Iryna Danylovych was born in 1979 in the Vitebsk region in Belarus. In 1982, her family moved to Crimea.
Working as a nurse, after the occupation of Crimea, she started to cover rigged, politically motivated trials as a citizen journalist. During the COVID-19 pandemic, she reported on corruption in healthcare, in particular, the non-transparent use of funds allocated to fight the disease. Danylovych initiated the project “Crimean Medicine Without a Cover.” She collaborated with independent media, including Crimean Process, and was actively involved in the trade union movement.
On April 29, 2022, she went missing for two weeks. Later, her family was informed that Danylovych had been arrested and was being held at the pre-trial detention center in Simferopol. She was sentenced to seven years in prison, charged with the “illegal acquisition, transfer, sale, storage, transportation, shipment, or bearing of explosives or explosive devices” under Part 1 of Article 222.1 of the Russian Criminal Code.
Danylovych is now held at the colony in the city of Zelenokumsk in Stavropol Krai, Russia. She has reported beatings and other forms of torture and has not received proper medical care for the past two years, risking losing her hearing completely.
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With this narrative portrait, we launch a special project dedicated to the free voices of Crimea. This series of stories about journalists, now political prisoners, is a joint initiative of PEN Ukraine, The Ukrainians Media, ZMINA, and Vivat, supported by NED.
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She dreamed of becoming a journalist but was also interested in medicine. She was gentle when giving injections and harsh when exposing corruption in Crimean hospitals. The FSB attempted to recruit her as an informant, but she refused to talk to them. She continued to report on the occupiers’ rigged trials against Crimean Tatars. She was kidnapped at a bus stop in Koktebel and sentenced to almost seven years in prison. This is the story of a citizen journalist whose case contains zero details about explosive devices allegedly found in her eyeglass case—and a whole volume of references to her interviews in the media.
A simple, ordinary family
Iryna Danylovych’s father, Bronislav, says their family is simple, ordinary. They settled in Crimea in 1982. “We moved here from Belarus,” he says. “Before that, we often vacationed here, staying with my wife’s sister who lived nearby. We liked it in Crimea and decided to stay for good. On our first few visits to Crimea, we were impressed by the weather and climate. We loved the sea and the air, but that’s obvious; I shouldn’t even mention that. Another important factor was that, in those days, the quality of life in Crimea was much higher than in Belarus. I’m talking mainly about access to food. In Belarus, we lived close to the border with Lithuania and bought food and other necessities for children and adults there. Lithuania had a much better supply than Belarus or Crimea.”
Today, his family lives in the village of Vladyslavivka just outside Feodosia, while Olha, their elder daughter, lives in Belarus with her family.
We talk about Ukraine’s independence and how it transformed Crimea. Bronislav recalls quite difficult circumstances: “When it comes to Crimea of 1991, right after Ukraine proclaimed independence, my first thought is of chaos. In Crimea, people’s financial situations quickly worsened. Agriculture began to decline, and people were losing their jobs. That period was quite unpredictable and tough. The quality of life was very low until the 2000s. Sometimes, even buying a loaf of bread was a challenge.”
A gentle touch
Bronislav mentions his daughter’s leadership qualities, saying she was a leader in her class at school. “This was also the case after she finished school,” he adds. “She was a leader at the vocational school and university.” He says that Iryna has been passionate about the truth since she was a little girl: “Deception was the worst sin in her eyes. She couldn’t stand it when people lied. We always knew it was best to be honest with her, even when the truth was hard and unpleasant.”
Danylovych had two passions: journalism and medicine. Her family was not happy about one of them. “We really tried to talk her out of pursuing journalism,” Bronislav admits. “We just didn’t believe it could become a serious career. Medicine seemed like a more substantial occupation.”
He mentions that Iryna was initially afraid of blood, but her fear gradually faded: “We didn’t even notice when that happened. Maybe it was exaggerated. Before committing to medical school, she even went to a morgue to see how she would react and observed a surgery.”
Danylovych applied to the medical academy in Dnipro but wasn’t accepted. Instead, she pursued environmental studies at a college in Crimea, qualifying for free tuition. Later, she enrolled in nursing school full-time, completing her environmental studies through distance learning.
Bronislav says that medicine was Iryna’s true calling. “She worked as a nurse practitioner,” he says. “Quite a few doctors work here, but people always came to her when they needed an injection or an IV drip. I think she has a gentle touch. And she’s very kind, too—never showing any contempt or hostility. She’s always treated people well.”
He adds that both of her passions were still close to her heart: “One is journalism, which we managed to steer her away from. The other is medicine. It just worked out this way that she pursued medicine and never got involved professionally in journalism. Though, I remember she wrote great essays back in school,” he recalls.
Citizen journalist
Danylovych engaged in citizen journalism soon after the temporary occupation of Crimea. How did it happen? Bronislav recalls this was in 2014 or 2015. “Iryna didn’t share much with us,” he says. “She would only tell us about some episodes, such as stories of Crimean Tatars who were unjustly harassed and sentenced to seven or eight years in prison.”
Around the 2020s, Danylovych started sharing more details with her parents. “The FSB detained her several times,” her father says. “I think they tried to recruit her as an informant, but Iryna didn’t buy into that. I don’t know any more details. I remember this happened during her work shift in Koktebel. They approached her and wanted to have a conversation with her. She told us later that they attempted to pressure her into cooperating with them, but she refused to talk to them.”
The COVID-19 pandemic drastically changed the situation as the nurses found themselves in especially challenging conditions. In November 2020, in her comment for Radio Liberty, Danylovych described the Crimean reality like this:
“Healthcare workers started getting sick, both in outpatient hospitals and in-patient facilities. There was a shortage of space in hospitals to treat the sick. The authorities claimed that COVID-19 hospitals were only eighty percent full, but that simply wasn’t true. Our COVID-19 patients were stuck at home, waiting for a hospital bed to open up.”
Describing those days, Danylovych’s father recalls: “Just like other nurses, she was among the first to care for the sick. Nurses were the first point of contact, and they were supposed to get gloves, masks, and protective gear. Yet, they didn’t. Iryna raised the alarm with the hospital’s chief physician. The administration didn’t take it well. They were resentful but had to fix the situation somehow. However, later a scandal erupted over a COVID-19 inspection, and they bluntly told her they wouldn’t listen to her concerns and would find it much easier to just fire her. And that’s exactly what happened. She was dismissed.”
“When it comes to corruption, people just don’t want to get involved and leave the person to deal with it alone. That’s what happened to Iryna,” sums up Danylovych’s father. However, the Russian independent labor union, The Alliance of Doctors, was active in Crimea, advocating for the rights of healthcare workers. Its directors were detained and put on trial. Danylovych became the head of the Crimean chapter of this organization.
Her father recalls how the case gained momentum. “It implicated not only the hospital where Iryna worked but the entire district healthcare department in Feodosia. Things started moving forward; an investigator got involved, and some people found themselves facing criminal proceedings. I think it was at that point that they turned to the FSB for help.”
Going missing
On April 29, 2022, Danylovych was kidnapped at a bus stop in Koktebel. “For a long time, we had no idea about her whereabouts,” her father says. “We spent two weeks searching for her. It turned out that she had been kidnapped by FSB officers.”
Yes, later they did plant an explosive device on her, but the actual reasons behind her abduction and further persecution were these: legal trials, which Iryna covered fairly, and her fight with corruption in healthcare.
Danylovych was abducted in broad daylight. The same day, the house where she lived with her parents was searched. “It was a day like any other,” her father remembers. “Iryna was supposed to finish her shift and come home. About an hour before she was due, two cars pulled up to our house. A district police officer got out and informed us they had come to search our house. They read some sort of court ruling aloud but didn’t give me a copy when I asked for one. Then, they proceeded with the search. I was surprised but not afraid—I had no reason to be. We didn’t have anything; they could only plant things on us, but that would’ve been a different story.”
Bronislav calls the house search “obnoxious.” “They confiscated a pile of books,” he says, “along with Iryna’s laptop. They took all our phones away, leaving us, old and sick, without any means of communication. We couldn’t call anyone to let them know.”
Realizing that Iryna would not return home soon, her parents reported her missing to the police three days later. “They accepted our report but didn’t initiate a search,” Bronislav remarks. “That’s when I turned to my friends for help. We watched CCTV footage together. The footage from the camera at the bus station showed two men grabbing Iryna, shoving her into the car, and driving away.”
Bronislav returned to the police station. “I filed another report, urging them to start criminal proceedings for kidnapping and assist with the search. No one helped us with the search, though,” he recalls. “So, we started calling local morgues and hospitals. They all confirmed Iryna wasn’t there. Then we contacted the pre-trial detention center, but they also said she was not there.”
Thirteen days later, they did locate their daughter at the pre-trial detention center. “The attorney was informed that Iryna was being held there,” Bronislav says. “By then, they’d stopped beating and torturing her in that FSB basement. We still have no idea where she was from April 29 to May 7. We don’t know what they were doing to her. In court, Iryna simply stated that they beat her, that’s all.”
Rigged trial
However, Danylovych’s testimony during the rigged trial in November 2022, later published in full by Graty, revealed that she was not only beaten but also strangled, held in a cold cell, and denied bathroom access for long periods. They also threatened to take her to the forest and kill her and do harm to her parents. Iryna said she was never interrogated about explosive devices, for which she was eventually convicted, but instead, about why she “got involved with that story with the COVID-19 funds,” her connections with Ukrainian security services, and independent journalists working in Crimea.
Alim Aliev, deputy director general at the Ukrainian Institute, advocates for Danylovych in the #SolidarityWords project. He describes her case as a clear example of injustice.
“Iryna’s case proves that the occupiers can and will persecute any independent public voice in Crimea,” he asserts.
Her conviction marks a new wave of repression in Crimea, as Iryna was charged in the early months of the full-scale invasion in 2022.
“This case is particularly significant to me because it’s not just about an activist being targeted but also a woman. Like Halyna Dovhopola before her, Iryna became one of the few women Russia targeted in Crimea with criminal charges.”
What provoked such an intense reaction from the authorities in Crimea towards Danylovych? According to Aliev, her focus on healthcare seems apolitical at first glance. “It actually exposes systemic failures,” he explains. “How the system deceives people and fails to provide proper medical care. This became especially evident during the COVID-19 pandemic. Also, Iryna had been outspoken in her pro-Ukrainian stance and never came to terms with the temporary occupation in 2014. That’s why her case serves as a stark illustration that you can express your views in public only within certain permitted limits. And if you cross these limits, they will come after you, too, plant an explosive device on you, and send you to prison in Stavropol Krai or elsewhere.”
The case of Iryna Danylovych also raises the issue of the appalling reality of inadequate medical care for prisoners. Aliev stresses that people held in Crimean or Russian prisons do not get proper medical care. “They’re simply being tortured,” he says. “Iryna has serious trouble with her ears. She has lost hearing in her left ear and constantly hears noises. They refuse to treat her, and one doctor even said they won’t intervene until she goes deaf. It’s a form of outright torture in Russian prisons against those with dissenting political views. The system cripples them, and they return from prison with a bunch of health issues.”
“Iryna’s case is about holding an undesirable alternative opinion, and the occupiers punish people for this if they demonstrate it systemically,” Aliev continues. “It’s important to note that Iryna reported on the illegal trials against Crimean Tatars. They’re also political prisoners, and Russian occupiers consider these reports as a leak of information about the true state of affairs in Crimea.”
Imprisonment
Danylovych’s father describes an incident at the courthouse when an ambulance had to be called for his daughter. “The ambulance arrived, but the ‘doctors’ said the court session could continue. So, our daughter was locked back in that cage. She went to the medical unit at the pre-trial detention center, but they only laughed at her. They said the problem would resolve on its own. We found doctors for her in a civilian hospital and fought to have Iryna taken there for an exam. And not just us—journalists and human rights advocates pressured them, too. In the end, Iryna was taken to the Semashko Regional Hospital, but it was all for show. No one even bothered to talk to her. They simply checked her over and did not prescribe any treatment. She’s been suffering since the fall of 2022 without a diagnosis.”
Bronislav says that before her imprisonment, his daughter was in good health. “She might catch a cold sometimes, of course, like anyone else,” he notes. “But otherwise, she was completely healthy. We suspect that she had a ministroke as a result of all those tortures. It’s possible that blood started to press on her eardrum, causing that ringing and horrible pain.”
Danylovych was sentenced to seven years in prison. Bronislav mentions that the judge who oversaw the rigged trial against Iryna now holds a position in the “supreme court” of occupied Crimea.
Since August 2023, Danylovych has been imprisoned at a women’s colony in Zelenokumsk in Stavropol Krai, Russia. Bronislav has pleaded for his daughter to be transferred closer to her homeland. “I appealed to them,” he says. “I explained that my wife and I are old and won’t be able to travel so far to visit her. But they ignored us. The colony she’s been sent to doesn’t seem to be that far, but we’re too frail to make the journey.”
Danylovych and her parents rarely correspond. There are only a few brief letters. “We don’t write to her,” Bronislav says, “because what I want to write to her will be censored anyway. And Iryna doesn’t want to write what she truly wants to, either, because of the censorship.”
They speak on the phone instead. “We send her money she can use to call us,” he explains. “We manage to talk to her quite regularly, almost every day. There’s no doubt they listen in on our conversations. But we’ve become so lost to all feeling that we’re no longer afraid and discuss all kinds of topics.”
Bronislav describes the terrible conditions in the colony. “The shop in this colony was closed down,” he says. “Prisoners can’t even buy toilet paper now. They have to use newspapers… Those who are sick don’t get any treatment. You can die if you wish, they’re being told, there’s no medicine. Access to water is also a problem.
Women need more water for their hygiene needs, so in the winter, they had to crack and melt ice to wash up.
I feel like conditions in Auschwitz were better.”
Bronislav says that Iryna was taken to the hospital from both the pre-trial detention center and the colony in December 2023. “No one asked her anything there or listened to her complaints,” he remarks. He firmly believes that her pain stems from the beatings and torture. “They’ll never tell the truth because it’s actually from her being beaten in the basement. When she got moved to the colony, they told her to wait until the nerve died. Once it’s dead, the pain will go away… along with her hearing. They also said it’s too late for treatment because it would’ve only worked in the first two weeks when the symptoms started.”
Alevtyna Kakhidze sketched the scenes from the trial against Danylovych. Her works have been displayed at the exhibition “Lomykamin’. Women’s resistance in Crimea.”
Why did this case grab the artist’s attention? Kakhidze says that since 2017, she’s been sketching scenes from the Maidan trial. “I deeply care about this cause,” she explains. “I won’t stop doing that until the statute of limitations expires. Once, I met Yevhen Bondarenko [Head of the Information Support Department of the Representative Office of the President of Ukraine in the Autonomous Republic of Crimea], and he said that in Crimea, there was another person like me who attended court sessions. Her name was Iryna Danylovych, and she identified herself as a citizen journalist. While I simply sketched scenes and then gave my sketches to attorneys who posted them on social media, Iryna took notes during court sessions to later report on what was happening in Crimean courts where the cases against activists were considered.”
Kakhidze learned about Danylovych and her activism long before her imprisonment. “She wasn’t under arrest at the time,” she says. “And I thought, ‘How interesting. She’s like my alter ego.’ And then she was arrested.”
She sketched scenes from Danylovych’s trial as reconstruction. “I can spend days scouring the Internet for the information I need,” she explains. “My sketches were based on whatever I could find online and the materials Iryna’s family sent me. This is exactly how I worked on my mother’s story, recreating her life in occupied Zhdanivka. It’s called reconstruction.”
Community
Communities often rally to support families facing such unjust persecution. How have the neighbors of the Danylovych family reacted to this injustice? Bronislav Danylovych acknowledges that reactions among their fellow villagers are mixed.
“Some of them support us, others don’t,” he says. “A few have even stopped greeting us. But overall, I don’t care. Instead, we receive lots of letters from strangers—from Georgia, Lithuania, Germany, and Canada. Recently, we even received a parcel from a woman in Novosibirsk. This support from the outside of our community is significant and helps ease our nerves. We truly appreciate it.”
Bronislav mentions that he can only rely on himself and his wife, as their elder daughter lives in Belarus, and his wife’s sister, despite living nearby, can’t help them much due to her advanced age. “We rely on ourselves and on God,” he concludes.
Lessons of history
Bronislav Danylovych was born in 1947. Talking about his homeland—western Belarus bordering with Lithuania—he says that this territory regularly changed hands: “Tsar, then Soviets, then Poland, then Soviets again… like a kaleidoscope.” He adds that persecuting nonconformists is a long-lasting tradition of the Russian state.
The evolution of his values did not happen fast. “In the past, I believed their claims about the USSR,” he admits. “I was a pioneer and later a diligent member of the Komsomol. Yet, I began to notice stark discrepancies between what adults discussed privately and what we were taught in school. They portrayed our people as kind but never mentioned what they did in Berlin. Rape, killing… It still feels terrible to say this, but I heard adults say they lived their best years under German occupation—they even praised Poland less.”
He used to believe in the communist ideology, but things have shifted. “My opinion now is 180 degrees different from what it was in my forties and fifties,” he says. “I once believed we were building a better society. But later, I realized we’d been building precisely what Mussolini built. This realization came too late. I woke up to the scale of our problems—it was a deliberate, consistent state policy. As I was leaving the Communist Party, I stated in my petition that I could not remain in a party that orchestrated genocide against its own people.”
This text was written in March–April 2024
Translated by Hanna Leliv
Колажі Анастасії Струк. У зображеннях використано ілюстрацію Марії Глушко та фотографії зі сімейного архіву.
