Three civilian Ukrainian women – Svitlana Holovan, Yuliia Panina and Maryna Berezniatska – have been freed from Russian captivity during the latest prisoner exchange.

Source: Liudmyla Huseinova, a human rights activist and head of the NGO Numo, Sisters!; Coordination Headquarters for the Treatment of Prisoners of War

Details: The Coordination Headquarters revealed that the women are from Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts. One of them is a primary school teacher who was captured by the Russians in 2019. One of the freed women said: “The feeling cannot be described”.

Among those who returned from Russian captivity is Svitlana Holovan. She is from the city of Novoazovsk in Donetsk Oblast and was arrested in August 2019. At the time, she had two young daughters and earned a living by providing transport services, including helping locals get to Mariupol to collect pensions or other documents.

Quote from Huseinova: “In August 2019, ‘MGB’ [Russian-controlled security service in occupied Donetsk – ed.] officers decided to arrest her. They came to her home, turned the place upside down, and took a child’s laptop, money and car. This all happened in front of her young children. Her younger daughter was four years old at the time. The child ran after the car her mother had been put into, crying: ‘Give me my mum back, leave her’.”

Details: At the time of her arrest, Svitlana’s younger daughter was four and her elder daughter was 10. For two years, the Russians did not allow her to see her family or hire a private lawyer. She had to rely on a state-appointed lawyer who insisted she plead guilty. She refused and was left without any defence at all.

Huseinova said that during those two years Holovan was tortured in the Izolyatsia prison run by the Russian-controlled militants in Donetsk. She was later sentenced to 10 years and six months in prison and transferred to a penal colony in Snizhne, Donetsk Oblast.

Quote: “We rarely talk about the colony in Snizhne, but I will tell you what women who were freed said. It is forced labour from 08:00 to 20:00. The women are forced to sit in sewing workshops and make clothes for the Russian military. They get one day off per week. They also carry sacks of coal weighing 50 kg.”

More details: Svitlana’s husband took their daughters to Mariupol, but in 2022 the family again came under Russian occupation. Currently, the daughters live in Germany with their father. Until now, her family had no information about her whereabouts or condition.

Background: On 14 August, the 67th prisoner exchange between Russia and Ukraine took place. As a result, 84 Ukrainian military personnel and civilians returned home – almost all of them are in need of medical care and rehabilitation.

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