Russian forces kidnapped the son of a city official in Zaporizhia, the father launched a campaign on social media and asked anyone who could put pressure on the Russians to release his son who would do so, and indeed six days later – he was released.
Buryak, the son of a senior Ukrainian government official, was abducted by Russian soldiers as he tried to flee his hometown of Litopol in early April. His case has become one of thousands of Ukrainian citizens abducted or forcibly disappeared. But his story is different from most of them, and Vlad returns home.
In an interview with the Washington Post shortly after returning safely, the boy first recounted a 90-day saga. According to Vlad and his father, Oleg Buryak, Russian soldiers took Vlad to a prison in Busilwka, a city in the occupied part of the province of Zaporizhia in the southeast of the country. For the first few days they kept him in solitary confinement.
As he sat in his prison cell, Vlad could not understand what was happening. “Why am I in this place, and when will I return home?” he thought. But the initial shock quickly turned into sheer horror. Less than a week after arriving at the jail, Vlad said a man in his early 20s was transferred to the same cell. He heard the young man beaten and receiving electric shocks, the torture sometimes lasted up to three hours at a time, he said.
The man, who could no longer bear the suffering, told Vlad that he would tell his story when he left. “But before he took his last breath,” Vlad said, “a guard arrived and called a medic who took him away.” Vlad does not know if the man, who said he had a wife and child, survived.
To pass the time, he filled his days with toddler tasks, preparing his own food, reading and sleeping. He said he also had to clean the room where other inmates were tortured, where he would often find blood-soaked medical equipment, “I had no feelings,” he said, “I cleaned them all, acted like nothing happened, showed no aggression, so they did not They will do the same with me. “
“I realized that at that moment, I was also saving myself,” he added. But inside, “I was very scared, I was in shock. Like everything inside me was burning.” Meanwhile, Vlad’s father was engaged in a frantic pursuit of his son. As head of the Zaporizhia Regional Military Administration, Oleg Buryak used his government ties to hold prisoner exchanges.
After nearly seven weeks in the Russian prison, Vlad was transferred to a facility with better conditions, where he could call his father. On July 4, Boryak received a phone call from a Russian negotiator, who told him he was ready to release his child Vlad, in a prisoner exchange deal two days later, and Vlad called his father. “Dad, they say I’m coming to you tomorrow.” The last few hours have been excruciating for the father and son.
The father greeted Vlad in a demilitarized zone and the two hugged, leaving the place quickly towards the house. “When Shulad was abducted, it felt like a piece of my heart was torn from me,” Boryak said. “And when I hugged him, I felt like that piece was back.”
“I do not want to forget any of this,” Vlad said after recovering from the difficult days, “so I can tell others and make sure people know what was there.”
As reported in Behadrei Haredim, on April 8, about a month after Russian forces occupied the city of Litopol, a civilian convoy of cars slowly attempted to evacuate the occupied area through a checkpoint manned by Russian soldiers. The boy Vlad was in one of these cars, on his way to Zaporizhia to be with his father.
After the soldiers checked his documents and understood who his father was, he became the first and only minor known in Ukraine to be taken hostage for foreign political purposes. He was later transferred to a place with good conditions, and had access to a shower and toilet, and a mobile phone which he used to call his father.
Last year, 182 children were reported missing in the country. In the three months of the war, that number had reached 2,200, some of the children were missing after losing contact with their families due to damage to infrastructure, or when the power to the phones ran out while they were hiding from bombs. In the worst-case scenarios, children are killed in attacks or forcibly abducted, according to a report by the Missing Children Europe organization in Belgium that monitors abducted children to return them to families.