CNN :
Iryna Danilovich disappeared while returning from work in April 2022. It would be two weeks before Russian authorities admitted she was in their custody.
The human rights activist and nurse was detained in the Russian-occupied Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea, accused of illegal possession of explosives and sentenced to seven years in prison.
In her trial, Danilovich testified that she was tortured during her detention.
She has since been deported to a notoriously cruel women’s penal colony in Zelenokumsk, southern Russia.
She suffers from constant headaches and her health continues to deteriorate – yet she is not allowed to sit or lie down during the day, according to human rights monitoring group Zmina.
Ukraine has always called its areas under Russian control “temporarily occupied territories,” insisting it will eventually regain control over them. But that hope is being crushed now.
This week, US President Donald Trump suggested it was “unlikely” Ukraine would get back much of its occupied land in the peace negotiations he intends to hold with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Danilovich’s case – and she is just one of thousands Kyiv says are detained in Russia – shows what is at stake for Ukraine.
Trump’s comment came after he held a 90-minute phone call with Putin on Wednesday, and it sparked panic across the country, where few believe Putin would negotiate in good faith.
“We already had so many years of negotiations with the Russian side,” she said. Russia has a history of striking and violating agreements with Ukraine going back decades.
In 1994, Ukraine agreed to give up its nuclear weapons in exchange for guarantees from the United States, United Kingdom and Russia that they would respect Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.
In 2015, after illegally annexing Crimea and sparking the conflict in eastern Ukraine, Moscow signed a ceasefire agreement only to then repeatedly violate it and then launch a full-scale invasion of Ukraine seven years later.
“We know that Russia is very duplicitous, and they can play nice, but when it comes to actually making concessions and making peace, they never… make any concessions,” Kazdobina told CNN.
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky responded to the Trump-Putin call by saying his country would not accept a peace deal struck between the US and Russia without Kyiv’s involvement.
“As an independent country we simply cannot accept any agreements without us. And I articulate this very clearly to our partners. We will not accept any bilateral negotiations on Ukraine without us,” Zelensky said, adding that the fact that Trump spoke to Putin first was “not pleasant.”
And Ukrainians seem to agree with their leader. Speaking to CNN in Kyiv, student Nazar Voloshenko said that any talks that could lead to Ukraine losing further territory would be disastrous for the country.
