After fighting for nearly three years against Russia’s all-out invasion, Ukrainians now fear that their chief ally, the United States, may try to force them to forsake part of their country in a deal with the Kremlin when Donald Trump returns to the White House.
“That would mean the state betraying its own citizens,” says Oksana Zayarina, an accountant who was imprisoned and tortured by Russians when they seized Berdyansk in southeastern Ukraine. “People living under occupation are waiting for Ukraine to come back.”
No one knows how Trump plans to prove his claim that he only needs one day to end Europe’s biggest war since 1945, but the Kremlin says no peace is possible unless Ukraine gives up five provinces forever - Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, Zaporizhzhia and Crimea - and abandons its ambition to join Nato.
Any deal to legalise Moscow’s land grab is unacceptable for Zayarina and millions of other Ukrainians who are now trying to survive occupation or dreaming, like her, of returning to their hometowns when they are liberated.
Moscow’s military seized Berdyansk, a small port and resort on the Azov Sea 75km from Mariupol, a few days after launching a full-scale war on Ukraine in February 2022 that displaced some 14 million people.
Zayarina (55) and husband Mykhailo (68) did not hide their loyalty to Ukraine, refused to take a Russian passport or any form of aid from the occupiers and continued to help a local volunteer group until it was shut down in April 2022 and some of its members were arrested along with local officials.
“We realised then that we were really under occupation and it wouldn’t end quickly. We had been waiting for things to change but more and more people were leaving Berdyansk, including people who had fled there from Mariupol. I just didn’t go quickly enough,” she recalls.
Zayarina had packed a suitcase to leave for Kyiv-controlled territory on July 1st. Then she would travel to the safety of western Ukraine and decide whether to stay and work there or go abroad, while sending money home to Mykhailo and visiting him whenever she could. But shortly before midnight on June 25th the Russians came to their house.
Soldiers and officers from Russia’s FSB security service searched the house with sniffer dogs, apparently looking for weapons or other evidence of links to pro-Ukrainian resistance in Berdyansk. Then the couple were taken to a former police station and put in separate cells in the basement.
Interrogations began that night and continued the following day, with men in balaclavas demanding information about Zayarina’s friends and acquaintances and her supposed co-operation with Ukraine’s military and security services.
“It was completely terrifying, because I already knew what they did to people they detained,” Zayarina says.
“They started threatening me, pressuring me, saying they would bring my husband into the room and beat him in front of me, and that if I didn’t confess I would be ... imprisoned for 10 years and no one would know what had happened to me.
“They brought in a black device and asked if I knew what it was ... They said now we’re going to interrogate you and you will admit to everything. Then they attached wires to my legs and began turning on the current.”
Zayarina remembers screaming in pain but does not know how long the torture lasted. Then she was taken away and put in a cramped solitary confinement cell with three other women.
“They warned us that if something happened in the city, they would blame us and kill me. They had found a small axe among my husband’s tools during the search of our home, and said they would stick it in my head,” she says.
“They took a girl of 19 for interrogation and threatened to rape her. And every day we heard how they tortured men, how they brought them in for questioning, beat them badly using truncheons and wooden hammers, and how they electrocuted them. I was so worried about my husband but they didn’t call him for interrogation.”
The list of Russian atrocities committed in Ukraine proves that the current international tools are not working
— Ukraine foreign minister Andrii Sybiha
During more than 80 days in captivity, Zayarina saw Mykhailo only a handful of times and could exchange just a few words with him.
“One day the guards told me to get my things because I was being taken to another facility,” she recalls. “As I was being moved, I saw my husband standing facing a wall. I asked for permission to approach him and the guard allowed it. My husband told me: ‘Don’t say anything. We just need to survive this.’”
They did survive, and after Zayarina was released in September 2022 they left Berdyansk and moved to Kyiv. She describes what she went through as only a “tiny fraction” of what many of her compatriots endure at the hands of the occupiers; last month, it was discovered that award-winning Ukrainian journalist Victoria Roshchyna (27) had died in captivity after being jailed in Berdyansk and then transferred to Russia.
“A person cannot be Ukrainian in occupied territory,” says Yelyzaveta Sokurenko, head of war crimes documentation at the Zmina centre for human rights in Kyiv.
For the estimated five million people now living in occupied areas, communicating in Ukrainian is effectively banned and any display of the national language or symbols is crushed; Zayarina recalls how her captors described her in case documents as a “pro-Ukrainian activist/extremist” simply because she opposed the invasion.
No Russian law enforcement agency or court will protect a Ukrainian in Moscow-held territory, where any refusal to accept Kremlin rule is punished.
“We see cases of forcible ‘passportisation’, when Russian citizenship is imposed on Ukrainian civilians – without a Russian passport you’ll have no access to social or medical services and the Russians will take it as a sign that you’re not loyal to them,” Sokurenko says.
“People in occupied areas tell us that they can’t even call an ambulance, because they would need an insurance number that’s only available with a Russian passport,” she explains.
“There is no opportunity for kids who want to study in Ukrainian to do so online. One of the main Russian practices when it occupies territory is to take immediate control of the education system. Russia wants to indoctrinate and militarise Ukrainian children.”
[ How Ireland became ‘kind of a small motherland’ for Ukrainian childrenOpens in new window ]
Kyiv says at least 20,000 Ukrainian children have been forcibly transferred to Russia, in a practice that prompted the International Criminal Court to issue an arrest warrant for Russian president Vladimir Putin and one of his officials in 2023.
Ukrainian foreign minister Andrii Sybiha said this month that it “might be the largest state-run child-kidnapping operation in history.”
“They are subjected to indoctrination, forced Russian citizenship, adoption or foster placement with Russian families and even name changes,” he added. “These actions by Russia violate the Genocide Convention, UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, and the Fourth Geneva Convention.”
International organisations such as the Red Cross and United Nations agencies have extremely limited access to occupied areas, which helps Russia hide its treatment of Ukrainian civilians and much of the death and destruction caused by its takeover.
[ Ukraine’s children of war: A boy blurts out, ‘My dad got killed at Bakhmut!’Opens in new window ]
The office of Ukraine’s prosecutor general says it has opened investigations into the illegal detention of some 14,000 Ukrainian civilians in occupied areas and has recorded more than 140,000 war crimes during the full-scale invasion.
“The list of Russian atrocities committed in Ukraine proves that the current international tools are not working. We need new mechanisms to ensure accountability for the crime of aggression and all subsequent crimes. If this requires setting a precedent, let’s set a precedent,” Sybiha said.
Yet instead of breaking the mould, Trump is expected to propose a variation on the kind of land-for-peace deal that failed so catastrophically last century – giving an aggressor at least part of what he wants in the hope he will be satisfied and stop there.
Ukraine’s Crimean Tatar community, most of which strongly opposed the Kremlin’s illegal annexation of the Black Sea peninsula in 2014, has already said it would not accept any agreement that abandoned its homeland to permanent Russian occupation.
“No decision regarding the territorial affiliation of the Crimean peninsula ... can be made without the express will of the indigenous Crimean Tatar people and the agreement of the Ukrainian state,” said a statement issued this month by the Mejlis, the Crimean Tatar assembly that Russia has banned as an “extremist” organisation.
“The Mejlis ... is sure that any concessions to the territorial encroachment of the Russian Federation on Crimea and other occupied lands of Ukraine will not only fail to bring the anticipated peace but will also become a factor in the emergence of new military and political conflicts,” the assembly warned.
For most of his seven months in Russian captivity, Ukrainian businessman Hryhorii Holovko was held in a detention centre in Kalanchak close to northern Crimea, crammed with 10 or more other prisoners into a cell designed for three.
Prisoners were not allowed to see their families and could only maintain contact with them by smuggling tiny notes into and out of the jail in bags of laundry that relatives would wash and return.
“When someone got a clothes package, everyone in the cell would take everything out and search every piece of clothing for a hidden note. It could be a little strip of paper saying something like: ‘We are alive, the kids are okay, we love you, we are waiting for you,’” says Holovko (41), who received such messages from his wife Iryna and their two young boys.
He had been detained in October 2022 in the market where he ran a shop in Hola Prystan, a town on the Dnipro river in the southeastern Kherson region, on suspicion of giving information to Ukrainian forces to help them target Russian troops in the area.
In the local police station he was punched and kicked and shocked with an electric stun gun, before being loaded into a car and taken to a field where Russian soldiers continued to beat him and burned him with cigarettes. One of them put a gun to his head and threatened to execute him before shooting to the side.
Back at the station, they broke Holovko’s thumb with a blow from a gun and carved RF for “Russian Federation” into one of his buttocks with a knife.
About two weeks later, Holovko and three other civilian detainees were moved to Kalanchak, where he says the guards forced them to sing the Russian national anthem while telling them “their history of the world” according to Kremlin propaganda.
“Newcomers were taken out into the corridor at midnight and forced to sing the anthem until four or five in the morning ... Anyone who forgot the words or made mistakes was punched or given an electric shock.”
Holovko was freed in May 2023 and finally left occupied territory later that year with his family, travelling to the safety of Kyiv-controlled Ukraine via a nerve-racking journey through Crimea and Russia itself.
Just as Zayarina dreams of going back to Berdyansk, so Holovko is determined to return to Hola Prystan, even though his family home was badly flooded when the Russian-occupied Kakhovka dam on the Dnipro exploded three weeks after his release.
“It’s still my land and it’s home – the place I rode my first bike, first scraped my knees, had my first kiss,” he says.
“There should be no concessions because this is our territory, our people live there and many of them are hoping and waiting for Ukraine to return. People I talk to there ask me if Ukraine has forgotten about them. I tell them no, of course not, our [military] guys are working and doing what they have to do.”
Trump prides himself on being a dealmaker, and in advance of his inauguration on January 20th, 2025, speculation will surely grow over what territory he could press Ukraine to abandon in exchange for some sort of peace agreement with Russia.
“That would be devastating for people living in occupation,” says Sokurenko. “We see that Russia has a policy of persecuting civilians. Basic human rights are violated every day ... You can’t be Ukrainian there – your identity will be blurred and your kids won’t know their identity, and they might be forced to participate in some other Russian war.”
If occupied territory were bargained away, Zayarina might never again see her 75-year-old father, who still lives in a Russian-held area.
“He is waiting,” Zayarina says, before recalling a friend who stayed in Berdyansk to care for her seriously ill mother, and who was asked by many friends who fled occupation to keep an eye on their homes.
Zayarina remembers her friend telling her: “I will stay and wait. After all, someone has to be here to greet our soldiers when they arrive.”
- Sign up for push alerts and have the best news, analysis and comment delivered directly to your phone
- Join The Irish Times on WhatsApp and stay up to date
- Listen to our Inside Politics podcast for the best political chat and analysis
