Electric shocks, savage dogs and daily beatings: three weeks in Russia as a Ukrainian prisoner-of-war

On February 24th, the day Russia invaded Ukraine, Alex, a businessman in his 40s, joined the army. He was soon deployed to a village 30km north-west of Kyiv, where the weather was raw and he ate nothing but stale bread for over a week. Russian tanks constantly bombarded his position. Half his company of 26 men were killed; almost all were wounded. Both of Alex’s legs were hit by shrapnel.

Alex, the eldest of the fighters, assumed a paternal role. He dredged up childhood memories and led his company in prayer, preparing them for the worst. When the order to surrender came, he put a gun to his temple and pulled the trigger. One man pushed the barrel away and the bullet hit the wall. “I will probably question this decision for the rest of my life,” Alex told me. “Would it have been better to be a dead hero or to try to save the lives of these young men?”

The Ukrainian soldiers in the village surrendered to an elite unit of Russian troops who “behaved decently to us”, Alex said. Then the Ukrainians were driven to a military base in Belarus, where Chechen soldiers threatened to rape and shoot them. They could hear the cries of prisoners being beaten elsewhere.

Alex was taken for questioning. Interrogators asked his name and rank, his profession and the company he worked for. Judging him to be a wealthy businessman, they said he’d be returned to Ukraine that evening if he paid them $20,000. Alex saw this was an opportunity to prise out useful intelligence. He asked to whom and by what method he should make the transfer. Then he told them he didn’t have that kind of money.

According to the Geneva conventions, which Russia has signed, prisoners-of-war (POWs) must be treated with dignity and consideration. In theory POWs are simply combatants removed from the battlefield. In practice they often become currency: a lever in negotiations and a tool for propaganda.

We don’t have an exact picture of how many POWs the Ukrainians and the Russians have captured or lost. (In July, Ukraine announced that 7,200 of its soldiers were missing and Russia recently announced they had 6,000 Ukrainian captives.) Neither has the International Committee of the Red Cross, which is empowered by the Geneva conventions to monitor the health and safety of POWs. “On both sides we have been able to visit POWs and also not able to visit POWs,” Achille Balthazar Despres, a Red Cross spokesman in Ukraine, told me, taking care to be balanced. “What I can say is that we have visited several hundred POWs on both sides. Which means there are probably thousands.” In July, dozens of Ukrainian prisoners died in an explosion in a camp in Olenivka, in the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic: the Russian government blamed Ukrainian shelling, a claim which is hardly credible.

When the order to surrender came, he put a gun to his temple and pulled the trigger

POWs are supposed to be protected from “public curiosity”, though both sides have used videos of them as part of the information war. In the opening weeks of the war, Ukrainian officials, hoping to puncture the Russian public’s support for the conflict, organised several press conferences with captured Russian soldiers who denounced the invasion and apologised to the Ukrainian people. Many Ukrainian officials dealing with POWs told me they found these scenes awkward. The press conferences soon stopped, though Volodymyr Zolkin, a Ukrainian blogger who has been granted access to POWs by the authorities, continues to post video interviews with captured Russians on his YouTube channel. He says it helps reassure their families that they aren’t dead.

After three days in Belarus, Alex and a dozen other Ukrainian captives were flown to a prison, which he reckoned was in central Russia. On arrival they had to kneel in the yard with their hands behind their heads. For two hours they were beaten with fists, batons, metal bars and rifle butts. Afterwards they crawled into their cell. One man died that night.

The torture continued. They suffered electric shocks to their genitals. A prisoner had his face mauled by a dog. Another was left outside in freezing temperatures and developed bleeding frostbite on his feet. Forty prisoners were packed in a filthy cell crawling with mice and lice. They used their towels as bandages, their urine as disinfectant and, on one occasion, were forced to extract a piece of shrapnel with their fingernails. Alex’s own wound became infected and he got a fever. In the next cell they heard a woman screaming in childbirth. Her cellmates called for help, for a medic, for a knife to cut the umbilical cord. The guards shouted back: “Use your teeth!”

Alex’s interrogators seemed more interested in breaking the prisoners than gathering intelligence. POWs were forced to sing the Russian national anthem. “They filmed us. They laughed at us. They said, ‘Oh, look, he’s shitting himself!’ Even though we had no food in our stomachs and there was nothing to shit.” The guards stripped them and threatened to rape them. On one occasion, they hooded Alex with a plastic bag until he passed out.

Prisoners had to keep their heads bowed, so Alex never saw his interrogators’ faces. Asked whether Crimea was part of Russia, he answered: “De facto, yes, de jure, no.” He was beaten for being clever.

Russian guards filmed Alex and his fellow prisoners, forcing them to say that they were being well treated and receiving medical attention. Two weeks into Alex’s captivity one of his sons saw him in a video posted online. That was how his family learned he was a POW.

Volodymyr Petukhov, a Ukrainian military psychologist, believes Russia’s abuse of POWs has its roots in the Soviet Union’s treatment of political prisoners. Similar torture methods were used in the 1930s. Breaking a prisoner consists of three phases, he says: unfreezing, indoctrination and freezing. This is achieved by keeping a prisoner in a state of stress and uncertainty, destabilising their thinking with disinformation, then instilling submission by forcing them to sing the Russian national anthem, praise the Russian flag or recite patriotic verse – POWs today often mention having to read a poem entitled “Forgive Us, Dear Russians”. Alex tried to deflect this kind of psychological pressure by encouraging his cellmates to sing the Russian national anthem unbidden – partly to avoid a beating and partly because, by singing it voluntarily, they would neutralise their captors’ coercive power.

When Alex had done his military service 20 years earlier, he had received no training in how to react when taken prisoner. The rapid expansion of the Ukrainian army since February means that few new recruits have had lessons on surviving captivity, such as techniques for managing their emotional reactions.

For two hours they were beaten with fists, batons, metal bars and rifle butts

After a fortnight, Alex was flown to Crimea and kept in a large hall with Ukrainian marines and civilians. A few days later he was moved again, along with other captives, this time to another prison in southern Russia. The prisoners were made to stand in the yard for three hours with their arms outstretched and foreheads pressed against a wall. If they collapsed, the guards beat them. “Then I was lucky,” Alex told me. “They called my name.”

Alex was taken to an office where a man in a blue-grey civilian uniform sat behind the desk. He gave Alex a glass of water, shared an energy bar and asked politely about his education and career. The man wanted to discuss business plans, economics, interest rates. Alex felt relieved to be having a normal conversation.

After a while, the man seemed satisfied: “Well, they weren’t mistaken about you.” He pushed a file across his desk. Inside was a contract for a job at a Russian company similar to the one Alex did in Ukraine. The man told him he’d be well paid and given a house. Alex’s family would be transferred and the man himself would act as his protector. They would become good friends! Yes, Alex would have to give interviews to journalists, but he’d get used to it.

When Alex said that his home was in Ukraine, the man replied that a homeland was a place with a good salary. “You must understand,” he said darkly, “that I cannot leave here without you.” He told the guards not to beat Alex and insisted he be taken to the guards’ bathroom, which had hot showers. Alex spent a minute enjoying the warm water. “Think about my offer,” the man told him. “There is really no other option.”

Alex was taken to a cell with five bruised and groaning POWs. The man in the blue-grey uniform returned that night. Sign, he said, “then your life can begin. One way or another we will force you.” Alex told the man he was weak from fever and any more abuse would probably kill him. He was transferred to solitary confinement.

In the morning guards unlocked the cell to reveal the uniformed man. But instead of whipping out a contract, he whispered: “You’re going home.” Weary of the game-playing, Alex hardly knew what to think.

He was taken to an airport and flown back to Crimea. There, guards put him in the back of a truck with a group of civilians who were also being exchanged. (Around 1,000 POWs from both sides have been exchanged in several groups since February.) They drove north through a series of checkpoints. The last one before they reached the front line was manned by Chechen troops, who ordered everyone off the truck for inspection. Alex was the last to climb out. “You told us there were only civilians but here’s a rat,” the Chechens said on seeing him. “Well, what do you choose? Shall we cut off your nose or an ear?”

Feverish and exhausted, Alex thought he was about to be shot. He wanted to die with dignity. He said he needed to piss, and the Chechens escorted him to a bush. Then he told them he wanted to pray. The soldiers hit him around the head a couple of times and called him a “Christian pig”. The civilians had been loaded back onto the truck and driven off. Alex was left alone. He thought he was going to be killed. So he prayed.

“Well, what do you choose? Shall we cut off your nose or an ear?”

As he did so, his terror lifted. “I thought, here is the end. This at least will be the end of my suffering. I was happy at this moment and I wept.” Unexpectedly, a Chechen soldier wiped away his tears with a fingertip and said: “Your words are as pure as your tears. Ask for whatever you want.” Alex asked for some water. Then a second truck filled with POWs arrived. Finally, Alex was loaded on board and taken to the exchange.

At the handover point, Russian POWs filed past him, looking clean and neat, in contrast to his dirty and torn clothes. When Alex asked them if they’d been beaten, they shook their heads. “This was so important to me,” he said. “We are not the same as Russians. We are not like them.”

The Ukrainian authorities have been learning how to reintegrate POWs for the past eight years, since conflict with breakaway republics erupted in the east of the country. When Olena Sek, a Ukrainian military psychologist, met the first group of returning POWs in 2014, she and her colleagues had no idea how to deal with them. The Soviet army, in which Ukrainians served until the end of the cold war, treated POWs either as traitors or victims. On their return, protocol demanded they be interrogated rather than offered sympathy.

The psychological care was haphazard for the first group of returning POWs. “A lot had classic symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder,” Sek recalled. “They didn’t sleep, they had bad dreams, they were unable to create relationships with new people or even relatives and friends. There were cases of psychosis and some were very aggressive. There was alcohol abuse. We had a couple of suicides.”

The Ukrainian army gradually developed methods for treatment. At first, psychologists simply prescribed rest. Later, after visiting American military medical centres, they created rehabilitation programmes.

Former POWs often don’t understand why they continue to experience the same feelings that they felt in captivity and often have emotional outbursts. These days they are kept in hospital when they emerge, sometimes for weeks. They can call their families, but visits are forbidden until medics believe they are ready.

Sek has learned how to spot former POWs. They are emaciated and won’t look you in the eye. “They ask permission to do anything – permission to look up, to have a cigarette. And most of them have injuries from being beaten.”

Bohdan Pantiushenko, a former POW, spent five years in captivity in Donetsk until he was released in late 2019. He showed me a photograph of himself when he first returned. He was thin and bent with an angular, misshapen face, unrecognisable from the hale, pink-cheeked man who sat opposite me. When Pantiushenko returned to Kyiv, he couldn’t understand how normal life could continue. “I wanted to shake them and ask: what are you doing? Don’t you know there is a war!...It was only after a year that I realised I had begun to feel normal again.”

Alex met Sek as he arrived at a military hospital on the night of the exchange. She made a point of greeting each returning prisoner personally. The prisoners had hot showers and were given shampoo, toothpaste and new clothes. Then they were checked, physically and psychologically.

For the first few days, Alex had nightmares and shouted in his sleep. He found almost all sounds unbearable, so he was given noise-cancelling headphones to help calm him.

Returned prisoners are treated for injuries and given nutritional supplements. They get help retrieving back-pay and applying for compensation. The intelligence services debrief them and they attend one-on-one therapy sessions. “I wanted to talk,” Alex said. “I wanted to tell people the information I had. I was still full of adrenaline. It was very important to me that I tell my story. I still had a fever but I didn’t even feel it.”

“They ask if their loved ones are being beaten and I tell them it’s not so bad. I hope they will forgive me one day”

I spoke to Alex in a supermarket café on the outskirts of Kyiv. The supermarket had been destroyed during the Russian assault on the capital, but had already been rebuilt and now bustled with shoppers. It seemed hard to imagine that war had been waged right here. Alex talked easily about his time in captivity, retelling his experience in detail. But when I asked him about how he was doing now, he faltered and quickly returned to recounting his time as a prisoner, how he had exhorted the men in the cell to swab the floor three times a day to keep it clean or learned to identify guards by their gait. As Alex talked, he ripped empty sugar packets into small pieces and rolled the shreds between his fingers.

Alex is back on active duty, attached to a unit in Kyiv, “but I can’t say that I am OK or that I have put this behind me,” he said. He no longer has the will to go fishing or pursue his interest in photography. He has become introverted and doesn’t feel like seeing his friends. His sleep is broken and occasionally he faints. He told me that he can recognise women he knew before his captivity but not men, even his brother and sons. He can’t bear to spend more than a couple of hours with his wife and children in the family home in the suburbs of Kyiv, and is staying in a rented flat in the city. When I asked about his relationship with his wife he didn’t speak for a long time. “I don’t want to explain this,” he said, looking down at a cluster of tiny paper pellets. “I just understand that I am not going back.”

“I think all the time about my guys in captivity. I want them back. That takes over my thoughts. It is my purpose, my dream. It is everything I want.” Every day he calls the families of his fellow prisoners. “It’s hard and there are often tears but I have to help them to keep going. I lie to the families,” Alex admitted. “They ask if their loved ones are being beaten and I tell them it’s not so bad. I hope they will forgive me one day.”

I asked Alex, tentatively, if anything makes him feel better. “Sunday is my day of rest,” he told me. Listening to music and cooking in his apartment brings some peace. “Maybe you think I’m crazy,” he said, his face brightening into a smile, “but when I cook I imagine I am cooking for one of my guys. I decorate the dish, and even though I don’t have any appetite, I have to taste it for them.”■

Wendell Steavenson has reported on post-Soviet Georgia, the Iraq war and the Egyptian revolution. You can read her previous dispatches from the war in Ukraine for 1843 magazine, and the rest of our coverage, here

ILLUSTRATIONS: GERARD DUBOIS