2024-04-28 22:24:18
Andriy, a 28-year-old soldier of the Ukrainian National Guard, was captured by Russia in May 2022, when Putin’s army captured the city of Mariupol in eastern Ukraine. Together with several other men, he defended the Azovstal steelworks there until his last breath. He got to the well-known Olenivka prison, where the occupiers kept him for almost two years. “It was bad. People were rotting alive there,” he described.
According to Kyiv, since the beginning of the Russian invasion, more than three thousand Ukrainians have been rescued from Russian captivity in several exchanges. In most cases, these are soldiers, but there are also civilians among them. Russia abducts Ukrainians and keeps them in detention centers, they return home physically crippled and mentally broken.
Ukrainians who were exchanged for Russian soldiers described to the editorial office of Aktuálně.cz and The Insider server how the occupiers beat them with wooden planks, forced them to sing the Russian anthem and Russian patriotic songs, and left them to starve.
The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) human rights monitoring mission confirmed inhumane conditions in 32 of 48 prisons, both in Russia and in the occupied territories of Ukraine. According to the latest available report of the Ministry for Reintegration of the Temporarily Occupied Territories of Ukraine, there are over four thousand Ukrainians in Russian captivity. Of these, there are more than three thousand soldiers and almost one thousand civilians.
Andrij returned home to Ukraine during the exchange of prisoners only in January of this year. Although it was difficult for him, according to his own words, Aktuálně.cz was able to describe what he went through in captivity. He did not drink or eat most of the time in the Olenivka prison. The occupiers sometimes brought leftovers to the captives, just so they wouldn’t die. But most of them were wounded, they did not have medicine or the necessary medical care, so it happened that their wounds rotted alive.
“So a lot of them died a slow and torturous death. They brought us water every three to four days, it was mostly rusty and smelly. Some of the boys got nasty infections after drinking it, which they couldn’t get rid of without medicine. And I don’t mean that in they suffered from pain for a week or two, but for months, sometimes even years,” Andrij recalled.
The soldier also described to the editors that the Russians sometimes gave captured Ukrainians a strange boiling liquid instead of rusty water. “It looked like boiled water, but it was something else. We burned our whole mouths because we were so thirsty. Then when it came to food, they only gave us about a minute to eat whatever they decided to serve us.” portrayed.
Sign that you are a spy
A soldier named Viktor, who was also captured by the Russians along with other defenders of the Azovstal steel mills, which were the last center of Ukrainian resistance in Mariupol, described similar experiences from Olenivka prison to The Insider server.
“When they brought us, they stripped us, beat us, took some of our things and placed us in barracks – small two-story post-Soviet buildings for 100 to 200 people. There were over seven hundred of us. People slept in the bathrooms, in the entrances – one on top of the other,” he described.
Not only in Olenivka, but in almost all prisons in the territories that remain under Moscow’s rule, the Russians practice cruel methods of torture. This is evidenced not only by the testimonies of soldiers and civilians obtained since 2014, when the armed conflict broke out in the east of Ukraine, but also by independent analyzes and the results of numerous investigations.
“Sometimes they beat people to death. This usually happens in the so-called punishment cells. In our barracks, we had no direct contact with the prisoners, but we heard their screams,” said Viktor.
As Aktuálně.cz recently described journalist and writer Stanislav Asejev, who spent more than two years in a Russian prison in the Donbass, the Russians’ goal is to cause Ukrainians as much suffering as possible and then prolong it as long as possible. Nothing has changed even with the outbreak of aggression in February last year. “The only difference I perceive from the beginning of the invasion is that it is happening on a mass scale. Survivors tell me of absolute atrocities. And the Russians use such practices on ordinary civilians as well,” he said.
The occupiers also practiced the worst methods of torture on Aseyev. They electrocuted him for an hour until they forced the man to falsely confess to being a Ukrainian spy.
Blackmail by children
The civilian Yuliya, who was captured by the Russians in 2021 in the city of Chystyakove in the Donetsk region, also had to resort to a false confession that she was a Ukrainian spy. The occupiers kept her in the same prison as Aseyeva – in a dungeon nicknamed the Donetsk Dachau (the first Nazi concentration camp intended for political prisoners, editor’s note).
“What they did there was unbearable. Luckily they didn’t electrocute me, but a lot of people did. They beat me, pinned me to a table and poured water into my mouth until I started suffocating. The regime there is strict. You can’t sit during the day don’t even lie down. When you wake up, you’re on your feet all day,” The Insider quoted Julia as saying. The occupiers allegedly forced her to wear a black bag on her head.
“When they opened the cell, I had to immediately put a bag over my head or they would beat me,” she continues. The Russians came to her three times a day and forced her to sign documents stating that she was a spy and cooperating with the Ukrainian state security. “I said I wouldn’t sign anything, that I hadn’t done anything wrong. But it was pointless. They didn’t care if you were a woman or a man. When I refused, they immediately started beating me,” she described.
The last straw that broke her was pressure through the children. The occupiers told Julia that if she didn’t sign a paper about being a spy, they would send her children to a Russian orphanage. They showed her the documents that confirmed that the descendants were already registered there. “I started crying and just signed it for them,” she recounted.
Video: Ukrainians published how captured Russian soldiers live in a camp in the Lviv region (November 10, 2023)
Ukrainians have published how captured Russian soldiers live in a prison camp in the Lviv region. | Video: Reuters