Russia Has Turned Crimea Into a Hub for Abducted Ukrainians — Investigation
Russia, an aggressor state and occupying power, has been using the temporarily occupied Crimea as a transit and interrogation hub for abducted Ukrainian civilians from the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions since the start of its full-scale invasion. This is according to an investigation by “Ukrainska Pravda,” whose authors also reported an increase in the number of enforced disappearances of women on the peninsula.
According to the journalists, by the end of 2025, they had verified 32 cases of women being abducted: 25 women were abducted in Crimea, and another seven were brought from other temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine. Some of them were held in isolation from the outside world at Simferopol Pretrial Detention Center No. 2 and FSB Pretrial Detention Center No. 8, which formally do not have women’s wings. The location where five women abducted in Crimea—including Gurzuf resident Marina Riff—were being held remained unknown at the time of the investigation’s publication.
The authors cite the abduction of nurse Iryna Danilovych as the most thoroughly documented case. On April 29, 2022, she was forcibly pushed into a car near a bus stop in Koktebel; the incident was captured by a security camera at a gas station. According to Danilovich’s testimony, she was then taken to the FSB headquarters in Simferopol, where she was beaten, threatened, and questioned about independent journalists and the “Alliance of Doctors” trade union.
Danilovich was subsequently charged with possession of an explosive device, a charge she denied. In late December 2022, an occupation court in Feodosia sentenced her to six years and eleven months in prison. She was first transferred to a penal colony in Zelenokumsk, Stavropol Krai, and later to Mordovia. According to the investigation, after being beaten, Danilovich lost hearing in one ear and went on a hunger strike, demanding medical care.
The authors of the article note that abducted civilians in Crimean detention centers may be held incommunicado for months or years—without access to family members or independent lawyers. According to the journalists, criminal cases are fabricated against these individuals during this period, and access to lawyers is granted only after so-called “confessions” have been obtained.
According to the Crimean Human Rights Group, at the end of 2025, 94 abducted individuals who had been brought from other occupied territories were being held in the Simferopol pretrial detention center. In late 2022, the human rights organization Zmina reported 110 such detainees. Additionally, prior to the de-occupation of Kherson and part of the region in November 2022, prisoners from penal colonies and pretrial detention centers in the Kherson region were transported through Crimea to Russia.
