‘The child of a traitor’

How a Mariupol judge in Russian captivity refused to defect, even in exchange for freedom

Shortly after Moscow launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Yulia Matveyeva, a judge from Mariupol, was captured by Russian soldiers. She spent seven months in captivity, where she was subjected to physical and psychological violence. In May, she was offered a seat on the Supreme Court of the “Donetsk People’s Republic,” but she refused — and was later accused of crimes against the self-proclaimed republic’s “constitutional order and security,” which is punishable by death. The trial against Matveyeva was originally slated for September but was postponed, and in October, she was freed as part of a prisoner exchange. The Ukrainian outlet Graty recently told Matveyeva’s story, from Russia’s first strikes on Mariupol to her reunion with her family in Kyiv. With Graty’s permission, Meduza retells the report in English.

On the day of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Mariupol judge Yulia Matveyeva didn’t initially realize that a full-scale war had begun, despite hearing explosions in the city that morning. Over time, the blasts became louder, but Matveyeva was reluctant to leave Mariupol; the following week, she was slated to preside over a hearing to extend the arrest of a man charged with a serious crime. “I didn’t want him to get released because of me,” she said.

After the hearing, Matveyeva and her family — her mother, her husband Artyom, and their daughter — started preparing to evacuate. By that point, the situation had become more complicated; in mid-March, the city’s Azovmash manufacturing plant and the Ilyich iron and steel works, both of which were relatively close to the family’s home, came under heavy fire; shells frequently hit the apartment buildings neighboring theirs. They finally decided to leave on March 15 when a shell hit their building directly. By the time they left, four days later, according to Matveyeva, Mariupol had turned into a “ghost town.”

Soon after leaving the city, the family was stopped at a Russian checkpoint. Matveyeva’s mother and daughter were allowed through, but she and her husband were not; instead, they were sent to “filtration.” Matveyeva later learned that there was an acquaintance of hers at the checkpoint who had defected to the Russian side and who could inform the soldiers that she was a Ukrainian judge.

Matveyeva and her husband were taken to a police station. Her captors initially said her “filtration” would take two hours, though they later announced that it would actually last until the following morning. The next day, she, her husband, and their fellow detainees were put on a bus and taken to Dokuchaievsk. Then the couple was moved together with several other people to Donetsk, where they were interrogated about the Azov regiment in Mariupol and their ties to the Ukrainian Security Service. Afterward, they were told that they would be held for another 30 days for a “thorough investigation.”

According to Matveveva, there was no room left in the temporary detention facility that night, so the Mariupol residents were taken to the police’s Organized Crime Control Department, where her husband was put in a basement cell with several other men, and she was chained to a radiator.

There was also a young man being held there who was beaten by eight men; there was blood everywhere. He didn’t make a sound. According to them, they were beating him because he had served in Azov and fired on Donetsk. All of these “DNR” guys were drunk; to be honest, I never saw a single one of them sober.

The following day, Matveyeva was taken to a temporary detention facility. Before she and her husband were moved to different cells, the soldiers told them they should tell each other goodbye because they wouldn’t see each other again.

A criminal charge and a job offer

After a month in detention, Matveyeva still hadn’t been brought in for questioning. On April 19, she was told that her “investigation” still wasn’t complete and that she would remain in captivity for another month.

They never took us out anywhere; there was no recreation time. It was a closed facility — they didn’t open the windows, and there were no hygiene products. The water was cold. On April 1, they stopped bringing us hot water. We realized later that the hot water had been coming out of the radiator, and when the heating was turned off, that was it.

In late March, Matveyeva was transferred to a cell that also contained paramedic Yulia Paievska. “We were there together for just under three weeks — until April 15. I saw how they abused her. I tried to help; I fed her because her hands weren’t working. It was really scary to see them abuse a woman like that,” Matveyeva recalled.

In mid-May, Matveyeva was told that she would be charged with crimes against the “constitutional order and safety” of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic — offenses that are punishable by death. Several days later, she was taken to the office of the “DNR’s” prosecutor general and told she was being given an “offer she couldn’t refuse”: a job in the self-proclaimed republic’s “Supreme Court.” The occupation authorities told her they would release her husband and reunite the couple with the rest of their family if she agreed to the deal. Matveyeva refused. “If I defected to their side, my child would be the child of a traitor. If they killed me, she would be the child of a hero, I thought,” she told Graty.

After she refused the offer, Matveyeva was officially charged and told that she was under arrest. She was immediately taken back to the temporary detention facility, and several days later, she was moved to a remand prison. At first, she was put in a cell that was too small for her even to sit down. She heard constant screams from the neighboring cells. “To this day, I can’t believe the way those men cried out in pain. The sounds were just unnatural. I don’t know what they were doing to them,” Matveyeva said.

Shortly after, she was taken to a cell that contained nine other women. The prison guards banned them from sitting down from 6:00 a.m. to 10:00 p.m. Anyone who sat down or leaned down to tie their shoes for relief was forced to do squats or pushups.

Threats of execution

During her time in the cell, Matveyeva was brought in for questioning just once when an investigator wanted the passwords for her phone and her laptop. After she intentionally gave incorrect passwords to keep her captors from finding documents related to her work, Matveyeva was taken away “to be shot,” she told Graty. She was then left alone in a room for several hours in an unknown facility before a bag was put over her head, and she was taken to a vehicle. She later learned that the place had been a psychiatric hospital, where she was declared mentally fit to participate in legal proceedings. She was then brought back to the remand prison, where her captors tortured her with electric shocks while demanding she reveal her passwords.

She never did.

In early July, Matveyeva and several other women who had been charged with the same crimes were taken to a basement cell that was extremely hot and infested with rats and ticks. According to Matveyeva, the prisoners were given water just once every five to six days; the rest of the time, she said, the guards brought them pickles and offered to let them drink the brine.

In late August, Matveyeva was charged with another crime: “attempting to undermine the constitutional order of the DNR.” The first hearing in her case was slated for September 27, but it was canceled due to the “referendum” on Russia’s annexation of the region. In mid-October, Matveyeva was added to a prisoner-exchange list. She was then flown to Crimea before being taken to the Zaporizhzhia region, where the trade took place.

In Kyiv, Matveyeva met with her daughter and her mother, both of whom had managed to leave the occupied territories through a checkpoint in Berdiansk back in April. Matveyeva applied for a job at a Kyiv court.

Her husband, meanwhile, spent nearly a year in captivity. He was never charged with any crimes and was released in February 2023. He says his captors said he was being let go “due to the expiration of the detention period.” He traveled through Rostov-on-Don, Moscow, Pskov, and Riga before finally reaching Kyiv.

Story by Viktoria Matola for Graty

English-language version by Sam Breazeale