For nearly four months, the world has watched in horror as Russian forces flattened Ukrainian cities, with images of slaughtered civilians in Bucha and Mariupol attracting international outrage and prompting Western powers to increase their military aid. But all the while a less visible phenomenon was taking place in homes, at checkpoints, during street protests: Russian soldiers were detaining and abducting hundreds — perhaps thousands — of civilians.

All over the country, people are missing. A schoolteacher who refused Russian soldiers’ demands that she speak their language. A volunteer paramedic tending to the injured in the port city of Mariupol. The father of a journalist, taken to blackmail his daughter into providing access to her news outlet’s website. A village leader who was escorted from a government building with a bag over his head. And untold others.

Authorities and human rights advocates say these cases are part of a larger pattern of Russian abductions and disappearances, a military tactic meant to terrorize communities and demoralize civilian resistance.

Patsan said Russian troops who had been occupying Havronshchyna had agreed to allow civilians to leave in a convoy. He said he and his wife had packed their car and were ready to join the end of the column of vehicles as it passed by.

“They were trying to escape. Men, women and children. And the Russian vehicles came up behind them and started to shoot,” he said.
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“People were running away, and they were being shot at. I saw an old man get shot. I fled to my house. Then slowly I came back and saw the bodies,” Patsan said.

He could also see a woman bent over a toddler trying to protect it in the backseat, and an older woman and a teenager in the car, he said. They were all dead.

The Russian Ministry of Defense has said that more than 951,000 Ukrainians have been deported to Russia since the beginning of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

According to Ukrinform, this was reported by Interfax, with reference to Mikhail Mizintsev, the head of Russia's National Defense Management Center.

According to him, "over the past 24 hours, without the participation of the Ukrainian authorities, 16,838 people were evacuated to Russia from dangerous regions of Ukraine, certain areas of the Donetsk and Lugansk regions, including 1,402 children, in total, since the start of the war, there have already been 951,329 people, including 174,689 children."