2024-07-25 09:17:08
Journalist and writer Stanislav Asejev spent two and a half years in an illegal Donetsk prison on the grounds of the former factory and art center Izolace. Russian-backed separatists have been holding their captives there since 2014. After being released during a prisoner exchange, he returned to writing and founded a foundation to investigate war crimes. Now he fights for Ukraine as a professional soldier.
In May 2017, journalist and book author Stanislav Aseyev also appeared at the place of illegal imprisonment of Ukrainian prisoners of war, activists, journalists and other civilians. | Video: Radio Free Europe
In 2014, after Euromaidan and the Ukrainian revolution, riots broke out in a large part of the Ukrainian Donbas, which turned into war. Pro-Russian separatists in Donetsk and Luhansk regions occupied government buildings in 2014 and declared the regions independent people’s republics after Russia annexed Crimea. The torture chamber called “Isolation”, which is still in use today, was set up by separatists about a decade ago in the area of the former factory and art center in Donbas.
In May 2017, journalist and book author Stanislav Aseyev also appeared at the place of illegal imprisonment of Ukrainian prisoners of war, activists, journalists and other civilians. Today, a thirty-four-year-old man spent two years of his life in an illegal “camp”. However, he was sentenced to fifteen years – for alleged espionage in favor of Kyiv and incitement to extremism.
During the war, Aseyev wrote reports for Radio Free Europe under a false name, even when Russia occupied most of the region. That is why he was taken into custody by the separatists, where the captors tortured him with electric current for six weeks and then kept him in a cell for 28 months without contact with the outside world.
“The fear I have now is not that I will die. I am afraid that I will be captured again. I know exactly what that means and what will happen to me there, if I am caught again three years after my release,” he says in a report by Radio Svobodná Europe after, despite his experience, career path and the ability to travel abroad for work, he became a soldier after the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine broke out in 2022.
Aseyev got out of the torture chamber during a prisoner exchange at the end of December 2019, when the Russians handed him over to the Ukrainian authorities. Just one year after his return, he published a book called The Torture Camp on Paradise Street, in which he revisits the cruel practices and traumas of the torture camp.
He also described some of the strategies of the separatists in the report at the beginning of the article. “They told me in the Ukrainian army: This is the phone with which you will regularly report while on duty. I realized that it is the same device with which the security forces of the separatists tortured me in 2017,” he recalls.
The device, described as resembling a military field telephone, was used to torture Aseyev during his captivity. According to the journalist’s description, electrical wires were supposed to lead from the device, which send current to various parts of the body. “During the call, the lever was pressed and I received an electric shock in my fingers and ears,” he says in the video.
In an April interview for Aktuálně.cz, Asejev described that the occupiers also inserted wires under the prisoners’ skin, most often into the genitals. It took some time for the journalist to get used to using the phone again. “For a while I had to convince myself it was just a phone,” he admits.
Aseyev won an award for his book works, and according to Radio Free Europe, he was also given an unspecified offer to work abroad. However, instead of avoiding the war, the journalist decided to join the army. “Of course I would like to write books and press articles and live somewhere in Europe and run my foundation. But I have to wear a bulletproof vest and camouflage because my country is in danger,” he says.
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