Putin is bringing back the Soviet-era gulag

Anne Applebaum has a story at the Atlantic today about the return of the Soviet-style gulag system as a way for Russia to control Ukrainian civilians.

Journalists, war-crimes investigators, and specialized groups such as the Reckoning Project have already documented arrests, murders, prisons, and torture chambers in Ukrainian territories under Russian occupation. Slowly, it is becoming clear that these are not just ad hoc responses to Ukrainian resistance. They are part of a long-term plan: the construction of a sprawling system of camps and punishment colonies—a new Gulag.

The Associated Press had a story yesterday documenting the expanding scope of this prison network.

The new building in the compound of Prison Colony No. 2 is at least two stories tall, separated from the main prison by a thick wall.

This facility in Russia’s eastern Rostov region has gone up since the war started in February 2022, according to satellite imagery analyzed by the AP. It could easily house the hundreds of Ukrainian civilians who are believed detained there, according to former captives, families of the missing, human rights activists and Russian lawyers. Two exiled Russian human rights advocates said it is heavily guarded by soldiers and armored vehicles.

The building in Rostov is among at least 40 detention facilities in Russia and Belarus, and there are 63 makeshift and formal ones in occupied Ukrainian territory where Ukrainian civilians are held…

And the plan is to build even more:

A Russian government document obtained by The Associated Press dating to January outlined plans to create 25 new prison colonies and six other detention centers in occupied Ukraine by 2026.

Ukraine believes as many as 10,000 civilians are being held in these prisons. They have no rights and no contact with family. Some are used as slave labor digging trenches on the front lines or in some cases mass graves. But nearly all prisoners describe being tortured while in captivity.

Torture was a constant, whether or not there was information to extract, according to every former detainee interviewed by the AP. The U.N. report from June said 91% of prisoners “described torture and ill-treatment.”

In the occupied territories, all the freed civilians interviewed by the AP described crammed rooms and cells, tools of torture prepared in advance, tape placed carefully next to office chairs to bind arms and legs, and repeated questioning by Russian’s FSB intelligence agency. Nearly 100 evidence photos obtained by the AP from Ukrainian investigators also showed instruments of torture found in liberated areas of Kherson, Kyiv and Kharkiv, including the same tools repeatedly described by former civilian captives held in Russia and occupied regions.

Many former detainees spoke of wires linking prisoners’ bodies to electricity in field telephones or radios or batteries, in a procedure one man said the Russians dubbed “call your mother” or “call Biden.” U.N. human rights investigators said one victim described the same treatment given to Yahupova, a severe beating on the head with a filled water bottle.

This is what people in the occupied parts of Ukraine are facing. Some will survive and be released with no explanation and other will simply disappear. Applebaum concludes her piece:

Anyone who wonders why the Ukrainians keep fighting, why they keep asking for more weapons, why they become frustrated by slow-moving transatlantic diplomacy, why they seem angry or “unreasonable,” should remember this: The Gulag was supposed to belong to the past. Now it belongs to the present. If Ukrainians don’t want it to be part of their future, they will have to physically remove these camps—and the people who run them—from Ukrainian land. Until they have succeeded, no help will ever be enough.

The Russians have not been shy about targeting civilians and civilian infrastructure in Ukraine. It’s difficult to see how you reach a compromise with people who are kidnapping civilians, torturing them and using them as slaves.