Kathrine Frich
Life under occupation reshapes daily routines in ways that are hard to imagine from afar.
For civilians trapped behind shifting front lines, survival often depends on silence, luck and endurance.
One Ukrainian woman’s testimony offers a rare account of what that reality looked like from the inside.
Early disappearances
According to The Insider, Olena Yagupova lived in Kamianka-Dniprovska, in Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia region, when Russian forces took control of the area in the first days of the full-scale invasion.
She said order was imposed quickly through patrols, checkpoints and house-to-house searches.
“People started disappearing from the very beginning,” Yagupova told The Insider, describing how residents were detained without explanation.
She said workers from the nearby Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant were among those targeted.
“They had lists of the plant’s employees,” she said, adding that some people were pressured into cooperation while others were tortured or sent to dig fortifications. Communication with the outside world, she said, was almost impossible.
Arrest without charges
Yagupova said she was detained on October 6, 2022.
Her husband served in the Ukrainian army, and she had worked in regional public administration, factors she believes made her a target.
“They had no warrant and no charges,” she said.
An FSB officer and members of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic searched her home, she said, taking property before moving her to a local police station.
“They suffocated me with bags, tortured me with electricity, simulated execution, raped me,” Yagupova said.
She described two days of abuse aimed at forcing false confessions, followed by months in detention without formal accusations.
Life in detention
She told The Insider she spent four months in pre-trial detention, often sleeping on the floor in overcrowded cells during winter. “In pretrial detention, your goal is to live one day,” she said.
Food was scarce, water limited and medical care nonexistent, she said.
Guards forced detainees to sing the Russian anthem for hours while beatings took place.
Many inmates, she added, were civilians detained for minor or unclear reasons.
A guard once gave her a book, she recalled. “Read it, it will be useful to you,” he said. The book was about the Nuremberg Trials.
Forced labor
In January 2023, Yagupova said she was transferred from detention to a labor camp. Before the transfer, she said, officials filmed a video claiming she had been released.
“They forced us to dig trenches and demine the fields,” she said. Such videos, she added, were meant to mislead families and avoid responsibility.
In October 2025, the International Criminal Court in The Hague accepted Yagupova’s testimony, according to The Insider, adding her account to a growing body of evidence about alleged abuses in occupied Ukrainian territories.
Sources: The Insider, International Criminal Court, Digi24.
