UA POV: Ukrainian volunteers being jailed by SBU on “collaboration” charges for caring for the vulnerable in occupation – OpenDemocracy

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1. Ukraine has some very loose standards on what they call “collaboration”

   That includes receiving food from the Russians, distributing food given by the Russians, or accepting aid of various types from them

   And if you’re labeled a collaborator by the SBU? Say your prayers, for jail is the least of your worries.

   Worst case scenario? Cold blooded murder like they committed en masse in Bucha

   Or how the SBU murdered their own negotiator in cold blood and extrajudicially on suspicion of treason, then later posthumously cleared him of any wrongdoing:

   https://www.svoboda.org/a/glava-gur-ubityy-denis-kireev-byl-sotrudnikom-razvedki-ukrainy/32234428.html

   > Denis Kireev, a participant in the Ukrainian-Russian negotiations who was killed in Kyiv in early March, shortly after the start of the large-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, was a staff member of the Main Intelligence Directorate of the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine (GUR). This was stated by the head of the Main Intelligence Directorate, Kirill Budanov, in an interview with the Ukrainian service of Radio Liberty, confirming statements that had previously appeared in the media. Budanov also confirms that Kireev was killed in early March last year by members of the Security Service of Ukraine. The head of the Main Intelligence Directorate categorically excludes the possibility that Kireev worked for Russia.

   > Judging by the photograph that was there, Kireev was first beaten and then shot in the back of the head. The corpse was thrown into the street and a statement was made that he was killed while trying to escape. His bodyguards from the intelligence service were also killed.

2. **In occupation, they cared for the vulnerable. Now they’re in jail for it**

   When the eastern Ukrainian city of Lyman was occupied for five months last year, Valentyna Tkach and Tetiana Potapenko stayed behind. They volunteered to help their vulnerable neighbours. They cared for elderly residents, contacted the Russian occupation administration to ask for food and coal for them, and even buried dead bodies.

   Now, both women are in detention, having been accused by Ukraine’s Secret Service of collaboration with Russia – a crime punishable by up to 10 years in prison.

   Tkach and Potapenko were volunteers long before the occupation. Since Soviet times, Lyman’s population has self-organised to better coordinate with local authorities. Residents of each of the city’s ‘microdistricts’ nominate individuals, who are usually women and are known as street attendants (vulychni), to maintain order and liaise with the mayor’s office on their behalf.

   This work is coordinated by a head of the neighbourhood, who is elected by residents. When Russia captured Lyman, the local leaders in Tkach and Potapenko’s microdistricts fled, and the women stepped up to take on their roles.

   Today, they believe they are being punished for helping others. As part of a series of stories on collaboration trials in the Donetsk region, Ukrainian news outlet Graty met both women in April, while they were in pre-trial detention. Below, openDemocracy publishes an abridged translation of Graty’s feature.

   **War enters Lyman**

   At the end of April 2022, Valentyna Tkach, 63, and her husband took shelter in the cellar of their house in north Lyman. It soon became clear they had been right to hide: Russian forces broke through the city and the shelling didn’t stop. Electricity, water and gas supplies to the city were cut. Stores were forced to close and many people’s food supplies dwindled.

   Tkach’s street, like much of north Lyman, was mainly private one-story houses, often home to elderly women who refused to leave when the war started. “They said: ‘We grew up here, our children and grandchildren grew up here. We’re not going anywhere. We will live in tents, in our vegetable gardens,’” Tkach explained.

   Tkach, a street attendant who has been involved in social work for many years, began to help her elderly neighbours with food and care, even taking in one 86-year-old woman for five months after her house collapsed, until relatives came from Lviv to fetch her.

   She cared for and fed another octogenarian neighbour, Vira Pymenovna Naumova, when the latter became bedbound. In the end, Pimenovna’s house collapsed on her, and she became one of three women Tkach and her husband were forced to bury her on their street.

   Russian troops approached Lyman on 22 May. Tkach says there was the most horrible shelling that night. “It was a real Armageddon,” she said.

   “Our entire street [was] on fire. And most of the houses were demolished that night. We thought it was the end of the world, that we would never come out alive. I don’t want any person on earth to experience what we experienced.”

   By the end of that month, city authorities had announced an evacuation. Most Lyman residents left, but a third of the population remained. Tetiana Potapenko, 52, had wanted to leave, but her 72-year-old husband’s chronic illnesses had worsened after spending so much time in their cold, damp basement.

   “My husband almost died, I resuscitated him three times. The Lord simply saved him. My son was also ill, he is disabled. And we are simple people, we have no income. My husband and son each receive around two thousand hryvnias [less than £45] in benefits, we couldn’t afford to leave,” Potapenko explained.

   Trying to escape their own damp cellar, Potapenko and her family moved into the basement of a nearby four-story building – where they stayed until Russian soldiers arrived. The soldiers told them they could go home if they wore a white cloth around their arms, to show they were civilians. They did so, but the shelling continued, forcing them to spend more nights in the basement.

   Like Tkach, Potapenko was a street attendant and the deputy head of her microdistrict. Soon, neighbours approached her to complain their food was running out. The Russians distributed humanitarian aid, but rarely and only near the town council, far from her street. It was difficult for older people to get there and stand in line waiting.

   Potapenko’s neighbours had other problems, too. “People approached me about what to do with construction waste. Houses were in ruins, there was glass, slate and brick all around,” she said. “They asked what to do with the unexploded ammunition that some people had lying in their sheds. They asked essential questions: where to bury people, where to get coffins.”

   Potapenko went to the city executive committee building to get help for her neighbours. There, she found a help centre for the ‘Donetsk Republic of Denis Pushilin’ had been opened, headed by Viktoria Zinchuk. Before the occupation, Zinchuk had led the local House of Culture and often sang Ukrainian folk songs at concerts. She wore embroidered shirts in honour of national holidays. But in July, two months after the occupation, Pushilin presented Zinchuk with a certificate “for her contribution to the development of the Donetsk Republic” in occupied Mariupol.

   On behalf of this ‘civic movement’, Zinchuk started supervising the heads of Lyman microdistricts and their street attendants. She held meetings with them in her office. At one of these meetings, Zinchuk asked Potapenko to replace the head of her microdistrict, who had fled before the occupation. Potapenko accepted.

   Tkach was also asked to become head of her microdistrict – one of six in the city – when its previous leader fled. She had been a street attendant for 15 years. Before the full-scale war, she and other attendants in her neighbourhood organised clean-up days and holidays and resolved everyday issues. No one was paid for this work.

   During a massive shelling on the night of 22 May, Tkach was overwhelmed by severe stress. Once she was feeling better, street people from her neighbourhood began to come to her. They said the city was in ruins; houses were damaged, windows were broken, roofs were leaking, garbage hadn’t been collected, there was a shortage of food and medicine. They asked her to help, to temporarily take on the leaders’ duties. She, too, agreed.

   **‘Everyone was fed’**

   As heads of their microdistricts, Potapenko and Tkach’s main job was to obtain humanitarian aid from Lyman’s occupation administration, which the ‘Donetsk People’s Republic’ set up in June and was headed by Alexander Petrykin, the former vice-mayor of occupied Yenakiieve, another city in Donetsk.

   “Drivers of vehicles distributing aid didn’t know the area. The city is scattered. I argued with Mayor Petrykin. Everyone was fed. Everything went in an orderly manner, there were no crowds, no one struggled, fought, cried or shouted,” Potapenko said.

   Tkach asked the street attendants to compile lists of people in need, which she took to Zinchuk. “I drove one single car with humanitarian aid into the neighbourhood. There were 800 packages and of course, that wasn’t enough for everyone,” she sighed. “They would bring [aid] to the neighbourhood, and the street attendants would deliver it to those who couldn’t come on their own.”

   The Russians issued pensions, and Potapenko, together with other street attendants, handed over lists of pensioners to the occupation administration.

   Many street attendants left Lyman or were injured or killed, and Potapenko and Tkach helped residents to find new ones.

   “One of my attendants was actually lying wounded. Her husband was killed by the shelling, and she ended up in hospital,” Tkach recalled. “I would say: ‘Ladies, please go out and help the grandmothers who are left.’ And the women were great, they looked for doctors for them.

   “One old lady had gangrene, so the attendant says: ‘It doesn’t matter to me what kind of government the doctor is from, I need to save a life.’ Although, of course, the old woman died. There were no functioning hospitals, no pharmacies.”

   *(continued in the next comment…)*

3. ukraine is so cartoonishly shitty it would almost be comical if people’s lives weren’t being ruined

4. Good. According to our special subreddit operative friends, to work with the ruzzians is a crime punishable by deaf /s

5. This is a terrible account of the treatment of these heroic citizens to be accused, trialled and punished by their own Government, who couldn’t care less about welfare of their own people.

   Knowing the Ukrainian Government and SBU, I’m certain that there would be thousands of more innocent civilians who have been detained and suffering these same injustices.

   The more the Western countries are exposed to these types of Ukrainian Government attitudes, the more respect for their cause is lost.

6. Why couldn’t they have been partisans or maybe suicide bombers? Don’t they care about the Zelensky regime?

   Azovites are spilling Aryan blood. There is no room for humanity or decency in this war.

   Slava Ukraine and let’s bring these people to justice for freedom and to ensure western values remain strong.

7. None of this would have happened if Russia did not invade Ukraine in an unprovoked war of aggression and murder the people who live there.

8. Anyone who mentions the words, peace negotiation, Russia and Neo-Nazis are automatically described by the Ukrainian regime as collaborating with “Russian terror.”