The “Empty Chairs” action was held in Kyiv in support of the missing and prisoners due to the war

Olga, participant of the campaign “Empty chairs” (right)

More than 50 people took part in the event, in particular, relatives, relatives and colleagues of the prisoners. They told the stories of the missing and imprisoned and Ukrainian prisoners. Thus, among the participants of the action was Olga, who maintained contact with Volodymyr Dudka. In November 2016, in Sevastopol, Russian security forces detained Dmytro Shtyblikov, Oleksiy Bessarabov, and Volodymyr Dudka, accusing them of “preparing sabotage on the order of Ukrainian intelligence.” In 2019, Dudka and Bessarabov were sentenced to 14 years in prison. After the full-scale invasion, Olga says, she stopped corresponding with Dudka because Ukrposhta stopped cooperation with Russia.

“I tried to support him with letters. Now I’m also writing through the “Letters to a Free Crimea” initiative, but I can’t get a response from him, so I don’t know if he gets these letters or not. I want to believe that they are coming,” says Olga.

Ukrainian PEN and the Center for Civil Liberties held a human rights action “Empty Chairs”

Relatives of prisoners also came to the rally. Among them is Oleksandr Barkova, Bohdan Zis’s sister. Russian security forces accused the Crimean artist Bohdan Ziza of dousing the building of the Russian administration in Yevpatoria with blue and yellow paint, and the Russian court sentenced Ziza to 15 years in prison. Currently, he is in the “Volodymyr Central”, says his sister.

“We correspond, this is the only form of our communication at the moment, initially his imprisonment. And now I rarely receive letters from him. Once a month. I waited for the last letters from him for a whole month, because the censorship is very strong and for some reason this process is very blocked, I can’t understand why, but that’s how it’s happening now. Usually this is a periodicity, two letters a month,” Barkova says.

Mariupol poetess and public activist Oksana Stomina also attended the event. Her husband, Dmytro Pascalov, defended the Azovstal metallurgical plant and has been in Russian captivity since May 2022. Stomina does not have the opportunity to correspond with her husband, and she learns all the information from her brothers who were released from captivity during the exchanges.

“I ask everything. We stay in touch with these guys. I ask very different questions. I ask, for example, if he does push-ups from the floor. And from this I can already draw conclusions about his psychological state,” says Stomina.

The Ukrainian PEN and the Center for Civil Liberties held a human rights action “Empty Chairs” on Sofia Square in Kyiv “Empty Chairs”, November 15, 2024

The action was also joined by former political prisoners: Lyudmila Huseynova, a citizen journalist and human rights defender who was in Russian captivity from October 2019 to October 2022, and Nariman Dzhelal, a journalist and human rights defender who was held by the occupation authorities from September 2021 to June 28, 2024. . Dzhelal says that such actions and expressions of attention to prisoners helped to endure captivity.

“My lawyers, my wife and in letters, and when they had the opportunity to visit me in the pre-trial detention center, or when my wife came to see me in distant Krasnoyarsk, she talked about the action with empty chairs, about the banner on Instytutskaya, about the mention of various people from different countries. It’s really hard to express how important it is to a person when you sit in four walls, in the dark, in such a non-literal but imaginary, and the focus of your life, it’s very narrow, and you live one day like another, and here you it is told… well, you know, such a ray of light of hope that everything is not so bad. People are fighting for you,” says former political prisoner Nariman Jelal.

At the end of the event, Huseynova and Dzhelal occupied two chairs with their names as a sign of liberation and return home.