MOSCOW — The last time Nadezhda Yevdokimova saw her husband was nearly three years ago, when he was dragged from their car by Russian soldiers at a checkpoint in northeastern Ukraine littered with corpses and burned-out tanks.
That winter, after months of excruciating silence, Nadezhda, now in Europe, received a call from an unknown Russian number. Her husband, Vlad, was alive, said the voice on the phone, and was now being held in a prison inside Russia. The stranger had found her name and number on a tiny scrap of paper, smuggled out of Vlad’s cell in a spool of thread.
Nadezhda would later discover that the man who called her that day was part of a constellation of volunteers and insiders in Russia risking their lives — occasionally for money, but usually for nothing — to pass on crucial information about the Ukrainians who have vanished into Russia’s sprawling penal system.
Vlad is one of thousands of Ukrainian civilians who lawyers and activists say have been illegally swept up as Russian forces have advanced and occupied swaths of Ukrainian territory, disappearing into prisons, detention centers and torture cells across Russia and occupied Ukraine.