Andrii Belyi
Andrii Belyi
Date of abduction: March 13, 2022
Place of abduction: Buryn, Sumy region
Before the full-scale Russian invasion, Andrii Bilyi, his wife, son, and mother lived in the same house in Buryn, Sumy region. Russian troops took control of This town in the first days of the full-scale war.
On March 13, 2022, Andrii and two other residents, Oleksii and Yaroslav, went to look for diesel fuel. The men did not return home that evening.
Much later, Oleksii, who was held by the Russians for a month in the Kursk detention center and eventually released, told Vira, Bilyi’s mother, that the men’s problems began that day at a checkpoint on the outskirts of the city. The Russians stopped their car, and the conversation was initially neutral. However, at the same time, another group of Russians was walking past the checkpoint, dragging burnt equipment.
“They were being chased from Konotop, traveling across the same bridge. They stopped and started asking: “Who are these people? What are they doing here?” They took away their phones and snatched the armed APC (armored personnel carrier). Then they started beating them, threw them into an armored personnel carrier, and drove them away,” Vira recounts Oleksii’s words.
When the men did not return home, their wives and mothers searched for them. First, they went to the local police, but they said that no one had been detained that night. Then they went to a Russian checkpoint and were told nothing. A few days later, they found Andriy’s car. “The exhaust pipe was hanging off the car, the whole car was covered in pine needles, and the hood was covered in blood. Maybe their heads were beaten against the hood, or they were beaten first and then put on the hood. I don’t know,” Vira says.
A few days later, the locals suggested that the men might have been detained and taken to Russia. “They asked for a driver. I don’t even know who gave us his number, but we drove to the Kursk region to Tiotkino,” Vira continued.
The driver warned the women that it would be better if only their mothers went. So they did so. Almost at the border, they were stopped: “There is a checkpoint, tanks are there, we can’t go any further. Young guys came out, we asked them whether they had brought such and such or not. They said they couldn’t know.”
After some persuasion, the Russians assured the women that they had called the Kursk detention center and that the head of the detention center would soon come to them. Two hours later, Vira and the other two mothers were indeed approached by a man who introduced himself as the head of the detention center and confirmed that Andriy, Oleksiy, and Yaroslav were in Kursk. “Don’t worry. They will be held for a while and then released. We’ll let them make a phone call,” the Russian said, ordering the women to leave. He refused to take the parcel with warm clothes and food, saying they had everything.
However, the call never came. On April 11, 2022, the Armed Forces of Ukraine fully regained control of the state border in the Sumy region.
Later, Vira received two letters from her son: one from the Kursk detention center and the other from the place of detention in Crimea. She also learned from one of the released prisoners that Andriy had been transported to the Rostov region, to the city of Kamensk-Shakhtynsky. She assumes he is still there, but she does not know Andrii Bilyi’s exact location.
This publication was compiled with the support of the International Renaissance Foundation. It’s content is the exclusive responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily reflect the views of the International Renaissance Foundation.
