Two young women talk about their abduction and brutalization at the hands of Russia’s thugs in what used to be Ukraine 
 
 KIEV, Ukraine -- Before the revolution in Ukraine, Olena Maksymenko devoted herself to writing short stories and fairy tales, modeling for fashion agencies and hitchhiking around Mongolia, Siberia and Europe. But months of protests on the Maidan Square in Kiev changed the lissome 28-year-old’s way of thinking, made her more interested in Ukrainian and international politics. After she saw reports of Russian troops occupying Crimea, Maksymenko genuinely believed it would be patriotic to become personally involved by traveling to the peninsula and sharing her views of the Euromaidan goals with local people. She had her ideals, like so many in the Maidan. But she had no idea what waited for her near the shores of the Black Sea. 
 
 A few days before the referendum in which the people of Crimea voted overwhelmingly to secede from Ukraine and join Russia, Maksymenko decided to take the trip. Without telling the truth to her parents about her real destination, she joined up with a group of her male friends, some of them reporters and some of them, like her, young professionals-turned-activists sympathizing with the revolution. On March 9th, they packed an SUV with a few laptops, cameras and sleeping bags and drove from Kiev towards the peninsula some 800 kilometers (500 miles) away. 
 
 As they approached a checkpoint near Armyansk, just after entering Crimean territory, Maksymenko and her friends Oles Kromples and Eugene Rakhno came across armed men next to a white Citroen with a pink roof. Maksymenko recognized the uniforms of the Berkut, the Ukrainian riot police defeated in battles against protesters in Kiev last month and disbanded by the new government. There also appeared to be a few Cossacks and Russian-speaking militia. The men had machine-guns trained on two young women whose hands had been tied and who’d been forced to kneel on the ground. “It was too late for us to turn around,” Maksymenko told The Daily Beast. “A few minutes later we were detained and also forced to our knees.” 
 
 The other two women were Oleksandra Riazantseva, 29, and Kateryna Butko, 25, activists from a movement called AutoMaydan that began last December with a car procession to then-President Victor Yanukovych’s residence to protest against his refusal to sign the Ukraine-European Union Association Agreement. They, too, had decided they needed to see pro–Russian Crimea with their own eyes. 
 
 That evening, Riazantseva’s parents, who are residents of Crimea, expected her and her friend for dinner. Instead they began three long nights and days searching for the disappeared detainees. 
 
 In the past few weeks, armed men in Crimea have picked up several Ukrainian activists. Earlier this week, seven more people from AutoMaydan were released after being held the better part of a week. Amnesty International (PDF) and other human rights groups have urged the new administration in Crimea and the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg to stop the practice of abductions and disappearances, which are a new phenomenon for Ukraine. 
 
 In an exclusive interview with The Daily Beast, the young women detained near Armyansk described in detail what was done to them. The treatment was brutal, though not as savage as they feared, and it revealed a lot about what might be called the organized disorganization of the security forces in newly Russianized Crimea. 
 
 “I realized we were going to die. In my mind I was saying goodbye to everybody I loved” 
 
 Butko, who normally works in public relations and wears her fiery red hair in thick curls, said she was shocked when she was forced to the ground. “Cars were passing by. I could not believe that Berkut was beating us, humiliating us, cutting our hair off and threatening to kill us in broad daylight, right next to a public place.” She pointed to Maksymenko, whose delicate, gamine features make her seem especially frail. Her head was all but shaved. “You lost more hair than any of us,” said Butko. But the men held with them suffered far worse: a series of mock executions. 
 
 Maksymenko and Butko said it was terrifying to see their male friends stripped to their underwear and forced to lie on the ground as guns were fired next to their heads. At one point, one of the men whispered the address of his girlfriend to Maksymenko so she could find her and tell her if he got killed. “That was when I realized we were going to die,” said Maksymenko. “In my mind I was saying goodbye to everybody I loved, telling myself that if I survived I would always tell my parents the truth about my whereabouts.” 
 
 In fact, none of the five detainees were hurt seriously. They lost cameras, cell phones, laptops, tents and sleeping bags but all their limbs were in place. “I was still happy to have my ears, after all the threats about cutting them off,” said Maksymenko. 
 
 That same night they were picked up they were taken to a Russian navy base in Sevastopol and each was put in a separate cell. The women recalled loud arguments in the hall. The Berkut arrived demanding the five “Maidanovtsy,” but the Russian officers, to the enormous relief of the detainees, did not turn them over. The former cops from a former force appear to be under nobody’s control. “There are about 3,000 Berkut feeling betrayed by president Yanukovych right now,” said Maksymenko. “Some of them might be following us even in Kiev.” 
 
 Every day the Russian military questioned the detainees about their involvement in Euromaidan protests. “Unlike Berkut and the Cossacks, the Russian military treated us with almost exaggerated respect and care,” Butko pointed out. “I was having long political discussions with my polite interrogators,” she added. 
 
 On the third day of detention, the Russian military commanders went so far as to let the AutoMaydan activist Butko walk freely around Sevastopol together with two Russian journalists. Their calculated idea was that later, on her return to Kiev, the activist could tell her friends about Sevastopol’s genuine willingness to become a part of Russia. 
 
 “I thought about running away,” said Butko, “but after three days in jail, I was too dirty and unkempt, and besides, I did not have any documents or money with me.” By then the Russian military had already read her cell phone contacts, studied her text messages and searched out details of her life online. 
 
 The women told The Daily Beast that by the third day a Russian colonel and two young draftee soldiers armed with machineguns escorted all five detainees back to the checkpoint and convinced the Berkut to allow the Ukrainian activists to leave in their cars. Looking back on the lessons she had learned from her experience, Maksymenko said, “I would not advise any activists to go to Crimea these days.” ||||| SIMFEROPOL, Crimea – Kidnappings, threats and assaults of Ukrainian activists and journalists have become the norm in Crimea since the Russian military invasion of the Black Sea peninsula on Feb. 27 
 
 On March 9, while Ukraine was celebrating the 200th anniversary of poet Taras Shevchenko’s birth, two activists from the EuroMaidan Revolution -- Anatoliy Kovalsky and Andriy Shchekun -- arrived at the Simferopol train station to pick up a parcel decorated in Ukrainian blue-and-yellow. 
 
 Local pro-Kremlin militia promptly beat the two men and took them to a police station. Now they are believed to be members of the Russian Unity party, but have not been seen since. 
 
 Sevastopol activist Igor Kiriushchenko, who is helping Ukrainian soldiers at military bases, had to urgently leave Crimea on March 10 when dozens of men with white armbands from the Russian Bloc militia broke into his apartment and threatened the lives of him and his wife. “Get out of Crimea, otherwise we will kill you,” they said, Kiriushchenko reported. 
 
 On March 18, Ibraim Umerov, a journalist at ATR, a Crimean Tatar channel, was brought to a hospital with a broken knee after he and a cameraman tried to film the seizure of an auto repair shop in Simferopol by a group of masked men. The men severely beat him on the spot. 
 
 This is the everyday terror that Crimeans are facing under Russia’s control, an invasion condemned as illegal by most of the world. 
 
 “This is real terror, when people are getting abducted, when armed men are walking the streets, when journalists are getting beaten,” said Sergiy Mokrushin, a Simferopol investigative journalist, adding there are as many as 10 activists missing in Crimea right now. 
 
 These cases of kidnappings and abuse are disturbingly reminiscent to those in Kyiv during the EuroMaidan Revolution that toppled Viktor Yanukovych as president on Feb. 22. Dozens of anti-government activists were reportedly taken and tortured in the three months before victory, and at least one was killed, aside from the 100 protesters and police officers shot and killed. 
 
 After the new government took power, Berkut riot police officers sought shelter in Crimea and got welcomed as local heroes and victims of what many of the peninsula’s two million residents believe was a violent, fascist takeover by nationalists in Kyiv. Many of the riot police officers can now be spotted alongside police officers on the streets and checkpoints of the peninsula. 
 
 Near the front gate of the Berkut base in Simferopol is a small tent camp adorned with the words “Crimean Front” that was set up in late February. Some 50 men who call themselves Crimean Self-Defense, a Russian-backed outfit, spend their nights guarding the barracks of the Berkut riot police officers. 
 
 “Almost all of the former Berkut police officers are now here,” Mokrushin said. “Moreover, very many “titushkas” (thugs hired by the ousted Yanukovych regime) were also brought to Kyiv from Crimea.” 
 
 These people have become the backbone of pro-Kremlin Crimean self-defense groups and often apply the brutal methods they were using towards activists in Kyiv to those here. “They like to be scot-free here, to feel their strength, when they may check people’s documents and bags wherever they want,” Mokrushin added. 
 
 The Russian military takeover has already prompted more than 500 people, including Ukrainian activists and Crimean Tatars, to seek shelter outside the peninsula in recent weeks, according to Ukrainian Border Guard Service statistics. Ukrainian border guards and their families are also being harassed by the pro-Kremlin Crimean self-defense groups, they say. 
 
 Iryna Brunova-Kalisetska, a Simferopol psychologist, said that despite the fact that pro-Russian activists in Crimea openly hate EuroMaidan in Kyiv, they have adopted some attributes of the revolution. Apart from self-defense groups that are reminiscent to those representing EuroMaidan, there are also some local tent camps, widespread wearing of black-and-yellow St. George ribbons on the streets of Crimean cities. “This is a mirror effect of EuroMaidan,” Brunova-Kalisetska said. 
 
 The pro-Russian camp is also experiencing euphoria, which could be witnessed in Crimea in recent days with numerous street celebrations attended by thousands of people showing off Russian and Soviet symbols, after the March 16 referendum which led to Putin to order the transfer of Ukraine’s Crimea to Russia. “But this euphoria obviously will not last for long,” the psychologist added. 
 
 Given the danger to people’s lives and their personal safety if they oppose the Russian takeover, Brunova-Kalisetska said that many residents are simply too frightened to protest. 
 
 “They don’t care about violence until it touches their relatives or friends,” she said. 
 
 Kyiv Post staff writer Oksana Grytsenko can be reached at grytsenko@kyivpost.com. 
 
 Editor’s Note: This article has been produced with support from the project www.mymedia.org.ua, financially supported by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Denmark, and implemented by a joint venture between NIRAS and BBC Media Action.The content in this article may not necessarily reflect the views of the Danish government, NIRAS and BBC Action Media.
– Three female Ukrainian activists drove into Crimea just before its referendum and ended up kidnapped, beaten, and tossed in the same jail, they tell the Daily Beast. They were driving into Crimea—one on her own, and two together—to spread their views when Cossacks, Russian militia, and Ukrainian "Berkut" riot police dragged them onto a road near Armyansk. "I could not believe that Berkut was beating us, humiliating us, cutting our hair off and threatening to kill us in broad daylight," said Kateryna Butko, 25. It was bad for their male friends, too, who were stripped down to their underwear and had guns fired beside their heads. All were taken to a Russian navy base in Sevastopol, where Russian military questioned them about their activities. "I was having long political discussions with my polite interrogators," said Butko. The Russians even let her go out with Russian journalists, hoping she would speak well of Russia later, but the trio seemed unconvinced after being freed: "I would not advise any activists to go to Crimea these days," said one. Makes sense, considering that Crimea has seen more than 20 kidnappings lately, the Guardian reports, and KyivPost says kidnappings and assaults of Ukrainian activists and journalists "have become the norm" since Russia invaded.