‘Please send adult diapers’

After Halyna was transferred to another cell, Darya received a letter from her new cellmate. “She’s doing poorly. She categorically refuses to eat. We drag her by the hands to the table,” the woman wrote. “Two of us hold her at the table, so she doesn’t run away. Sometimes we feed her the first spoonful ourselves, so she’ll try it and eat at least half.”

In another letter dated July 15, Bekhter’s cellmate writes about grinding up the elderly woman’s food and medicine, and forcing both into her mouth. Bekhter, who is 176 centimeters tall, has developed muscular dystrophy and weighs just 50 kilograms. “She lies there all the time. She doesn’t change her clothes, doesn’t know what to do in the shower, and has no control over her bodily functions,” the letter says. 

“We support her as best we can. We get angry with her, but there’s no other choice. [...] Changing her is a fight! If you can help, please send adult diapers…”

According to the letter, Halyna Bekhter is being held in a cell with seven people, six of whom are over 60 years old. “That’s how ‘dangerous’ we are to the country,” the cellmate concludes. 

‘Our boys will return soon’

Human rights activist Lyudmila Huseynova spent three years in Russian captivity. A native of the Donetsk region, she was imprisoned in the notorious Izolyatsia torture prison and the Donetsk detention center before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Following her release as part of a prisoner exchange in October 2022, Huseynova founded Numo, Sestry! (“C’mon, Sisters!”), an advocacy group that supports imprisoned Ukrainian civilians and those affected by occupation and war-related violence.

Huseynova’s organization learned the details of Halyna Bekhter’s case from her family. As Huseynova told Novaya Gazeta Europe, Bekhter lived with her husband in Raikhenfeld, a rural village in Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia region formerly known as Plodorodne. Their daughter, who lived in the neighbouring village, fled with her family to Ukrainian-controlled territory in the summer of 2022. “The older generation remained in their home,” Huseynova explains. 

According to Huseynova, the Bekhters never hid their pro-Ukrainian stance, which brought them into conflict with some of their pro-Russian neighbours. In November 2024, Russian forces raided the Bekhters’ home under the pretense of looking for weapons. They seized their passports, phones, laptop, and the bank cards for the Ukrainian accounts where their pensions were deposited. Then, the Bekhters were taken to a police station in the occupied village of Mykhailivka for questioning.

The couple didn’t tell anyone what had happened. But soon after, Halyna found herself in conflict with a pro-Putin neighbour once again. According to Huseynova, in the heat of the moment, Bekhter retorted: “Our boys will return soon. We’ll see how you talk then!” 

On July 29, 2025, while her husband was at work, Halyna returned home in the afternoon to find a dozen Russian soldiers waiting for her. She called her husband from Melitopol to tell him that she’d been arrested. Her daughter’s family hired a lawyer, but there was little he could do to help. 

That September, Halyna was transferred to Yakymivka, another village in the Zaporizhzhia region. From there, she was taken to Donetsk. Then in January 2026, she was placed in Simferopol’s Pre-Trial Detention Center No. 1 (SIZO-1). On March 5, a Zaporizhzhia occupation court convicted Halyna of “high treason,” sentencing her to 11 years in prison.

Investigators allegedly established that Halyna had provided “financial aid to a foreign state, directed against the security of the Russian Federation.” Halyna’s daughter and grandchildren maintain that she was denounced by a neighbour who didn’t share the Bekhter family’s political views.

According to Huseynova, several Ukrainian citizens were reportedly transferred from the Simferopol detention center to Russia’s Krasnodar Krai in the last week. Whether Halyna Bekhter is among them remains unknown. 

‘Ghost people’

On June 10, Svitlana Loi marked her 70th birthday in Simferopol’s Pre-Trial Detention Center No. 1. The same Zaporizhzhia occupation court that convicted Halyna Bekhter sentenced Loi to 15 years in prison. She is scheduled for release in 2040.

According to the prosecution, Loi was issued a Russian passport, but did not renounce her Ukrainian citizenship and continued to receive a Ukrainian pension. In an official statement, the occupation court claimed that Loi — “adhering to her anti-Russian views” — “deliberately and systematically” transferred money to the Ukrainian military using a Ukrainian banking app. She allegedly sent 24 transfers between January and November 2024, totalling the equivalent of about 700 euros today. 

Svitlana was sentenced on February 10. On the eve of her appeal, she wrote to activist Darya Kostromina:

The miracle never came. After Svitlana’s sentencing, she wrote to Kostromina again. “I first studied the verdict, and when I saw my words twisted in the transcript, that I never said those things, only then did I decide to file a complaint. I’m not asking for a reduced sentence; that’s not my goal or objective. Just a cancellation and a new verdict,” she said in the letter. “Even I assume the result will be zero. That’s also a result, and I need it [to prove] that I’ve done everything possible.” 

Ukrainian journalist Vladyslav Yesypenko, who was arrested in Crimea in March 2021, also served time in Pre-Trial Detention Center No. 1 and in a prison colony in Kerch. He was released in June 2025. According to Yesypenko, the repressions and torture intensified after February 24, 2022. His friend, poet and political prisoner Kostiantyn Shyryng, sentenced to 12 years for “espionage,” died in a Russian prison due to a lack of medical attention in 2023. 

“Those women you’re talking about became known because they’re in SIZO-1,” says Yesypenko. “But in [Simferopol’s] SIZO-2, there are several floors where people are held incommunicado. They’re locked up for months or years without charges, without a trial or an investigation, and we know nothing about them. They’re ghost people. They’re political prisoners who aren’t on any lists. The FSB sends them there, and does what they want with them.” 

‘There’s no such person here’

From the first days of the occupation of Crimea, Eskender Bariiev, a member of the Mejlis of the Crimean Tatar People, and his wife, Zarema Bariieva, began documenting human rights violations and war crimes on the peninsula. Since 2022, they’ve expanded their efforts to the occupied areas of the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions. 

“One of the first raids in Crimea was on our house,” Zarema says. Be that as it may, the Bariievs initially remained in their home — until Eskender left for a business trip and Zarema discovered that a criminal case had been opened against him. She told Eskender not to return to Crimea and, four months later, moved with their two children to Kyiv. There, the Bariievs established the Crimean Tatar Resource Center (CTRC), a rights group that documents repressions in real time. They’ve also been gathering bits of information about Simferopol’s Pre-Trial Detention Center No. 2 (SIZO-2). 

 “We recently received reliable information that there are 20 cells on the third floor where people are being held incommunicado. There are two to four people in each cell,” Eskender says.

According to Zarema, this block of cells in SIZO-2 is under the direct control of Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB). These details were gleaned from prisoners who were able to pass along information after they were transferred to prisons in Russia, she says.

According to Zarema, it’s much easier to obtain information from SIZO-1. But finding out the status of political prisoners can take months or even years. Rights activists spent 18 months searching for Anatoliy Kobzar, a resident of Crimea kidnapped in March 2024. Thanks to a campaign led by the CTRC, the FSB finally acknowledged his arrest in October 2025. By that point, Anatoliy had lost 40 kilograms, having been held in various special units of Crimean prisons without so much as a remand hearing. Today, he’s officially been taken into custody and is under investigation for “treason.” 

“For many months, the response to all of our inquiries at all of the SIZOs was: ‘There’s no such person here,’” Zarema recalls. “We searched for Marat Batyrov the same way: we sent 19 inquiries to various SIZOs, not only on the peninsula but all across Russia. As it turned out, he had been held incommunicado in SIZO-2 for seven months.”

Meanwhile, Halyna Bekhter’s health continues to get worse every day. “Halyna Hryhorivna is developing dementia, and she has lost a significant amount of weight by refusing to eat,” Zarema says. “Recently, she took a shower fully clothed, and afterwards her cellmates changed her into dry clothing.”

“Due to the bombings, prisoner transfers from Crimea were suspended temporarily, but now they’ve resumed,” Zarema adds. “I’m worried that Halyna Bekhter simply won’t survive [the next] transfer.” 

In her letters to Darya Kostromina, Svitlana Loi reminisces about her home region, going over the towns and villages: “Melitopol is cherries, Kherson is watermelon, Kam’yanka-Dniprovska is tomatoes and apples.” She has 14 years left in prison.