The Ukrainian marine infantryman endured nine months of physical and psychological torture as a Russian prisoner of war, but was only granted three months of rest and rehabilitation before he was ordered to return to his unit.
The infantryman, who asked to be identified only by his call sign, Smiley, willingly returned to duty. But it was only when he underwent intensive combat training in the weeks that followed that the depth and extent of his wounds, both psychological and physical, began to surface.
“I started having flashbacks and nightmares,” he said. “I only slept for two hours and woke up with my sleeping bag soaked.” He was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder and referred to psychological care, and is still receiving treatment.
Ukraine is only beginning to understand the lasting effects of the traumas its prisoners of war experienced in Russian captivity, but has failed to treat them adequately and returned them to service too soon, say former prisoners, officials and psychologists familiar with individual cases.
Nearly 3,000 Ukrainian prisoners of war have been freed from Russia in prisoner exchanges since the 2022 invasion began. More than 10,000 more remain in Russian custody, some of whom have endured two years of conditions that a United Nations expert described like horrible
The Ukrainian government’s rehabilitation program, which typically involves two months in a sanatorium and one month at home, is inadequate, critics say, and the traumas suffered by Ukrainian prisoners are growing with the duration and severity of prison abuse. who are being subjected. the war drags on.
Russia’s torture of prisoners of war has been well documented by the United Nations, with former inmates speaking of relentless beatings, electric shocks, rape, sexual violence and mock executions, to the point that one expert described it as a policy. systematic, supported by the State. . Many detainees have also reported persistent symptoms such as blackouts and blackouts stemming from repeated blows to the head that were severe enough to cause concussions.
Ukraine’s Prosecutor General Andriy Kostin said in September that “about 90 percent of Ukrainian prisoners of war have been subjected to torture, rape, threats of sexual violence or other forms of ill-treatment.”
The Russian military did not respond to a request for comment on allegations of mistreatment of Ukrainian prisoners of war.
Most of the released prisoners have returned to active duty after about three months of rest and rehabilitation, as the Ukrainian military, short of troops on the front lines, has granted relatively few medical exemptions to former prisoners of war.
A law passed this month will allow former prisoners of war to choose between returning to duty or being discharged from the military, recognizing that many have been subjected to severe physical and mental torture and need prolonged rehabilitation. Ukrainian officials acknowledged there had been problems providing sufficient care for former prisoners, but said they had now developed special centers for them using international best practices.
Ukrainian prosecutors have identified 3,000 former military and civilian prisoners who can serve as witnesses in a case they are preparing in Ukrainian courts to accuse Russian individuals and officials of mistreatment of prisoners. Prosecutors encouraged two of the former prisoners to speak to The New York Times.
One of them was 22-year-old Smiley, who was captured at the beginning of the war when the Russian Navy seized Ukrainian positions on Snake Island in the Black Sea. He spoke a year after his release and said that he hoped that shedding light on conditions in Russian prisons would help not only his own rehabilitation, but also that of the thousands of prisoners of war still in prison. captivity.
“My sister convinced me to do my first interview,” he said. “’You have to say it,’ she said. Maybe if we talk, she will help our boys’ treatment.”
A second Ukrainian soldier made available by prosecutors gave a lengthy interview but declined to give his name or call sign, citing the stigma surrounding the abuse he suffered.
The 36-year-old soldier said he was taken prisoner along with several thousand soldiers and marines after a long siege at the Azovstal steel plant in Mariupol in May 2022. He spent nine months in Russian captivity before being freed in a prisoner exchange in early 2023.
He spent most of his time in three detention centers in the Russian cities of Taganrog, Kamensk-Shakhtinsky and Kursk. He returned severely underweight with a spinal injury and, like many others, fainting, dizziness, and ringing in the ears due to frequent blows to the head.
“I don’t faint anymore,” the soldier said, “but I have trouble with my back and a concussion, and I get tightness in the area around my heart all the time.” Despite his injuries, he was ordered back to light duty as a guard after only two months of rest in a sanatorium.
“I don’t know if I could run a mile,” he said.
The prisoners were subjected to brutal daily beatings on the legs, back and fingers, and physical and mental torture during interrogations, as well as hunger, cold and lack of medical care, he said. Three men died in custody during their imprisonment, including one who died in the communal cell they shared, he said.
Some of the Russian units guarding or interrogating prisoners were worse than others, the two former prisoners said, but there were constant beatings at roll call and torture every morning in most detention centers. Interrogations lasted 40 minutes and often consisted of electric shocks, blows to the head and actual or threatened sexual abuse.
“They start with maximum violence,” said the soldier. “They say ‘you’re lying, you’re not telling us everything.’ “They put a knife in your ear or offer to cut off your finger.”
Others hit you in the back of the head so often that you lost consciousness, he said.
“If one gets tired, another takes over,” he recalled. “When you fall, they make you get up again. It can last 30 to 40 minutes. In the end they say, ‘Why didn’t you tell us everything right away?’”
Smiley said much of the violence was sexual in nature. A prison unit repeatedly beat prisoners all over their bodies, including their genitals, with batons that delivered electric shocks, he said. On another occasion, he said, a cellmate was repeatedly kicked in the genitals during roll call, where prisoners were lined up with their legs spread, facing a wall in a hallway. Smiley suffered a permanent injury due to an untreated broken pelvis from a baton blow and was unable to bend or lie down without assistance for two weeks.
The International Committee of the Red Cross, which has very limited access to prisoners of war held in Russia, was not allowed to visit him during his nine months in prison, he added.
The second soldier said he was forced to strip naked and place his genitals on a stool while his interrogators hit them with a ruler and held a knife to them, threatening to castrate him.
Interrogators subjected him to a mock execution, firing a volley of gunshots at his side while he was blindfolded. They threatened to rape him, the soldier said, and forced him to choose what they should use: the handle of a mop or the leg of a chair. “Do you want to do it yourself or do you want us to help you?” They made fun of him.
He said he was never penetrated, but that others were raped. “You can’t walk normally after that,” he said. “You suffer for weeks. “Other guys got the same treatment.”
“I think they had the order to break us psychologically and physically so that we don’t want anything else in life,” he said, adding that there were suicides in Taganrog prison.
“You could hear the screams all day,” said the soldier. “Impossible screams.” Sometimes, during a lull, prisoners could hear the voices of children playing outside, he said.
The ordeal for former prisoners doesn’t end once they get home.
“The most difficult thing is having too many people around,” said the soldier. “Everyone is walking calmly in the park and you are still afraid that someone will hear you, that they will push you or that you will say the wrong thing.”
Major Valeria Subotina, a military press officer and former journalist who was also taken prisoner in Azovstal and who spent a year in women’s prisons in Russia, recently opened a meeting space in kyiv called YOUkraine, for former prisoners.
“There are a lot of triggers and people don’t realize they still need care,” she said.
He returned to duty three months after his release in April 2023, but found it difficult to sit in an office. “I can’t stand it when someone comes up behind me or stands behind me,” she said.
Government psychologists were not much help, he said. “They often don’t know how to help us,” she said, and civilians often ask careless questions.
As a result, many former prisoners find it easier to return to the front than to reenter civilian life, he said, and only surviving comrades truly understand what they are going through.
“We don’t want to feel sorry,” he said, “because we’re proud to have survived and gotten through this.”