In 2018, Ukraine was on place 49 in the world ranking of the countries with the most slaves: 286.000 people in Ukraine live the lives of modern-day slaves, as an investigation by Australian organization Walk Free Foundation estimates.
For comparison, in 2013 Ukraine was on place 86, with an estimated number of between 110.000 and 120.000 modern slaves. That was nearly half as many as four years later. One of the decisive factors for this hike is the armed conflict in the country’s east. In many cases armed militias forced their prisoners and the local population to do unpaid work for them.
In a modern world, the definition of “slavery” includes a wide range of forms of forcing people to work. It is the forced subjection of one person to another making the subjected person fully dependent. Even if there are no obvious signs of physical or economical dependency, a person may still be forced to work through the threat of punishment.
The city of Sloviansk in Donetsk oblast was among the first to be occupied during the war. The rampant lawlessness led to the tragic rise in slavery statistics. The militias of the so called DNR controlled the city between April 12 and July 4, 2014. The militiamen illegally arrested civilians as well as soldiers off the street and forced them to work under the threat of torture or execution. People were forced to work in the local police headquarters and the building of the SBU, Ukraine’s secret service. These two buildings had been occupied by militias and were used as illegal prisons.
Investigations by the Coalition “Justice for Peace in Donbas” documented a number of cases of forced labor. For instance an inhabitant of Kostyantinivka, who was arrested for no obvious reason in April 2014 and then held first in Sloviansk’s SBU building and later in the local police headquarters, testified to cases of torture, inhumane conditions of detention and also to cases of forced labor. During the final days of his detention, his captures started to take him out and forced him to dig trenches, sometimes while they were under artillery attack.
They said they would shoot us if we don’t dig the trenches until the evening. But we didn’t finish digging those trenches, neither one nor the other. Nobody shot us, but we were very frightened. […] we couldn’t find shelter anywhere. There wasn’t even a sand bag bunker or anything. We just lay down at the fundament of this house and that was it.
There were about 15 other detainees digging trenches with him. There were also guards supervising the work and making sure no one would escape. Their function also was to humiliate the prisoners. One detainee, who was also held in the Sloviansk police headquarter, was forced to dig trenches in the village of Semenivka, where fierce artillery battles were raging.
As in many other places all over Donbas, the illegal prisons in Sloviansk were a source of free labor force for the militias. Prisoners were also used to sweep the streets and for house cleaning. A former inmate of the Sloviansk SBU building, who was detained under inhumane conditions and without access to fresh air, said this about his experience of forced labor:
They forced us to clean up the site. This was forced labor on the one hand. They told us where we should pick up the trash and where we should carry it. On the other hand, I understood that this was good for me. It gave me the chance to go outside and breathe fresh air.
The practice of relying on forced labor served to use prisoners for the kinds of work that militiamen were not willing to do themselves. Another goal of forced labor was to break the prisoner’s moral. Unfortunately the city of Sloviansk was but one among many occupied cities in Eastern Ukraine, the occupation of which resulted in Ukraine’s steep growth of modern slavery.
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The Secretariat of the Coalition «Justice for Peace in Donbas»
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