Political prisoners across Ukraine have carried out a series of historic hunger strikes in protest against the state ‘s torture and brutal treatment.

Authoritarian cruelty

Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s authoritarian actions have been largely ignored by UK media. Early in Ukraine’s war with Russia, Zelenskyy has enacted laws stripping workers of rights and criminalising unions ; he has arrested journalists for supposed ‘treason’ for reporting on Ukraine’s losses. Scenes of Ukrainian men being kidnapped and sent into the ‘meat-grinder’ of the battle front are now notorious everywhere but in the ‘msm’.

And the same goes for his imprisonment of dissenters and critics. Now, hundreds of prisoners across Ukraine have gone on hunger-strike over shocking living conditions and alleged beatings, forced labour and beatings in one prison, Vinnytsia Correctional Colony No.86, 120 miles southwest of Kiev.

The first ever coordinated one-day hunger strike in August was joined by 162 prisoners in five prisons. 92 of them were political prisoners. In September, 113 Ukrainian prisoners held a second hunger strike – and last Friday,

Last Friday, 16 October 2026, 58 prisoners and pre-trial detention centre inmates joined the third one-day hunger strike. These actions were carried out in five locations across Ukraine: Vinnytsia Correctional Colony No. 86, Pyatikhatka Penal Colony No. 122. Pre-trial detention centres in Nikolaev, Lviv, and the Lukyanivskiy pre-trial detention centre in Kiev also took part. Four political prisoners under house arrest in Kiev also joined the strike.

The actions were organised by the Ukrainian Association for the Protection of the Rights of Political Prisoners and Human Rights , which was created by brothers Mikhail and Alexander Kononovich. The pair are currently awaiting trial under house arrest in Kiev, along with the Platform of International Solidarity for Political Prisoners.

In August prisoners at the Lukyanivskiy Pre-Trial detention Centre in Kiev managed to send a video of the conditions in the prison. The video also includes photos of four-star hotel style “luxury accommodation” that the organisers say were circulated by the Ukrainian Justice Ministry and later published in the Washington Post and New York Times.

The video contrasts these images with footage of ten prisoners living in squalid conditions in a cell measuring 8-10 square metres, with over-spilling toilets, mouldy walls, broken bunk beds filthy blankets. It also shows political prisoner Anatoly Miruta, who was one of many people arrested for organising basic humanitarian services in the chaos at the start of the Russian ‘special military operation’ in 2022. Miruta was charged with ‘high treason and collaboration’. He said at his trial that all the Ukrainian authorities, soldiers and police had fled from the village, “leaving the people to fend for themselves”.

The Daily Mail newspaper reported in March 2022 that Vlodymyr Struk the mayor of Kreminna, Lugansk, was kidnapped from his home, shot dead and his body left in the street. Anton Gerashchenko, a Ukrainian Interior Minister advisor, said at the time that Struk was a “Lugansk People’s Republic supporter”, and described him as a “traitor”.

Others have been jailed for crimes such as “supporting separatism” – a term meaning any support for the Donetsk and Lugansk Peoples Republic, or even for posting social media greetings on pre-1991 Soviet holidays. In one case an 81-year-old man with a mental condition was jailed for “collecting information on behalf of the enemy”.

Statements from prisoners claim that a prisoner at Vinnytsia died “from exhaustion, torture, and forced unpaid labour” last February. They said that:

the colony’s administration forces prisoners to perform slave-like, unpaid labour at construction sites including a sawmill and assembling of barbed wire.

The organisers described varied responses to the hunger strikes. At the Nikolaev Pre-Trial detention Centre that political prisoner Igor Savitsky had been placed in solitary confinement for joining the August hunger strike, and at the Vinnytsia Correctional Colony hunger strike organisers were taken to “administration blocks” where they were subjected to beatings.

‘Punishment pits’

They also say that Oleksandr Melnyk, a political prisoner who organised nonviolent resistance and sent an appeal to the Office of the Prosecutor General of Ukraine, was beaten and placed in a “punishment pit” resembling a well without a toilet for two months.

As long ago as 2015, a report by the International Red Cross (ICRC) said that there was a network of secret detention centres in Ukraine which described similar pits in which prisoners were held.

Protesters specifically accused the head of the Vinnytsia facility, Colonel Dmytro Petryk, of brutal Nazi-style rules for political prisoners including beatings, extortion, torture, rape, unpaid slave labour, and other methods of humiliating human dignity.

All three hunger strikes were joined by hundreds of activists in Britain, Russia, Belarus, Turkey and Europe including in in Saudi Arabia, including 324 people in fifteen countries. In addition, solidarity protests were held at Ukrainian embassies and consulates including in London, Frankfurt, Barcelona, Athens and Naples. The London protest was joined by the campaign group International Ukraine Anti Fascist Solidarity, created in 2017

The international actions were coordinated by the Anti Imperialist Front (AIF), which was initially created by the Turkish People’s Front but now has numerous international branches.

The AIF has also pointed out the according to UK government’s ‘Overseas Security; Justice Assistance (OSJA) Assessment Process ‘ that requires the UK government to conduct an human rights risk assessment before providing assistance to foreign states:.

If there is a serious risk that the UK’s aid will directly lead to or facilitate severe human rights abuses – such as torture, arbitrary detention, or the death penalty – the assistance must be restricted, mitigated, or escalated to Cabinet Ministers for cancellation.

British solidarity activists believe the UK government has never conducted such an assessment, and plan to write to the Foreign Office seeking further details.

The protests come as the UK government continues to try to whip up public support for the UK to join Ukraine in fighting Russia directly. Ukraine is already using UK-made drones to kill Russian civilians .