Arrested in Mariupol and imprisoned by Russian forces: the 83 days of horror of a Spanish woman

Galina looks with special affection at her gold wristwatch.

It never stopped working between February 19, five days before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, when she returned to her native Mariupol to care for her ailing father, and May 13, when, broken and relieved, she managed to fly back to Spain, where he has lived for two decades.

The clock kept ticking when the first bombings blew out the windows of the family home, when her father died after weeks in agony sheltering in a tiny basement, when the Russian forces arrested her on suspicion of her Spanish passport that she was a spy (and forced the lid of the watch looking for a microchip in the hole of the battery) or journalist.

Over a soft drink, this 48-year-old doctor recounts her torment with a mixture of relief - for having left behind the war, the devastated city and the humiliations she suffered for weeks in prison - and anger at not having been able to save the life of his father.

She doesn't even know if he was buried.

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Despite the hell she has lived through, Galina - who prefers that her last name, her place of work, and the location of the interview not be disclosed - has written an open letter to Russian President Vladimir Putin, exuding disappointment in a leader who came to admire.

She says that she has always felt culturally Russian and asks the head of the Kremlin, who launched the invasion under the pretext of "denazifying" the country and saving Russian-speaking Ukrainians, like her, from alleged oppression, to negotiate peace because this The "meaningless" war is destroying the "very important human values ​​that he has transmitted to so many Russian and Ukrainian families."

She feels "totally betrayed" and admits that she has "every reason to hate" after her torment, but she wants to "build, not destroy."

During the story, in fact,

he gets confused on occasion and says that he has Spanish and Russian passports.

“I have never stopped feeling Russian.

Being Ukrainian, I grew up among the very important Russian cultural values ​​that were instilled in me by my parents and the Soviet regime [...] Now all this is covered in blood, ”she stresses.

Galina did not imagine that Putin was going to invade Ukraine.

Due to “optimism or overconfidence”, he says, he did not believe that Moscow would launch a war that has caused thousands of deaths and injuries, and devastated cities like Mariupol, already hyperactive – with “huge queues of up to 500 people” and people “running already from one place to another”― when he arrived at the alert call from his mother due to his father's worsening.

His daughter had more than two decades of experience as a doctor in Spain, where she arrived in 2001, after having learned Spanish with songs by Manolo Escobar, Isabel Pantoja, Los Brincos or Julio Iglesias, and acquired nationality by roots 10 years ago.

Galina, in Spain in 2010.

A “tremendous noise” marked the beginning of the bombing on February 24.

The attacks on Mariupol left the windows of his house shattered and the walls shaking.

Galina and her parents took refuge in the basement, converted into a makeshift bunker.

A cold, damp, and electricity-free space just over a meter high.

There they spent several weeks in which she had to ensure the survival of the family, look for food, water, medicine.

It was then that she first contacted the Spanish Embassy for help, she says.

"There were corpses in the street," she recalls.

His mother, who is now a refugee in Spain, was able to be evacuated three weeks after the war began.

Several of her neighbors carried her seven kilometers in their arms to the car of a relative of hers.

Galina stayed with her father.

"Many neighbors told me that she should leave him there, that she would not live," she says.

He did not, and despite the danger, he decided to walk the three kilometers that separated his parents' house (in the part of the city under Ukrainian control) from one of the nearby hospitals, already in Russian hands, to ask for help.

She even begged for “Russian volunteers”, with the gloomy Z symbol of the invasion edging their uniforms, and tried several times to appeal to the occupying forces, despite the fact that they often treated her over and over again for what she was: a Ukrainian who he had as a second passport that of a NATO country clearly aligned with kyiv.

Bombing

Ten days later, his house was destroyed in a bombing and his father was moved to the basement of a nearby building.

Galina was held by Russian soldiers on the outskirts of Mariupol as she tried to reach a town 20 kilometers away on foot to ask for help.

“When one saw my documentation, she told me with hate: 'We already know a few from the European Union who have killed our people by shooting their genitals.

You are one of them, right?” she assures.

After questioning her twice, she was able to return to the Mariupol hospital to try again to have her father saved.

She was greeted with hostility.

The person responsible, apparently a Russian military doctor,

“He thought I was a journalist.

Or spy,” he states.

“He started asking me strange questions, like where I studied, what was the name of the university cafeteria… Until he told me that, instead of receiving one type of help, he was going to receive… another type of

.

They put me under military control, took me away and spent the night in a hospital room with the Ukrainian prisoners.

I was very afraid that they would rape me,” she recounts.

After one night, she managed to return to his neighborhood, under the bombs, and found his father recently dead at the entrance of the building.

“I had a tremendous feeling of helplessness and hopelessness, of not having fulfilled my duty as a daughter...'

, forgive me, I tried everything,' I told him.

Galina went up to what was left of the family home and she rescued, crying from the ashes, the strings of the piano on which she learned to play.

Galina, with her parents, at the house in Mariupol in 2020. Family photo

In

and despite what he had already experienced, he returned to the hospital.

She kept hoping that someone would finally help her, that her colleagues would at least give her health care.

"I had confidence in those people, I had told them my whole life," she justifies.

She says they gave her an injection that put her to sleep for 40 hours.

When she woke up it was April 4th.

Right there, in the medical center, two uniformed

Russians handcuffed her, blindfolded her, threw her cell phone at her and took her away.

She was robbed of the equivalent in Ukrainian currency of 6,000 euros that she had been sending to her family and that she returned to her mother before she was evacuated, she says.

She was left alone with her watch, the Ukrainian and Spanish documentation, the plane ticket with which she entered kyiv and the keys to her parents' apartment.

The horror was increasing.

She says that she was taken to a room in a prison in Donetsk, where she heard the screams of a young man being tortured and a trickle of blood ran down the corridor.

“They told me that it was better for me to reveal who I am because no one was going to rescue me there.

Not even the King [of Spain].

That I was going to rot inside for life.”

She was questioned by five men.

She claims that they applied electrodes to her hands and feet until she was unconscious, threatened her and beat her.

Then they transferred her to another prison "a little more dignified, where the food smelled rotten, but there was water, which was a luxury, and you could walk a little", and finally to a third, in which they warned her that, if he did not collaborate, four years awaited him inside.

“We were about 40 in about 50 meters.

She had a permanent feeling of shortness of breath.

The smell of urine, poop, lots of flies… lots of inmates had urinary tract infections,” she says.

Two inmates threw food at her, insulted her for having asked a Russian doctor for help.

She barely had any strength left, she confesses.

Galina shows the incarceration document on which you can read her first and last name.

She points to the "protection of the population against banditry and organized crime"

as a reason for the arrest and has the letterhead of the authorities of the self-styled "Donetsk People's Republic" through which the Kremlin controls the territories occupied since the 2014 war.

Arrive in Poland

On May 3, they took her out of the cell just as she entered: "With a push and without explanation."

She stayed at an aunt's house in Donetsk, where she was able to eat potatoes, sausages and tea and take paracetamol.

She says that she only thought about returning to Spain, but she did not know "who to trust".

She turned to the Spanish Embassy in kyiv, then relocated to Poland, which advised her and helped her get to Warsaw by road, crossing from Russia to the Baltics, because

the route to the part controlled by the Ukrainian forces was already impossible to cross.

About 2,500 kilometers and 50 hours of travel.

In the Polish capital she was received by the diplomatic staff who had followed her case.

As if she needed to remember that life is more than fear and flight, she allowed herself to close those two and a half months of pain with some beauty: she took advantage of being in the homeland of Frédéric Chopin to go to a concert of his music.

From there she flew back to Spain.

"I still have the feeling that it was a horror movie, that I don't know if it happened to me, but it did happen to me," he reflects today.

"I have regained the feeling of being happy by opening my eyes in the morning and seeing the sunlight."

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