“I am like mother to them”. Story of soldier who lost her son, survived captivity and returned to life

Bones were stuck in their throats

Svitlana Vorova, a 57-year-old soldier, is going on vacation. She has a daughter and five grandchildren in Odesa. Before the train, we have time for a conversation. And it starts with sausage, a common home-made blood sausage.

In Russian captivity, the women remembered home cooking with longing. One of the prisoners even wrote down recipes until her pen and notebook were taken away from her. Some told how to pickle cucumbers, others how to bake cakes, and Svitlana told them about blood sausages. She has made so much of it in her tenth-floor apartment!

“In the 90s, my mother and I used to buy blood, intestines, and pork heads at the Odesa market — what a delicious homemade blood sausage we made! We would bake 20 kilograms in the oven overnight and sell it the next day. People came to us, they knew it was mouth-watering,” she recalls.

In captivity, she gave the bread to her fellow captives, who could not sleep because of hunger. But she could not swallow more than a crumb — it would not go down.

“In Olenivka, you could not pick up plums from the ground that fell from the trees. They could put you in the punishment cell for that. They fed us soup made of water with only a cabbage or a piece of potato floating in it. It was like cabbage soup or porridge. To it they added small uncleaned fish, such as kilka, with bones and intestines, crushed into cereal. It was all unsalted, unseasoned. And we had to swallow this stuff in two minutes.

The convoy passed through our nine women's cells very quickly. As soon as they handed out the bowls, they immediately turned around to take them away. If you managed to swallow it, good, if not, it’s your problem. Some girls couldn't eat — the bones were stuck in their throats. So they threw the mess into the toilet. The dishes had to be washed, not just empty!”, Svitlana says.

What tormented Svitlana the most was the lack of water. Not to wash or do laundry. They were allowed this “luxury” once a week: they were given 5 to 10 minutes to shower. Six women ran under two watering cans and, huddled together, washed themselves and their clothes at the same time.

But there was nothing to drink. The faucet in the cell was filled with industrial water, which one could not even put in their mouths. Sometimes they brought them seemingly clean drinking water in bootles, but they had to strain it through cheesecloth — it was so bad.

Due to dehydration and malnutrition, the woman lost 30 kilograms in 11 months. It is impossible to recognize her in the video after captivity. The skin on her face had slipped down and hung in shreds. At the time, the woman looked like she was in her 70s, even her eyes were like those of an elderly person. She says she was frightened when she saw herself.

Now, Svitlana has regained her lush shape and vivacity, and her face is smoothed and flushed. Only in her memory is an ocean of pain and grief.

She buried her son in an open coffin

Her firstborn son Sasha died in the war. He was one of the first Azov soldiers to join the battalion, volunteering in 2014, when the battalion had just been formed and was getting back on its feet. A few months later, before the new year of 2015, her 27-year-old son came home: thin and determined.

“First, I'm signing a contract with Azov battalion. Second, I'm going to propose to my girlfriend,” he said,

Oleksandr asked his mom to buy him an engagement ring — they had such a trusting relationship. And when the girl agreed, he was on cloud nine: “Mom, I'm so happy!”

On February 15, 2015, Oleksandr Kutuzakii, call sign Kutuz, and his comrades went to take the wounded guys from the battlefield. The Ukrainian offensive had just begun near A village in the Donetsk region. From February 10 to February 15, the Pavlopil-Shyrokyne Offensive took place here, with Azov fighters aiming to divert enemy forces from Debaltseve and move the front line away from Mariupol.Shyrokyne. The car in which Kutuz was traveling was ambushed and he was shot.

Kadyrovites took the bodies and mutilated them. Oleksandr was returned with his ears cut off. His mother decided to bury him in an open coffin.

“Not everyone at that time realized that there was a war going on. And it's one thing to have a closed coffin for a soldier: it is a regular funeral. And it's another thing when you see a mutilated body. I wanted to convey to people who we were dealing with. That it was not enough for the Russians to destroy us - they mock the dead,” explains Svitlana.

When I ask her, “How are you now, nine years later?” she begins to answer calmly, but tears are already coming one by one:

“This cannot go away. This is my child, whom I carried, gave birth to, and raised. Love does not disappear, and neither does pain. You just learn to live with it.”

Before her son was killed, Svitlana's father and father-in-law passed away. At the same time, she was going through a divorce: her third husband met another woman. The blackness suffocated the woman — it seemed to her that the walls of the room would fold over her head like a house of cards.

Svitlana's two younger children, Valeriia and Yakov, helped her recover. It took her two years. But all this time, she was thinking about continuing her eldest son's legacy — going to war instead of Sashka (as she calls him).

“Mom is free, mom can go join the army”

She was able to do so only in 2020, when her younger son got married. Her daughter started a family even earlier.

“Mom is free, mom can join the army,” she said in response to their tantrums.

She quit her job at Ukrzaliznytsia, where she worked as a leading engineer, and joined Azov. She was recruited as a clerk in the supply service at the base in A village near Mariupol, now under Russian occupation.Urzuf, Donetsk region.

She chose the call sign Gracia. Together with Tequila, four years older, and a 70-year-old nurse, Godmother, they were the oldest in the regiment.

While in the army, Svitlana collected information about her deceased son: “They told me about him as a very honest man who was respected by his brothers-in-arms. And he was one of the youngest. I am proud that he grew up to be a real man.”

After the full-scale invasion began, Svitlana, like the rest of the Azov members, ended up at Azovstal.

“Like other girls, I cooked, cleaned, and washed toilets so that the guys wouldn't think about it, because they had their own combat missions. We were baking bread for hundreds of people: there were explosions all around, everything was flying at our heads, and we were still making dough. Sometimes it seemed like that was it: we would not get out alive. Then I recorded a video testament for the children, said goodbye and asked them to support each other,” Svitlana recalls.

The commander offered the women to leave through one of the green corridors. Four of those who agreed made it safely to their homes. Gracia stayed behind:

“I realized I was staying: who would feed the boys?”

She spent 86 days at Azovstal.

She lost 30 kg in 11 months

And then she received an order to surrender. The women from Azovstal were placed in the disciplinary isolation center in Olenivka. About a hundred Ukrainian prisoners of war from different battalions were held there in terrible conditions. Thirty people were crammed into a cell for six. Two people slept on the bed, and the rest slept on or under the table, under the benches, near the toilet. You lie there and mice jump on you.

The toilet was a hole in the floor, where sewage rose up and could spill out. The stench was terrible and constant. Svitlana had never cleaned as much as she did in captivity. They were worked to scrub walls and floors over and over again.

They were not tortured physically like men, but they were morally abused to a great extent: they were forced to sing the Russian anthem 10 times a day, or songs by Oleg Gazmanov and Nadezhda Babkina are Russian pop singers who openly support the policy of the Russian Federation.Gazmanov or Babkina. They also forced them to squat a thousand times a day. Those who could not or fell were sent to the It is a small basement where it is very cold and prisoners have to stand all day.punishment cell.

The women were summoned for interrogation, trying to get a confession from them about which of them were snipers. They were humiliated, called “Azov whores” and “Nazis” or “fascists”.

Once, during interrogation, Svitlana asked an investigator: “Why fascists?”. It turned out that he did not understand the difference between “nationalism” and “Nazism”. The woman advised him to Google it.

Another man said: “Odesa is almost ours,” she cut him off: “When it's yours, we'll talk about it.” Once, for being so smart, she was put in a punishment cell.

Sometimes Svitlana and her friend tore up towels and pulled threads from them, hanging them on the radiator to mark the days of the week. The supervisors found them: “Oh, you are weaving the flag of Ukraine!” The threads were blue and orange. They punished the women with squats and staying in the punishment cell.

During the 11 months of their captivity in common cells, the women talked about all sorts of things (and they were required to speak only Russian): about their families, recipes, and reciting the Lord's Prayer together.

In order not to go crazy, they would leave crumbs for the mice and listen to see if they would rustle that night. They made up fairy tales about them. They named the spiders. A couple of them were named after particularly cruel prison guards, Yuri and Kirill.

They also heard about the terrorist On the night of July 29, 2022, on the territory of the Olenivska colony, the Russians struck an industrial zone, where the Azovs had been transferred from their barracks the day before. The detention center where Svitlana was held was located far from the hit zone.attack in Olenivka, when a missile hit the men's barracks in the summer of 2022. We saw how happy the guards were, and immediately realized whose hands were behind it.

One day in the fall, the women were put on trucks and taken away. The guards gave us hope that it was for an exchange. But the destination turned out to be a colony in Taganrog, Russia. Seven more months of hell awaited the prisoners. There, they threw a Ukrainian flag at the women's feet and forced them to run out of the cell so fast that they would step on it. But they jumped over it and threw it aside, just to keep it clean.

When, after all, the Ukrainian soldier greeted them with the words: “Ukraine welcomes you,” the women did not believe that this was a real exchange: what if it was Russians in disguise who were mocking them?

“I'm going to the east, I'm like mother to them”

In captivity, Svitlana constantly thought about her goal: to survive, to see her children and grandchildren, to return to Ukraine, to go back to defend it.

After 11 months in captivity, she spent another eight months recovering in rehabilitation centers, hospitals, and sanatoriums.

At first she could not look at the feasts and celebrations. What three kinds of salad? What cakes? They gave each other a piece of bread as a birthday present in captivity! What cafes, what movies, what walks? All this was annoying.

Now her trauma is no longer bleeding, but it has not yet healed: It is difficult for Svitlana to be in trams or closed spaces where there are many people. She wants to be alone.

And when she reads the news about our prisoners, she feels their pain.

According to the new law, she could have resigned from the service, but she did not. Just like most of the sisters-in-arms who went through Russian captivity.

“I have such a position (clerk — ed.) that I can sit far from the front, in safety: it's paperwork. But I don't want to. I go to the east to be closer to the guys. I serve there and help my brothers-in-arms: I see them off, meet them, cook, clean, and do laundry if necessary. They need me and I need them. I am like mom to them,” Svitlana explains.