![\"\"](\"http:\/\/wardoon.net\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/10\/000_32M79YM.webp\")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
In May, 26-year-old Ukrainian military nurse Viktoria Obidina was forced to part with her four-year-old daughter.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was glad she wasn\u2019t near me,\u201d she told Al Jazeera, describing how she trusted a total stranger to take Alisa away on a bus.<\/p>\n
Mother and daughter were in a filtration camp for Ukrainian prisoners of war captured in the southern city of Mariupol, and Obidina was about to be whisked away to a Russian detention centre.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey could have tortured me near her or could have tortured her to make me do things,\u201d she explained matter-of-factly.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey\u201d were the Russian servicemen and pro-Russian separatists who interrogated her and roughly 1,000 Ukrainians who emerged from Azovstal, a huge steel plant that was the last Ukrainian holdout in besieged Mariupol.<\/p>\n
Azovstal\u00a0withstood almost three months of constant attacks, and its defenders left their underground bunkers only after a direct order from Kyiv.<\/p>\n
The separatists threatened to sentence some servicemen to death and kept them in concentration camp-like conditions for months, just as they do with thousands of other Ukrainian prisoners of war.<\/p>\n
Some of the POWs are women.\u00a0And some have been subjected to starvation, torture and sexual humiliation, Ukrainian officials and former POWs say.<\/p>\n
\u201cThese people hold nothing sacred,\u201d said Inga Chikinda, a Lithuania-born marine who was among 108 servicewomen and civilians released on October 17 in a POW swap.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere were times when we were starving,\u201d Chikinda told Al Jazeera. \u201cWe were not treated like humans.\u201d<\/p>\n
She lost 8kg (17.6 pounds) in one of the Russian jails.<\/p>\n
Their captors kept them away from non-Russian news outlets and any contact with their relatives and Ukrainian officials.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In May, 26-year-old Ukrainian military nurse Viktoria Obidina was forced to part with her four-year-old daughter. \u201cI was glad she wasn\u2019t near me,\u201d she told Al Jazeera, describing how she trusted a total stranger to take Alisa away on a bus. Mother and daughter were in a filtration camp for Ukrainian prisoners of war captured […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":183148,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"rop_custom_images_group":[],"rop_custom_messages_group":[],"rop_publish_now":"initial","rop_publish_now_accounts":{"facebook_10221280388112155_325455220908133":"","twitter_917774835383787521_917774835383787521":""},"rop_publish_now_history":[],"rop_publish_now_status":"pending","footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/wardoon.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/183147"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/wardoon.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/wardoon.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/wardoon.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/wardoon.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=183147"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/wardoon.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/183147\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":183150,"href":"http:\/\/wardoon.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/183147\/revisions\/183150"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/wardoon.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/183148"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/wardoon.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=183147"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/wardoon.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=183147"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/wardoon.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=183147"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}