The release on 28 June of the Ukrainian museum researcher Olena Pekh from Russian captivity, has shed light on the plight of other forcibly disappeared Ukrainian cultural workers.
Pekh worked at the art museum in Horlivka, a city in eastern Ukraine that was a flashpoint in the battle between Russian-backed forces and the Ukrainian military after the illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014. A Ukrainian citizen, Pekh had moved to Odesa, but was detained in 2018 when she went to Russian-controlled territory near Horlivka to visit her sick mother. In 2020, she was sentenced to 13 years in prison on charges of state treason against the Russian-controlled Donetsk People’s Republic.
Her release—along with nine others, including two Ukrainian Catholic priests—was mediated by the Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky and Pope Francis.
Pekh’s daughter, Isabella, kept her mother’s case on the agenda by lobbying Zelensky as well as international human rights groups and cultural organisations for her release. Isabella regularly described the torture, rape, and mock executions her mother experienced, telling Prisoners Voice, a website and app documenting stories of Ukrainian political prisoners, that she had tried to take her own life to end the ordeal: “My mum said she was regularly electrocuted, which is why she now has problems with her legs… she had epileptic seizures… she cut her veins because she could no longer stand the abuse.”
“Banksy of Donetsk”
Isabella Pekh recounted the details of her mother’s imprisonment in a report titled “Unpunished Crimes: Sexual Violence of the Russian Occupying Forces Against Ukrainian Women”. The report was compiled by researchers at the Raphael Lemkin Center for Documenting Russian Crimes, launched by Poland’s Pilecki Institute after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. A Polish journalist working with the Lemkin Center on the project was among the first to report on Olena Pekh’s release.
The report is illustrated with graphic drawings by Serhiy Zakharov, a Donetsk artist who was dubbed the “Banksy of Donetsk”. He was imprisoned for a month-and-a-half in 2014 for mocking the Russian occupation through his street art. Zakharov now lives in Kyiv and works with Izolyatsia, an art foundation that had to be evacuated from its base in a Donetsk factory after Russian-backed forces turned it into a prison.
In moving footage, Pekh was led out of Kyiv airport on 29 June with Ukraine’s blue-and-yellow flag wrapped around her shoulders. She appeared gaunt and haunted from her six-year ordeal, yet elated by her release.
Pekh and her daughter spoke via video, in tears. “Don’t cry my baby, I love you very much,” Olena told Isabella. “I’m in Ukraine,” she said. “Don’t cry. It’s all over. It’s over, my little one [..] I’m home.”
Why cultural works are vulnerable to Russian detention
Borys Petrunok, a researcher with Zmina, a human rights organisation in Kyiv that has identified culture workers as one of the groups of Ukrainian citizens most vulnerable to arbitrary detention by Russian forces, says it is incredibly difficult to compile a comprehensive list of the missing. Since Russia “mostly holds captured civilians incommunicado,” Petrunok says, human rights activists generally have to use alternative methods to establish their fates such as “the testimonies of other victims who were released” and who “heard names during roll call at the pretrial detention centre.”
According to Petrunok, the longer there is no information, the more dire the situation becomes due to “the conditions of detention in Russian prisons”. He says: “The risks of irreversible health damage, or even the risk of death, are constantly increasing for all prisoners.”
Zmina has been unable to obtain information about Halyna Kucher, a curator at the Melitopol Museum of Local History, who was kidnapped after she refused to lead a Russian-speaking man in a white lab coat to the museum’s collection of Scythian gold.
The whereabouts of Viacheslav Mashnytskyi, an artist and curator who founded the Museum of Contemporary Art in Kherson, are also unknown. He was abducted from his home when the city came under Russian occupation.
Mashnytskyi was also the founder of an organisation that promoted the work of the self-taught artist Polina Rayko, whose home, full of her work, was destroyed by the breach of the Nova Kakhovka Dam in 2023.
