“I don’t deserve to be here at all.” That’s something you’d expect to hear from someone in prison. But, sitting in her brown overalls, Tetyana Potapenko is adamant that she is not who the Ukrainian state says she is.
A year into her five-year sentence, she is one of 62 people incarcerated in the prison serving sentences for collaborating with Russia.
The prison is located near Dnipro, about 300 km from Liman, Tetyana’s hometown. Close to the Donbas front lines, Liman was occupied by Russia for six months and was liberated in 2022.
As we sit in the pink-walled room where inmates can call home, Tetyana explains that she volunteered in her neighborhood for 15 years – keeping in touch with local officials. but once the Russians arrived, continuing with these tasks had cost him dearly.
Ukrainian prosecutors said he had illegally assumed an official role with the occupiers, including distributing aid supplies.
“Winter was over, people had run out of food, someone had to defend their rights,” he says. “I couldn’t leave those old people. I grew up among them.”
The 54-year-old is one of nearly 2,000 people convicted of collaborating with the Russians under legislation drafted almost as quickly as Moscow moved into 2022.
Kyiv knew it had to dissuade people from sympathizing and cooperating with the invaders.
And so, in just over a week, deputies approved an amendment to the Criminal Code, making collaboration a crime, something they had been unable to agree on since 2014, when Russia annexed the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea.
Before the large-scale invasion in 2024, Tetyana used to contact local officials to provide her neighbors with materials such as firewood.
When the new Russian rulers were in power, she says a friend convinced her to also work with them to ensure they had much-needed medicines.
“I did not cooperate with them voluntarily,” he says.“I explained to them that disabled people could not access the medicines they needed. Someone filmed me and posted it on the internet, and Ukrainian prosecutors used it to indicate that I was working for them.”
After Limán was released, a court saw documents he had signed that suggested he had assumed an official role with the occupying authority.
Suddenly the woman becomes agitated.
“What is my crime? Fighting for my people?” he asks. “I never worked for the Russians. I survived and now I am in prison.”
The 2022 collaboration law was drafted to prevent people from helping the advancing Russian military, explains Onysiya Syniuk, a legal expert at the Zmina Human Rights Center in Kyiv.
“However, The legislation covers all types of activities, including those that do not harm national security,” points out.
Harsh punishments
Crimes of collaboration range from simply denying the illegality of the Russian invasion or supporting it in person or online, to playing a political or military role for the occupying powers.
The punishments contemplated by the law They are also harsh, with prison sentences of up to 15 years.
Of the nearly 9,000 cases of collaboration to date, Syniuk and his team have reviewed most of the convictions, including Tetyana’s, and say they are concerned that the legislation is too broad.
“Now people who provide vital services in the occupied territories will also be held responsible under this legislation,” Syniuk explains.
He believes that legislators should take into account The reality of living and working under occupation for more than two years.
We drive to Tetyana’s hometown to visit her frail husband and disabled son. As we approach Liman, the scars of war are evident.
Civilian life has vanished and vehicles have gradually turned green. Electric cables hang from fallen towers and tall grass has swallowed up the main street.
The sunflower fields are intact, but the city is not. It has been battered by airstrikes and fighting.
The Russians have retreated and are now almost 10 km away. We were told that they usually start shelling around 3:30 pm, and the day we visited the town was no exception.
Tetyana’s husband, Volodymyr Andreyev, 73, tells me he is “in a bind”: the house is falling apart without his wife, and he and his son are only coping with the help of neighbours.
“If I were weak, I would cry,” she says.
He finds it difficult to understand why his wife is not with him.
A deadly attack
Tetyana could have received a shorter sentence if she had admitted her guilt, but she refuses. “I will never admit that I am an enemy of the state,” she says.
But there have been enemies of the state, and their actions have had deadly consequences.
Last fall, we walked across the blood-stained ground of the liberated village of Hroza in the Kharkiv region of eastern Ukraine.
A Russian missile had hit a cafe where the funeral of a Ukrainian soldier was being held; it had been impossible to hold the service while Hroza was under Russian occupation.
59 people died, almost a quarter of the population of Hroza. We knocked on doors and found children alone at home. Their parents had not returned.
The security service later revealed that two local men, Volodymyr and Dmytro Mamon, had warned the Russians.
The brothers were former police officers who had allegedly started working for the occupation force.
When the village was liberated, they fled across the border with Russian troops, but kept in touch with their former neighbors, who unwittingly told them details about the funeral.
Violation of humanitarian law
The brothers have been charged with high treason, but are unlikely to be jailed in Ukraine.
Broadly speaking, that is the story of the Kyiv government’s battle with collaborators. Those who commit more serious crimes (directing attacks, leaking military information or organizing fake referendums to legitimize the occupation forces) are mostly tried in absentia.
Those who those facing less serious charges are usually the ones who end up in the dock.
According to the Geneva Convention, the Russian occupation forces must allow and provide the means for people to continue living their lives.
That is what Tetyana Potapenko says she tried to do when troops moved into Liman in May 2022.
His case is one of several we have discovered in eastern Ukraine.
Among them is a school principal jailed for accepting a Russian curriculum; his defence, his lawyer says, was that although he had accepted Russian materials, he did not use them.
And in the Kharkiv region, we heard of the case of a sports stadium director who faces 12 years in prison for continuing to organise matches during the occupation.
His lawyer claims that he had only organised two friendly matches between local teams.
For the United Nations, these convictions for collaboration violate international humanitarian law.
One third of the sentences handed down in Ukraine since the beginning of the war in February 2022 until the end of 2023 had no legal basis, the organization says.
“Crimes have been committed in occupied territory and people must be held accountable for the harm they have caused to Ukraine, but we have also seen the law being applied unfairly,” said Danielle Bell, head of the UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in the country.
Bell argues that the law does not take into account a person’s motive, such as whether they are actively collaborating or trying to earn income, which is legally permissible. He says everyone is criminalized under its vague wording.
“There are countless examples of people who have acted under duress and have performed functions simply to survive“, he says.
“I was afraid”
This is exactly what happened to Dmytro Herasymenko, a native of Liman, Tetyana’s hometown.
In October 2022, he emerged from his basement after the artillery and mortar fire had ceased. The front line had passed through Limán and the town was under Russian occupation.
“At that time, people had been living without electricity for two months,” he recalls.
Dmytro had worked as an electrician in the city for 10 years.
The occupying authorities They asked for volunteers to help restore power and he raised his hand.
“People had to survive,” he says.[Los rusos] They told me I could work like this or not. I was afraid of rejecting them and being persecuted.”
For Dmytro and Tetyana, the relief of liberation was short-lived. After Ukraine regained control of the city, agents of the country’s security service, the SBU, took them away for questioning.
After admitting to supplying electricity to the Russian occupiers, Dmytro was quickly sentenced to a suspended prison term and a 12-year ban from working as a state electrician.
We find him in the garage where he now works as a mechanic. His gleaming tools reflect his forced career change.
“I cannot be judged in the same way as the collaborators who help guide the missiles,” he said.
Her protests echoed Tetyana’s. “What do you feel when a foreign army comes in?” she asked. “Fear, of course.”
“You are either with us or against us”
This fear is justified. The UN has found evidence that Russian forces attack and even torture people who support Ukraine.
“We have had cases of people being detained, tortured and disappeared simply for expressing pro-Ukrainian views,” says Danielle Bell.
Since Moscow invaded Crimea in 2014, the definition of someone “pro-Russian” has changed in the eyes of Ukrainian lawmakers, from simply favoring closer national ties to supporting a Russian invasion deemed genocidal.
That same year, Kremlin-funded Russian forces also occupied a third of the Donetsk and Lugansk regions.
It is often the elderly who choose or are forced to live under occupation. Some may be too frail to leave.
There will also be those who have Soviet nostalgia or sympathy for modern Russia.
But given that Ukraine may one day have to reunify, is the collaboration law too harsh?
The message from a member of parliament who helped draft it is forceful: “You are either with us or against us”.
Andriy Osadchuk is deputy head of the parliamentary committee on law enforcement. He does not believe the legislation violates the Geneva Convention, but agrees that it needs improvement.
“The consequences are extremely harsh, but this is not a common crime. We are talking about life or death,” he says defiantly.
Osadchuk believes that it is actually international law that must rise to the challenge of the war in Ukraine, not the other way around.
The UN observer mission admits there have been some improvements. Ukraine’s prosecutor general recently instructed its offices to comply with international humanitarian law when investigating cases of collaboration.
The Parliament of Ukraine is also planning to add further amendments to the legislation in September.
One suggested change would see some people fined rather than sentenced to prison.
For now, Kyiv believes that Tetyana and Dmytro deserve their sentences if it means Ukraine can finally free itself from Russia’s yoke.
Both say their only regret is not having escaped when the Russians first arrived.
But with the state hot on their trail and Limán at risk of falling once again, it is unclear how sincere they are.
Additional reporting by Hanna Chornous, Aamir Peerzada and Hanna Tsyba.
All images by Lee Durant.
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