‘I Just Wanted the Whole Thing to Be Over’

Victoria Obidina realized that she was in a Russian prison only when the blindfold was removed from her face. There was paperwork for a DNA test before her. She read “Taganrog,” the name of a Russian town in the Rostov region, immediately east of Ukraine, where Ukrainian prisoners of war are registered before being shuffled around prison colonies across Russia. Two middle-aged male interrogators ordered the 27-year-old Ukrainian paramedic to strip naked, she told me recently, then they took photographs of her from the front and back.

Prison authorities may conduct intimate searches, but Obidina regards her experience not as a legitimate security measure but as coercive sexualized humiliation. If established, that would, the International Committee of the Red Cross, be a violation of of the Geneva Convention on the treatment of prisoners of war, which orders that prisoners “must at all times be protected, particularly against acts of violence or intimidation and against insults and public curiosity.” But after months of harrowing captivity,