Russia jailed her husband in occupied Ukraine. Then Natalya swung into action.

She’d been told her husband might be inside, one of thousands of civilians detained in an opaque prison system on occupied territory under the ultimate control of the Russian security service. Guards accepted the care packages but wouldn’t tell her whether her Oleksiy was there.

Natalya, then 55, had traveled from her hometown in search of him and now found herself alone in an alien place where Russian troops cruised the streets in armored vehicles and entered apartments at will. Once, she saw a Russian soldier batter an old woman with a rifle butt.

“I’m sitting in a hornet’s nest," she wrote in a text message to a Wall Street Journal reporter.

At the jail days after her first visit, a guard handed her a bag. Ripping it open, she found a familiar blue T-shirt among other dirty clothes. She pressed it to her face and inhaled a faint but recognizable scent. She began to sob. She had found him.

Now came the hardest part: getting him out.

Detention of civilians has emerged as one of Moscow’s preferred tools to consolidate its hold over the 20% of Ukrainian territory it controls. Anything perceived as resistance—from posting Ukrainian news on social media to refusing to collaborate with the occupation forces—can land civilians in custody, where they face squalid conditions and torture.

Ukrainian officials say 16,000 civilians are in Russian captivity. Humanitarian groups estimate the number could be several times higher. Around 170 have been released as part of prisoner exchanges, according to Ukrainian officials, but no clear legal process exists to free them.

Russian authorities release almost no information about detainees. Though Russian President Vladimir Putin claims occupied territory as part of Russia, Moscow’s electronic system for tracking prisoners doesn’t work there. Civilians can languish in prison for years without charges, denied access to a lawyer or communication with the outside world.

Any peace deal that left Ukrainian territory under Russian control would effectively cement that system in place.

“For prisoners of war, there are rules, but for civilians who are detained, it’s much more complicated," said Leonid Kirkun, a Russian lawyer in exile who represents the families of civilian detainees. The Russians, he added, “usually refuse to acknowledge that they’re holding the person."

Perhaps no one has gone to greater lengths to try to rescue loved ones than Natalya. After following Oleksiy, 56, into a Russian-controlled underworld, she would sweet talk prison guards, trek back and forth across occupied parts of Ukraine and face questioning by Russia’s security service—all the time worrying whether she herself, nevermind her husband, would get out alive.

‘He’s probably been detained’

When Natalya first met Oleksiy Barchuk, she was 17 years old at a summer camp on Ukraine’s southern coast, and he was the one keeping tabs on her.

At a party one night, Natalya found herself standing alone while others danced.

Taking matters into her own hands, she walked up to a group of boys and demanded: “Why won’t anyone ask me to dance?" One boy pointed to Oleksiy—he liked her, the boy said, and had asked his friends to stay away.

Soon, they were dating. But when the camp ended and they both went back to Kherson, he sent 10 letters before she agreed to meet again. They married a year later, in 1985, and had two children.

Over the next three decades, the Barchuks built a modest network of family businesses. Natalya worked at their kitchen-supply store. Oleksiy worked for the construction company. Artem Barchuk, Oleksiy’s elder brother, ran the whole operation.

They did well enough to buy a dacha on an island in the Dnipro River where the whole family would retreat on summer weekends to fish, wake board and barbecue.

The Russian army shattered their idyll when it thundered over the river to occupy Kherson in February 2022.

In the weeks that followed, most of the family joined large anti-Russian demonstrations. When soldiers began shooting at protesters, however, Natalya and Oleksiy’s daughter, Nadiya, fled to Ukrainian-held territory.

Natalya and Oleksiy wanted to leave as well. But Oleksiy’s 87-year-old mother supported the Russians and refused to go. Unwilling to leave her alone, they stayed.

One morning in late July, Oleksiy and Natalya got a frantic call from Artem. His eldest son, Serhiy, who worked for the regional pension service, wasn’t answering his phone. At Serhiy’s apartment, he found dozens of computers, which he realized Serhiy must have taken from the pension office to keep them from the Russians, who were looking for addresses of Ukrainians they considered a threat.

“He’s probably been detained," Artem said. “We should move the computers."

Oleksiy headed there with several others to help, while Natalya went to register Serhiy as missing.

When she arrived at Serhiy’s apartment several hours later, she found the door hanging open and at least a dozen Russian soldiers inside. Oleksiy and a family friend, Oleh, were sitting on the couch.

“What’s going on?" she asked. The soldiers ordered her to leave.

The Kherson region pension office where Serhiy Barchuk removed dozens of computers so the data they contained wouldn’t fall into the hands of Russian forces.

‘Go find them’

Oleksiy, Serhiy, Artem and his wife were all detained and taken to a nearby police station.

With just two small cells, the station was poorly equipped for prisoners. Natalya filled the gaps, delivering toothbrushes, yoga mats to sleep on and food twice a day.

She added parsley to some of the sandwiches—a signal that she’d hidden a note inside.

Natalya recalled stacking the fillings: “Bread, butter, note wrapped in plastic, ham, bread." Her relatives slipped replies into the dirty laundry that the guards returned to Natalya to wash.

It quickly became clear that the Russians, who were trying to get a government up and running in the occupied territories, wanted Serhiy to go back to work in the pension office. Russian officials told another relative that if Serhiy cooperated, the family’s problems could be easily solved.

Natalya explained the offer in a note tucked into a sandwich.

“I wanted him to take the deal," Natalya said later. “Get out of prison, then escape."

But Serhiy refused, and they all remained behind bars.

As she waited outside the prison to deliver food one day in September, Natalya caught sight of Oleksiy raking leaves on the other side of the fence.

Her heart raced. It had been two months since she’d last seen him—the longest they’d spent apart since Soviet times. They walked toward each other and grasped hands through the fence.

“It’ll all be OK," he told her.

Though he was pale, his fingernails yellow, Natalya was relieved how healthy he looked. She was getting used to this strange new life, and took solace in being able to help care for Oleksiy.

Then, on Oct. 15, the guards refused to accept food. The Ukrainian army was closing in on Kherson, and the Russians were starting to withdraw. Eventually, a guard told her that Oleksiy and the others had been taken across the Dnipro River to territory more firmly under Moscow’s control.

For days, Natalya reeled at home, paralyzed with worry. If she stayed, she’d be cut off from Oleksiy once Ukraine retook the city. If she followed Oleksiy across the river, she might end up trapped in Russian-occupied territory.

On the phone with her daughter, Nadiya, she asked: “What should I do? What should I do?"

Nadiya answered: “You go find them."

The far side of the river

As Natalya boarded a ferry across the river on Nov. 1, 2022, her primary fear was that she wouldn’t be able to find Oleksiy.

In her months sitting outside the jail in Kherson, she’d met dozens of other women from all over the region looking for missing loved ones. The guards usually refused to tell them if their relatives were there.

When the ferry docked, Natalya followed a tip from a sympathetic guard and headed to Kalanchak about an hour away.

On Nov. 11, a few days after she received the laundry bag confirming Oleksiy was there, she got news from home: Ukraine’s army had retaken Kherson. Friends called, recounting street parties with everyone draped in blue-and-yellow Ukrainian flags.

The window to return to Kherson was closed. Natalya was alone on the left bank.

She adopted a strategy: Whenever she met a prison guard, she’d launch into her story, often crying, hoping to appeal to their humanity. It soon bore fruit, when one man she approached outside the jail introduced himself as the warden.

“You really haven’t seen your husband in two months?" he said.

She said, “I just want to know he’s really alive."

The Russian warden bristled, apparently insulted by the implication. Then he dialed a number on his phone and passed it to Natalya. Oleksiy was on the line.

She struggled to speak, wary of causing trouble for Oleksiy with the warden in earshot.

“I love you," she said. “I’m here. Nobody abandoned you."

Oleksiy said he was fine—warm and dry, with enough to eat, not being beaten. Then the warden gestured to end the call.

It was the start of a transactional relationship. She bought medications that prisoners needed; the warden let her exchange short notes with Oleksiy.

She asked why he couldn’t let her relatives go. He apologized, but said it wasn’t up to him: They were accused of stealing $18,000 of state property, and Russia’s Federal Security Service, the FSB, had told him to hold the family until further notice.

Oleksiy Barchuk managed to pass a note to his wife reading, ‘happy birthday, my beloved,’ along with a rose he ripped off a bush while cleaning a yard during his time in captivity.

Russification

By February, Natalya was learning to navigate the Russian systems.

Oleksiy and the others had been moved to another prison in the village of Chonhar. There, she met the investigator in their case: an old bowling rival of Artem’s. He quietly advised her to look up prisoners’ rights in the Russian legal code.

That night, at the abandoned house in Chonhar where she was staying, Natalya read online that prisoners had the right to exchange letters. The next day, she marched into the jail and demanded the guards deliver a message to Oleksiy.

Natalya was soon passing messages to other prisoners’ relatives, many of whom previously hadn’t heard from their loved ones in months and had no idea where they were, or if they were even alive.

“Everyone here praises you when they hear that you followed your husband," Oleksiy wrote to her in early 2023. “I’m so grateful."

Still, Natalya couldn’t find a lawyer for Oleksiy. Some refused once they heard the charges. Others quoted at least $1,000 per client visit, which Natalya couldn’t afford. The money she brought from Kherson had run out months ago, and she was living off what her children could send her from outside Ukraine, plus a little extra from other prisoners’ relatives, who paid her to deliver care packages.

Finally, through a family friend, Natalya met Valery Geraskin, a 71-year-old lawyer.

Natalya Barchuk walks home after work in the Estonian capital Tallinn.

Sitting in his car outside the prison on March 10, she realized that Geraskin, a fellow native of Kherson, had embraced the Russian invasion. But Natalya liked his straightforward manner and hired him for a flat fee of $2,000 per client.

Geraskin’s strategy was to prove that the Barchuks had not stolen from the Russian government, because the computers Serhiy had taken hadn’t belonged to the Russian pension service. He assured Natalya the family would get a fair hearing in the Russian courts.

“Not like it used to be" in Ukraine, he told her.

Still, he pressed Natalya to take a Russian passport. Her Ukrainian documents, he said, marked her as an opponent of the regime and could complicate the case.

Natalya refused. A Russian passport felt too much like an endorsement of the occupation.

As spring wore on, however, pressure to Russify grew.

To get cash out or mail letters to Oleksiy, she had to take a bus more than an hour. At checkpoints, soldiers would pull young men off for questioning or demand passengers fill out a form with questions including whether they supported what Russia calls its “special military operation."

Natalya was warned that she would face questioning if she traveled with Ukrainian papers.

In June, unable to contain her anger, Natalya answered no. The FSB took her fingerprints, searched her phone, then began questioning her. She claimed she was a pacifist, and after six hours, they let her go, but they warned her that this would now be the norm for anyone traveling with Ukrainian papers.

That same month, the prison guards said she would need a Russian passport to send packages to Oleksiy—one of the few connections she still had to him.

The next day, she sent in her application.

Denied

It was a hot July day when Natalya stepped into a small courtroom in the nearby town of Henichesk for a hearing in Oleksiy’s case.

Taking the stand as a character witness, Natalya scanned the courtroom: the folding metal chairs arranged into a makeshift gallery, the Russian flag hanging behind the judge and, inside the glass defendant’s box, Oleksiy.

Their eyes met. Ten months had passed since she’d last seen him, in the Kherson prison yard, and his transformation stunned her. His cheeks were sunken, shoulders too thin to fill out his shirt, hair gray at the temples. He’d never looked so helpless.

Determined not to cry, Natalya took a breath, then began her testimony about her life with Oleksiy. When she finished, the judge sent her out to the hall.

An hour later, Oleksiy emerged, flanked by guards. Natalya stepped forward, but a guard blocked her path.

He was so close—just a few feet away—yet she couldn’t touch him. It was more than she could stand. She felt herself tearing up.

“Don’t cry," Oleksiy said. “It’ll be OK"

Then a guard struck him on the back with the butt of a rifle.

Over the next several weeks the Barchuks’ fortunes seemed to turn.

Geraskin tracked down a list of equipment owned by the Russian pension service. The computers Serhiy had taken weren’t on it.

By the time Natalya returned to court for Oleksiy’s next hearing, on Aug. 23, only Oleksiy and Serhiy remained in custody. The others had been moved to house arrest.

Geraskin was confident Oleksiy would be freed. But Oleksiy had a different judge, who denied the motion.

Geraskin exploded. “What the f— are you doing?" he said.

The judge left the courtroom, offering no explanation.

‘I’m waiting for you’

Natalya’s freed relatives moved into her house in Chonhar. There, Artem told her what he’d been unable to say in letters: The further they’d gotten from Kherson, the more brutally they’d been treated.

Arbitrary rules had been imposed, like bans on talking or lying down during daytime. Guards beat them for any supposed violation, or for no reason at all. Screams from men being tortured with electric shocks carried through the corridors. They weren’t brought outside even once until their court hearings.

Though she was happy everyone else was out, she began to resent that they were safe while Oleksiy remained behind bars, still being beaten.

On Aug. 30, Natalya boarded the bus to Simferopol, a larger city to the south. She told the others she was picking up groceries, like brandy, that they couldn’t get in tiny Chonhar. Really, she wanted time away from them.

As she stood at the bus station in Simferopol, her phone buzzed. It was Geraskin. She felt the mix of excitement and dread that always came over her when his number popped up. Maybe there was a development in the case? Or with Oleksiy’s health?

When she answered, it wasn’t Geraskin.

“You were waiting for me," her husband’s voice came through the phone. “Now I’m waiting for you." He was at the house in Chonhar.

The three-hour bus ride back to Chonhar felt interminable. When she reached her stop, she began the walk home. Then, she spotted Oleksiy at the far end of the street, rushing to embrace her.

For a while, neither of them said anything. Oleksiy broke the silence. “I’m sorry I was away so long," he whispered.

Geraskin told them he had paid $5,000 for each relative’s release, plus their family friend Oleh—$25,000 in total. The Russian legal system hadn’t worked as he’d expected. A bribe had freed them.

The Barchuks rustled up the money to pay him back. Geraskin declined to comment.

Oleksiy and the others had spent 13 months in captivity. Artem suffered two broken vertebrae. Oleksiy lost a fifth of his body weight, emerging from prison at 127 pounds. On their release, they learned that their mother had died.

Over the following weeks, they all made their way out of occupied territory via Russia. Natalya and Oleksiy now live with Nadiya and their grandchildren in Estonia.

“If Natalka hadn’t followed us, we’d still be sitting there," Oleksiy said, using a nickname for Natalya.

Natalya hopes to return to Kherson, to the dacha, but her relatives think it unlikely.

The Dnipro River now marks the front line, and Moscow’s forces hit Kherson every day with drones and artillery. Mines washed onto islands in the river, like the one the dacha sits on, after Russians blew up a dam.

“We can’t go back to life as before," Oleksiy said, wearing a vyshyvanka, a traditional Ukrainian shirt, and bouncing his granddaughter on his lap. “You can rebuild the dacha, but all of this is still with you."