There are encounters that leave you with no escape. Not because they impose a truth on you, but because they take away your alibi. That of distance, of complexity, of ‘we don’t know enough’. Yesterday I met Oleksandr Tarasov, a former Ukrainian political prisoner, and Yevgeniya Chirikova, an activist. They came to tell us what many prefer not to see: the face of the occupation when there are no cameras, when the news headlights go out and the armoured doors remain, the windowless dungeons, the plastic bags slung over their heads, the hum of electricity.

Oleksandr told us the exact date: 7 March 2022. Five days after the Russians entered Kherson, while the city was trying to resist with civil protests, he was arrested, precisely because he was carrying out those protests. First he was taken to the basement of Kherson, then transferred to the Crimea, in total isolation: no contact with the outside world, no chosen lawyer, no guarantees, for a whole year. Thanks to pressure from the international community, he managed to get out, and today he is trying to help all the civilians imprisoned by the Russian Federation.

The numbers make one shudder. There are thirty thousand Ukrainian civilian prisoners. The public hardly knows four hundred of them. The rest are whispered names, clandestine lists, families that keep quiet for fear of the FSB, the control machine that monitors phones, social networks, movements, that stalks, schedules, intimidates. Those who do not show loyalty to the Russian Federation end up in the meshes of a punitive system created ad hoc. After the occupation of Kherson, the Russian Federation set up civil-military administrations, transferred judges from Crimea to form new courts whose sole mandate was to punish. Punish whom? Even those who refused the imposition of a new identity by accepting Russian citizenship and passport.

This is perhaps the hardest point to accept for those who, from afar, are under the illusion that war is a matter of maps. Occupation is a politics of identity. If you stay, you must become something else: a citizen of another state, loyal to another church, a subject of another right. To refuse is to risk prison. It happened to the non-aligned pastors of the Moscow Patriarchate; their names – Viktor Bondarenko, Konstantin Maksimov – today say above all this: that repression also passes through symbols, through places of community, through the soul of a people.

Torture, repression and forgotten stories

The stories are similar, yet each one is unbearably unique. Oleksandr recalled a fellow detainee who refused the federally imposed lawyer. They took him to another room and tortured him with electricity. Then there is the tale of the mayor of Kherson, who in March 2022 opposed the occupation, and for this he paid with detention and torture for his decision to defend his country from the Russian invasion. He was released a few weeks ago, but the marks have taken their toll on the whole family.

When she disappeared in 2022, her niece reported her disappearance to the military civil administration, the very one the Russians had set up after the occupation. Hearing the name of the opposing mayor, the servants, because it is difficult to call them anything else, of Putin, raped and beat her for hours, with the criminal arrogance of those who even claim to dictate the meaning of abuse: ‘consider it a life experience’, she was told.

After listening to them, it becomes impossible to accept a certain European and international superficiality when discussing ‘territorial cessions’ as the price for negotiation. It is not a move on a chessboard: it is the lives of thousands of people. It is the fate of entire communities consigned to a regime of exception that has nothing of the exception: the exception is the rule, the law is its simulacrum. Talking about borders without talking about law, protection of civilians, humanitarian access, verified lists of detainees and their release means accepting that figures remain shadows. It means betraying reality to domesticate it to a pragmatism without people.

In our encounter, emotion did not weaken the analysis: it made it more accurate. Because the words of those who have suffered repression force a recalibration of categories. Prisoners of war can re-enter the exchanges, their status is recognised; civilians, on the other hand, are the blind spot of public discourse. They disappear into the ‘underground’, are reclassified as spies, saboteurs, extremists, until denaturalisation: new documents, new language, new church. A people also defends itself by remaining itself. That is why, in the architecture of the occupation, Ukrainian identity becomes a target.

There is another word that returned many times yesterday: fear. Fear of denouncing, fear of being heard, fear that a call or a message will betray a contact, a thought, a dissent. The ubiquity of control is the most modern trait of this occupation. It is not just the man in uniform: it is the algorithm that reads social networks, the telephone cell that locates you, the network that squeezes you even when you think you are out in the open. It is a panopticon 2.0, where the FSB doesn’t have to be everywhere because it can be.

European responsibility and the voice of the victims

What does it mean, then, to take responsibility here, in Europe? It means rejecting the mental shortcut that separates diplomacy and human rights. Every table must contain minimum and verifiable clauses, because Ukraine cannot be left alone in this either.

The writer has no illusions: international law is full of grey areas and institutions are often slower than the pain. The International Criminal Court has limited powers, Russia has left the Council of Europe and its protection mechanisms. But precisely because of this, civil society (journalists, associations, universities, research centres) must avoid the most convenient of tactics: removal.

Keep reporting, demand data, build archives, teach readers to read news for what it implies, not just what it says. A headline that talks about ‘prisoner exchanges’ must always remember the other half: exchanges are not about civilians kidnapped under occupation. And, as Oleksandr reminded us, when one civilian prisoner is released, three others are imprisoned.

At this point, some will argue that emotions should not drive policy. The opposite is true: informed emotions are what distinguish empathy from propaganda. The testimony of Tarasov and Chirikova is not a slogan; it is personal evidence, it is memory that demands to be taken in charge. When a man tells you about being blindfolded, his hands tied behind his back, his head pushed down in what is called ‘the swan position’, he is not asking for compassion. He is asking for justice.

The most difficult question remains: what can we do? We can do what we know how to do: inform, explain, connect the dots, remove the excuse of ignorance from cynicism. We can demand that numbers stop being statistics and become people again: thirty thousand is not a figure, it is a stifled chorus. We can remember that every negotiation has a human cost and that evaluating them is not a moralistic quirk, it is the human and political measure.

Oleksandr and Yevgeniya asked us a simple and very difficult thing: ‘tell us, don’t let the web of terror make us dumb too’.

That is why, when in Europe we hear people say that perhaps something must be ‘surrendered’ to silence the weapons, we should have the courage to ask: what, exactly, are we surrendering? Not square kilometres, but bodies; not lines on a map, but lives that will be interrogated, filed, recruited, re-educated. This is not peace: it is the transfer of violence from one visible place to a thousand invisible places. It is the peace of the underground.

Don’t call them ‘collateral damage’. They are citizens, mothers, fathers, sisters, grandchildren. They are thirty thousand stories asking to be brought back into the light. And in the face of this, politics, information, diplomacy have one simple responsibility: not to look away.