Residents Of Ukrainian Town Say Their Relatives Were Taken Captive To Belarus

The number of prisoners is eight.

Several local residents - electricians who went to fix electricity in a village with military equipment - have disappeared in the small Ukrainian border town of Gorodnia. The men's relatives and the head of the town administration believe they have been taken to Belarus as prisoners of war. The family of one of the men agreed to talk to zerkalo.io journalists hoping that the publicity would help find him.

Anastasia, a resident of the small town of Gorodnia in Chernihiv region, posted an appeal asking to help find her young man, 29-year-old Mykhailo Dudko. The girl says that her boyfriend, an electrician, went to the local village of Ilmovka together with his brigade. It is only two kilometres from there to the Belarusian border, as shown by Google maps. The day before, electricity was cut off there because of the shelling, and some military vehicles drove into the village. The men went to repair the appliances so that the civilians would have light in their homes. They had to cross a roadblock set up by the military who came from the Belarusian side. None of them returned, Anastasia says.

"They left there at 10 a.m. on February 27, and at about 12 p.m. their phones were not answering and they did not get in touch again. In the evening, during the curfew, the village headman was passing by and saw that they were sitting in a school or a club in Ilmovka. They were guarded [by the military], they were not doing work on the lines as they were supposed to," says Anastasia. "I called our mayor, and he told me that they were being held there and that they would not be released that day".

Anastasia has sent a list of those who were in the brigade and are missing. There are eight men on it, the youngest is born in 1998. In the morning of February 28, several of the mothers together with representatives of the local town authorities went to Ilmovka to ask the military to release them. But neither the military men themselves nor the missing men were present in the village.

The list of the missing electricians:

Igor Verkhusha (1976);

Mikhail Dudko (1993);

Aleksei Degovets (1987);

Sergei Biryuk (1974);

Sergei Gretzky (1974);

Vadim Avramenko (1998);

Vitaliy Semenyako (1970);

Mykola Melnyk (year of birth unspecified).

"The troops have left and taken our men prisoners. The vehicles in which they came were left in the village. The locals say they headed in the direction of Belarus, to Hlybotskaye," the interlocutor names the nearest Belarusian border village. "I don't know if this information is true. We called to the Consulate of Ukraine in Belarus. They asked us to call tomorrow - maybe they'll give us some information. But it's hard to wait till tomorrow, they have already spent the night God knows where".

Mikhail's family do not understand what has happened and why they have been taken away. They are retelling the information they have been able to get from local authorities and eyewitnesses.

"Our guys are responsible people. They knew that the military equipment was there. They didn't carry any weapons - they were peaceful people. And today [Ilmovka's head] tells us that they were allegedly drunk there. People who even at home drink rarely, came and drank on the workplace?!" the girl asks the question into the void.

"It is not clear who's right, who's wrong, why they were detained - they just had to restore the light and go home".

Valentina, Mikhail`s mother, who had earlier heard the conversation with the journalist, adds more details about the possible detention. The woman can't contain her emotions:

"The children were stripped naked, put on the ground and searched by soldiers! And if the boys have not seen the war, what kind of psyche is there? I'm telling you this as a mother," Valentina recalls emotionally. "If I have never seen my child drunk for 29 years, the neighbours will confirm it, and they tell me, that suddenly my child is drunk? Everyone is shocked to hear about it!"

Andrei Bogdan, the head of the town administration, adds some clarity to the story. He also says that the local men have been taken to Belarus. But the man doesn't know where exactly to. According to him, the electricians "broke the agreements".

"[The electricians] didn't go by themselves, but took our town dwellers, who were drunk. Why did they take them there? There was an agreement that 7 people would be allowed through the checkpoint, but 11 showed up. They started searching them. And those drunk people had video footage of convoys of equipment on their phones, things like that. Well, they said, if so - it means you are saboteurs. The military left and took our people as saboteurs. That is all I know," says the man.

Then the connection is cut off: there are also problems with electricity in the town, and they say there is no one to eliminate them at the moment. We do not have time to clarify who were those "town dwellers" about whom Andrei Bogdan was talking. Apparently, it was about the three men who were supposed to be helping the electricians with something.

Families of electricians are worried that they will not be able to find out information about their relatives:

"How can we calm down? A couple of kilometres from the border, I was standing there screaming: "My heart, why don't you burst?" And today, my nephew died [of illness] in Chernihiv, how do you think I am going to hold on?!" Valentina holds back tears. "Girl, my dear, we will be able to find them when we find out which military unit entered from the side of Belarus and returned back. They are the ones who took our children. The main thing now is to find our children. We don't know whether it was the Russian or Belarusian military vehicles. They didn't have any identification marks. They came from Belarus and left there".

The hotline of the Ukrainian embassy in Belarus says they are aware of the situation with the missing workmen.

"Our officers are now actively working on this situation. They are trying to bring them back by diplomatic and other means. I can't say anything else," they said at the embassy.