BBC“I don’t need to be right here in any respect” is a protestation you’d count on to listen to from somebody in jail. However, as she sits in her maroon overalls, Tetyana Potapenko is adamant that she isn’t who the Ukrainian state says she is.
One 12 months right into a five-year sentence, she is one in every of 62 convicted collaborators on this jail, held in isolation from different inmates.
The jail is close to Dnipro, about 300km (186 miles) from Tetyana’s residence city of Lyman. Near the entrance traces of the Donbas, Lyman was occupied for six months by Russia and liberated in 2022.
As we sit within the pink-walled room the place inmates can telephone residence, Tetyana explains that she had been a neighbourhood volunteer for 15 years, liaising with native officers – however that carrying on these duties as soon as the Russians arrived had value her dearly.
Ukrainian prosecutors claimed she had illegally taken an official function with the occupiers, which included handing out reduction provides.
“Winter was over, individuals have been out of meals, somebody needed to advocate,” she says. “I couldn’t depart these outdated individuals. I grew up amongst them.”
The 54-year-old is one in every of virtually 2,000 individuals convicted of collaborating with the Russians underneath laws drafted practically as rapidly as Moscow’s advance in 2022.
Kyiv knew it needed to deter individuals from each sympathising and co-operating with the invaders.
And so, in just a little over every week, MPs handed an modification to the Prison Code, making collaboration an offence – one thing they’d didn’t agree on since 2014, when Russia annexed Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula.
Earlier than the full-scale invasion, Tetyana used to liaise with native officers to supply her neighbours with supplies equivalent to firewood.
As soon as the brand new Russian rulers have been in place, she says she was satisfied by a pal to additionally interact with them to safe much-needed medicines.
“I didn’t co-operate with them voluntarily,” she says. “I defined disabled individuals couldn’t entry the medicine they wanted. Somebody filmed me and posted it on-line, and Ukrainian prosecutors used it to say I used to be working for them.”
After Lyman was liberated, a court docket was proven paperwork she had signed that urged she had taken an official function with the occupying authority.
She all of a sudden turns into animated.
“What’s my crime? Preventing for my individuals?” she asks. “I by no means labored for the Russians. I survived and now discover myself in jail.”
The 2022 collaboration regulation was drawn as much as forestall individuals from serving to the advancing Russian military, explains Onysiya Syniuk, a authorized knowledgeable on the Zmina Human Rights Centre in Kyiv.
“Nevertheless, the laws encompasses every kind of actions, together with these which don’t hurt nationwide safety,” she says.
Collaboration offences vary from merely denying the illegality of Russia’s invasion, or supporting it in particular person or on-line, to enjoying a political or army function for the occupying powers.
Accompanying punishments are robust too, with jail phrases of as much as 15 years.
Out of just about 9,000 collaboration circumstances up to now, Ms Syniuk and her workforce have analysed many of the convictions, together with Tetyana’s, and say they’re involved the laws is simply too broad.
“Now people who find themselves offering important companies within the occupied territories may even fall liable underneath this laws,” says Ms Syniuk.
She thinks lawmakers ought to take note of the truth of dwelling and dealing underneath occupation for greater than two years.
We drive to Tetyana’s residence city to go to her frail husband and disabled son. As we close to Lyman, the scars of warfare are clear.
Civilian life drains away and autos step by step flip a army inexperienced. Droopy energy traces dangle from collapsed pylons and the principle railway has been swallowed by overgrown grass.
Whereas the sunflower fields are unscathed, the city isn’t. It has been bludgeoned by airstrikes and combating.
The Russians have now moved again to inside practically 10km (6 miles). We have been informed they often begin shelling at about 15:30, and the day we visited was no exception.
Tetyana’s husband, Volodymyr Andreyev, 73, tells me he’s “in a gap” – the family is falling aside with out his spouse, and he and his son solely handle with the assistance of neighbours.
“If I have been weak, I might burst into tears,” he says.
He struggles to know why his spouse isn’t with him.
Tetyana may need acquired a shorter sentence had she admitted her guilt, however she refuses. “I’ll by no means admit that I’m an enemy of state,” she says.
However there have been enemies of state – and their actions have had lethal penalties.
Final autumn, we walked on the bloodstained soil of the liberated village Hroza within the Kharkiv area of jap Ukraine. A Russian missile had hit a restaurant the place the funeral of a Ukrainian soldier was going down – it had been unattainable to carry the service whereas Hroza was underneath Russian occupation.
Fifty-nine individuals – virtually 1 / 4 of Hroza’s inhabitants – have been killed. We knocked on doorways to seek out kids alone at residence. Their mother and father weren’t coming again.
The safety service later revealed that two native males, Volodymyr and Dmytro Mamon, had tipped off the Russians.
The brothers have been former law enforcement officials who had allegedly begun working for the occupying pressure.
When the village was liberated they fled throughout the border with Russian troops, however stayed in contact with their outdated neighbours – who unwittingly informed them concerning the upcoming funeral.
YAKIV LIASHENKO/EPA-EFE/REXThe brothers have since been charged with excessive treason – however are unlikely to be jailed in Ukraine.
That’s broadly the story of Kyiv’s battle with collaborators. Those that commit extra severe crimes – guiding assaults, leaking army info or organising sham referendums to legitimise occupying forces – are principally tried in absentia.
These dealing with much less severe fees are sometimes those who find yourself within the dock.
Below the Geneva Conference, occupying Russian forces have to permit and supply the means for individuals to proceed dwelling their lives.
Simply as Tetyana Potapenko says she tried to do, when troops moved into Lyman in Could 2022.
Her case is one in every of a number of we’ve got uncovered throughout jap Ukraine.
They embrace a faculty principal jailed for accepting a Russian curriculum – his defence, his lawyer says, was that though he had accepted Russian supplies, he didn’t use them. And within the Kharkiv area, we heard a couple of sports activities stadium supervisor dealing with 12 years in jail for persevering with to host matches whereas underneath occupation. His lawyer says he had solely organised two pleasant matches between native groups.
Within the eyes of the United Nations (UN), these collaboration convictions breach worldwide humanitarian regulation. A 3rd of these handed down in Ukraine from the beginning of the warfare in February 2022 till the tip of 2023 lacked a authorized foundation, it says.
“Crimes have been carried out on occupied territory, and folks must be held to account for the hurt they’ve achieved to Ukraine – however we’ve additionally seen the regulation utilized unfairly,” says Danielle Bell, the pinnacle of the UN’s Human Rights Monitoring Mission within the nation.
Ms Bell argues that the regulation doesn’t contemplate somebody’s motive, equivalent to whether or not they’re actively collaborating, or making an attempt to earn an earnings, which they’re legally allowed to do. She says everyone seems to be criminalised underneath its obscure wording.
“There are numerous examples the place individuals have acted underneath duress and carried out capabilities to easily survive,” she says.
That is precisely what occurred to Dmytro Herasymenko, who’s from Tetyana’s residence city of Lyman.
In October 2022, he emerged from his basement after artillery and mortar hearth had subsided. The front line had passed through Lyman, and it was underneath Russian occupation.
“By that point individuals had been dwelling with out energy for 2 months,” he recollects. Dmytro had labored as an electrician within the city for 10 years.
The occupying authorities requested for volunteers to assist restore energy, and he caught up his hand. “Individuals needed to survive,” he says. “[The Russians] stated I might work like this or by no means. I used to be afraid of turning them down and being hunted by them.”
For Dmytro and Tetyana, the reduction of liberation was temporary. After Ukraine took again management of the city, officers from the nation’s safety service – the SBU – introduced them in for questioning.
After admitting to having offered energy to the Russian occupiers, Dmytro was swiftly handed a suspended sentence and banned from working as a state electrician for 12 years.
We discovered him on the storage the place he now works as a mechanic. Shiny instruments replicate his enforced profession change. “I can’t be judged in the identical manner as collaborators who assist information missiles,” he says.
His protests echoed Tetyana’s. “What can you are feeling when a international military strikes in?” she requested. “Worry after all.”
Such concern is justified. The UN has discovered proof of Russian forces concentrating on and even torturing individuals supporting Ukraine.
“We’ve had circumstances of people being detained, tortured, disappeared, merely for expressing pro-Ukrainian views,” says the UN’s Ms Bell.
From the second Moscow invaded Crimea in 2014, the definition of being “pro-Russian” modified within the eyes of Ukrainian lawmakers – from merely favouring nearer nationwide ties, to supporting a Russian invasion seen as genocidal.
That very same 12 months, Russian proxy forces – funded by the Kremlin – additionally occupied a 3rd of the Donetsk and Luhansk areas.
It’s usually the aged who select to, or are pressured to, reside underneath occupation. Some could also be too frail to go away.
There may even be these with Soviet nostalgia or sympathy with modern-day Russia.
However given how Ukraine may in the future need to reunite, does the collaboration regulation come down too laborious?
The message from one MP who helped draw it up is blunt: “You’re both with us, or towards us.”
Andriy Osadchuk is the deputy head of the parliamentary committee on regulation enforcement. He strongly disagrees that the laws breaks the Geneva Conference, however accepts it wants enchancment.
“The results are extraordinarily robust, however this isn’t an everyday crime. We’re speaking about life and demise,” he says defiantly.
Mr Osadchuk believes it’s, in truth, worldwide regulation which has to meet up with the warfare in Ukraine, not the opposite manner spherical.
“We have to construct Ukraine on liberated territories, and never make somebody completely satisfied from the surface world,” he says.
The UN monitoring mission admits there have been some enhancements. Ukraine’s prosecutor normal has lately instructed his workplaces to adjust to worldwide humanitarian regulation whereas investigating collaboration circumstances.
Ukraine’s parliament can also be planning so as to add extra amendments to the laws in September. One urged change would see some individuals issued with fines as an alternative of jail sentences.
For now, Kyiv sees the likes of Tetyana and Dmytro as acceptable recipients of robust justice, if it means Ukraine can lastly be freed from Russia’s grasp.
The pair declare they solely remorse not escaping when the Russians moved within the first time.
However with the state respiratory down their necks and Lyman prone to falling as soon as extra, it’s not clear how candid they are often.
Further reporting by Hanna Chornous, Aamir Peerzada and Hanna Tsyba.
All BBC pictures by Lee Durant.
