down the town’s main road, and sent her findings to acquaintances with ties to the Ukrainian armed forces. Andrusha, a twenty-five-year-old math teacher, worked at an elementary school in Brovary, a satellite town across the Dnipro River from the capital; she had returned home on the first day of the war. She would keep watch through the living-room window and sometimes climb up to the attic to get a better view of Russian military equipment. Her father, Mykola, a garrulous man with a tender disposition, had served in the Soviet Army, and would help her identify the difference between, say, anti-aircraft launchers and long-range artillery systems. He also urged Viktoria to take the family car and drive somewhere safe. She refused. “We greeted them,” Viktoria said, of the invading force. “We’ll see them out.”
On March 25th, a month into Staryi Bykiv’s occupation, Russian soldiers conducted a house-by-house search on the family’s street. It seemed they knew exactly who they were looking for. An armored personnel carrier pulled up to the gate of the Andrusha’s home—a white-brick, single-story structure with a metal roof, and a rose bush and apple tree out front. A dozen troops spilled out, demanding to be let inside. A Russian F.S.B. officer asked to see Viktoria’s phone. “That’s her,” he said, ordering that Viktoria be taken into custody. “Dress warmly,” another soldier told her. “It will be cold there.”
Viktoria’s mother, Kateryna, managed to give her daughter a pair of warm socks and a kiss on the cheek. Mykola stood outside, where he was watched over by another contingent of soldiers. As she was led out, Viktoria asked to say goodbye to her father. They embraced, and then she was gone.
The F.S.B. officer came out to the yard. He accused Mykola of being a bad father. “You raised her poorly—she made bad choices,” he said. Mykola had no sympathy for Russia, and was proud of his daughter’s bravery. But he found himself tormented by her detention. “I thought, I really am a bad father,” he said. “I wasn’t able to protect my child and hide her from danger.”
I arrived in Staryi Bykiv about a week later, on April 6th. The Russian Army had withdrawn from the Kyiv and Chernihiv regions, which meant that they had left Staryi Bykiv, too. The town, once a typical Ukrainian tableau of prim, single-story homes, with gardens in the back and cows lazing in open fields, was in a state of disorder. Destroyed Russian military vehicles lined the streets; locals were returning to homes that had been taken over by Russian soldiers and were now covered in trash and graffiti.
Maxim Didyk, a twenty-one-year-old car mechanic, walked me to a boiler room behind the village’s Soviet-era house of culture, where he and twenty or so others had been held prisoner by Russian soldiers. Inside, a crawl space the size of a small closet housed, at one point, half a dozen people, including Didyk. The day before Russian forces pulled out, a commander had entered the boiler room with a grim pronouncement: he needed four dead bodies. Who would volunteer to be shot? The remains of three of those men were later found in the dirt near the local cemetery. (I wrote about the case in April.)
Didyk told me that an acquaintance of his from the village had also been held prisoner in the boiler room: Viktoria Andrusha. She furtively passed water to those in the cellar; one night she used a knife, sterilized over a lighter flame, to remove a bullet from the arm of a fellow-prisoner. Didyk spoke of her dignity and quiet defiance in the face of her Russian captors. “She told them, ‘I’m Ukrainian, a patriot—I won’t speak Russian with you,’ ” he said. “She wasn’t afraid but proud.” A few days before the Russian Army retreated from the village, a group of soldiers had come and taken Viktoria away.
In the coming weeks and months, I followed what little news emerged about Viktoria. “We are told she’s in Russia,” Mykola said. “But where, exactly, or what condition she’s in—we have no information.” In mid-April, a Ukrainian couple from another village who had been detained by Russian soldiers were released in a prisoner exchange. The couple had been held at a detention center in Kursk, in southwestern Russia. In an interview with Ukrainian journalists, the man had said that, while there, his wife had shared a cell, number 5-13, with Viktoria.
Oleksiy Dibrovskyi was detained in his home village in the Zaporizhzhia region, in southern Ukraine, and taken to Kursk; he, too, was eventually freed in an exchange. He told me that conditions in Kursk were those of a real “zone”—slang for “prison camp.” “Everything: the corridors, the dogs, the guards—it’s a very tough place psychologically.” When he first arrived, his captors told him that he’d receive, at minimum, a three-to-five-year prison sentence. “Even if you didn’t do anything, the fact you’re here means you’re already screwed,” he said, paraphrasing the guards’ threats. “You’re all criminals to us.”
Ukrainian human-rights defenders worked with Russian activists and lawyers to gain access to prisoners held inside Russia. In May, Leonid Krikun, a lawyer from St. Petersburg, showed up at the Kursk jail with a letter from Viktoria’s family, empowering him as their legal representative. Russian-military police trucks were parked outside—which struck him as odd, given that Kursk was ostensibly a civilian detention facility. When he asked to be given access to his client, guards made him wait for two hours. Finally, the warden emerged and told him, “We have no such person.” He got the same answer during another visit, in July. “We filed complaints,” Krikun told me. “But, if the state doesn’t even acknowledge they are holding a person, it’s hard to defend their rights.”
Nataliia Yashchuk, a coordinator at the Center for Civil Liberties, a Ukrainian N.G.O. that shared this year’s Nobel Peace Prize with human-rights advocates in Russia and Belarus, said that her organization alone was tracking some six hundred and fifty cases of Ukrainians who were detained or disappeared. She thinks the real number is several times that. Eventually, the Red Cross confirmed to the Ukrainian authorities that a prisoner by the name of Viktoria Andrusha was being held in Kursk. The Russian state continued to deny it. In a June report on Viktoria’s case, Human Rights Watch wrote that the “failure to acknowledge a civilian’s detention or to disclose their whereabouts in custody” could be “prosecutable as a crime against humanity under the International Criminal Court’s statute.”
In August, a handwritten letter arrived addressed to Viktoria’s parents. “I’m fine, I’m alive, but being held prisoner,” Viktoria wrote. She said that she was being fed three times a day and being provided with medical care. “Forgive me that I got myself involved with this mess,” she wrote. Her family recognized the handwriting but didn’t think Viktoria sounded like herself. “She either had this dictated to her or wrote it under the barrel of a gun,” her older sister Iryna told me.
In September, I drove out again to Staryi Bykiv. I sat in the living room, talking with Mykola and Kateryna. The mood was deflated, even as they tried to keep up hope. “There’s plenty of work to do,” Mykola said, pointing around the house and the yard, full of animals. “But there’s no spirit left in my hands.”
A few days later, on September 29th, Viktoria’s parents were in the yard—Kateryna was peeling beets, Mykola was trying to fix his tractor—when Kateryna’s phone rang. It was Viktoria. She was in Ukraine. Kateryna screamed, “They brought back Vika!” Mykola asked if they had returned her body, or if she was alive. Alive, Kateryna answered. Earlier that morning, with no notice or warning, Viktoria had been freed in a prisoner exchange. She was on a bus, headed to a military hospital. Four days later, she was home.
When I returned to Staryi Bykiv to meet Viktoria in person, she wore a blue V-neck sweater, and her brown hair was pulled behind her head. She seemed in a cheerful, even bubbly, mood, as she recalled what had happened since she was taken out of the boiler room. Russian soldiers had blindfolded her during a several-hour car ride, then put her in a helicopter. “It wasn’t scary as much as entering the total unknown,” Viktoria said. She spent a few days in a tent camp in Glushkovo, a Russian town near the border, where she received an identification document with her new status: prisoner of war. A Russian official told her that she was charged with spying, but never showed her a formal indictment.
After ten days, she was brought to the prison in Kursk. Russian guards took her to an interrogation room and beat her with their fists and clubs; at one point they tortured her with electroshock. As she learned, this was standard practice for new prisoners: “priyomka,” the guards called it, or “intake.”
The jail had been separated into two camps: one for Russian criminal prisoners, the other for Ukrainians. Viktoria was in a cell with one other woman. At six in the morning, they were required to stand and sing the Russian anthem. “If you got a word wrong, you had to start over,” Viktoria said. “They laughed at me, saying, ‘You’re a schoolteacher. Now you’re the one who has to pass the test.’ ” Prisoners were brought meals in their cells and allowed to bathe once a week—the shower stalls were in a neighboring cell block, and the walk over was the only time that Viktoria was able to see the open sky.
Viktoria was taken for regular interrogations, during which her captors would repeat the same questions: Are you a spotter for the Ukrainian military? Do you have access to secret information? You seem well prepared—were you recruited by the secret services? “I kept telling them, ‘I don’t have anything new to say,’ ” Viktoria remembered. “I’m just an ordinary schoolteacher.”
Her interrogators told her that Ukraine’s President, Volodymyr Zelensky, had fled Kyiv, and the Russian Army was about to take the capital; in the Kharkiv and Zaporizhzhia regions, they said, the fight had ended so long ago that residents were in the process of becoming Russian citizens. Prisoners were forced to watch Russian state news programs showing happy, satisfied people in newly occupied regions of Ukraine. “I watched that and thought, Can it be true?” Viktoria said. “But then I reminded myself not to believe it, that I remembered the country I had left.”
Early on, the guards told her that, because she is a woman, they wouldn’t torture her physically—but, as they put it, “no one forbids us from pressuring you psychologically.” Viktoria said, “They would tell us we’re not needed by anyone, there’s no more Ukraine, we’re forgotten, no one is coming to get us.” But, one day in July, a sympathetic investigator whispered a piece of news: “Everything is fine at home.” The Russians, he said, had left Staryi Bykiv.
By that point, Viktoria and her cellmates had resolved to ignore the guards’ abuse. “We simply stopped responding, at most turning it into a kind of joke, laughing about it,” she told me. “They would scream, and we would say, ‘What’s wrong? Why are you screaming?’ They couldn’t understand. Everyone else is afraid, and here we were, saying, ‘Do what you like. Scream if you want to.’ ” Viktoria added, “It drove them crazy when we laughed.” Once, guards tried to force the women from Viktoria’s cell to march in place, chanting, “Glory to Russia,” and cursing Zelensky. They refused, and the guards left them alone.
I asked about the letter she wrote to her family. One day, she and the other female prisoners were brought into an office and handed pens and paper. “I guess I was in a good mood that day,” she said. “I was trying not to fall into depression. Who knows how long I’d sit here?” Fine, she thought, I’ll write what the guards are demanding. “I understood they needed this letter more than I did.”
Occasionally, a new woman would show up in the cell—including an army medic who had been among the last Ukrainian defenders of Mariupol—but the days largely had a plodding sameness. The women retold the plots of their favorite novels to one another. Viktoria narrated the works of Daniel Keyes, including “Flowers for Algernon,” the tale of a man who undergoes experimental neurosurgery, and “The Minds of Billy Milligan,” a nonfiction book about the first person in America acquitted of major crimes because of dissociative-identity disorder. Viktoria came up with the idea for a role-playing game, in which they took turns pretending they’d woken up in a strange, empty room and had to figure out what to do next. “It was inspired by real life, you could say,” Viktoria told me. “Here we are, stolen from our families, taken to who knows where.”
On September 15th, after five months in jail, Viktoria celebrated her twenty-sixth birthday. Her cellmates filled their teacups with water and wished her a quick return home. But none of them had much hope left. “The first few months, we were waiting for someone to come and open the door at any moment, but after a while we stopped,” she said. “We turned off that part of our brains.”
Five days later, guards came to Viktoria’s cell and told her and her cellmates to gather their things. They were driven to another women’s prison, where they spent the next several days. They learned they were in Bryansk, a Russian region near the border with Belarus; this got Viktoria’s hopes up for an exchange. “I told the other girls, ‘We won’t be here for long,’ ” she said. Finally, on September 29th, Viktoria and five other Ukrainian prisoners were again loaded into a van. They passed through Belarus, then were separated into two jeeps—one for men, the other for women. They drove a bit more, then the Russian guards told them to get out.
As Viktoria walked along the road, she saw a sign written in Ukrainian. She turned to another prisoner, an army sniper named Ivan, and told him, “We’re safe. We’re home.” He looked shaken, as if he was about to cry; she hugged him. A Ukrainian soldier stood in front of them. “Welcome back to your native land,” he said. Another Ukrainian officer handed the prisoners mobile phones and a bite to eat.
After a few days in a military hospital, where she was looked after by doctors and debriefed by investigators from the S.B.U., Ukraine’s security service, Viktoria made it back to Staryi Bykiv. Her parents put up balloons. Neighbors came by. Mykola grilled shashlik kebabs. He told me that he hasn’t asked his daughter about the details of her time as a prisoner. “I don’t want to aggravate her,” he said. “She’s had enough of that.”
But her return home has meant confronting stark new details about the occupation of Staryi Bykiv. The man from whose arm she had pulled out a bullet, for example, was among those shot by their Russian captors. “When I was in jail, we were all told that Russians are very tolerant and considerate, that they came to Ukraine to save people,” Viktoria said. Coming home has severed her from the last of those illusions: “The belief that there is something human left in them has died completely.”
For her part, Viktoria takes heightened pleasure, these days, in the simplicity of life in Staryi Bykiv: a walk outside, fresh air, a chat with her parents. “I’ve come to understand that happiness, joy, love are contained in the smallest things,” she told me. Yet she doesn’t regret her own decisions, and would again do the same, even knowing she would end up a prisoner. “Everyone has their own path in life,” she said. “I follow my own as best I can.” ♦
