‘They expected me to die on my own’
Ukrainian POWs tell of brutal treatment behind Russian lines
SODESA, Ukraine hot through the jaw and tongue by a sniper’s bullet last year in the last days of the grinding siege at the Azovstal steel plant in Ukraine, Senior Sgt. Maksym Kushnir could not eat or talk, and could barely breathe.
But when he hobbled out of a bunker last May with hundreds of other wounded Ukrainian soldiers in a surrender negotiated with Russian forces, there was no medical help or any sign of the Red Cross workers they had been promised.
Instead, Kushnir, nine years a soldier and a poet since childhood, said he was taken on a two-day bus journey into Russian-controlled territory and left on a bed to die, with his jaw shattered and gangrene spreading across his tongue.
“I thought it was the end,” he said. “For the first three to four days, they did not do anything. They expected me to die on my own.”
That Kushnir survived and returned home to tell the tale is one of the success stories of the war. Even as the two sides are locked in full-scale conflict, Ukrainian and Russian officials have been exchanging hundreds of prisoners of war almost weekly.
Yet the prisoner exchanges have revealed a grim reality. Ukrainian soldiers have come home with tales of appalling suffering in Russian captivity — executions and deaths, beatings and electric shocks, a lack of health care and near-starvation rations.
Ukraine allows the International Committee of the Red Cross access to the Russian prisoners of war it is holding, an indication it is meeting its obligations under international conventions of war. Russia does not. It restricts outside monitoring and has confirmed the identities of only some of those it is holding.
Ukrainian officials and former prisoners say Ukrainian captives were in a visibly worse state than the Russian prisoners at exchanges.
“We were skinny like this,” Kushnir said, holding up his little finger. “Compared to us, they looked well. We were thin and bearded. They were shaved and washed.” “It’s a classic abusive relationship,” said Oleksandra Romantsova of the Center for Civil Liberties, a Ukrainian organization that was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize last year, summing up the Russian treatment of Ukrainian prisoners. It is unclear how many Ukrainian soldiers are prisoners of war or missing in action. Russia has provided only partial lists of those it is holding, and Ukraine does not release any numbers. But human rights organizations say there are at least 8,000 to 10,000 prisoners, and Ukrainian officials did not dispute those figures.
And more Ukrainians have been taken in the fighting in and around the city of Bakhmut in recent months, according to people working to bring prisoners home. There are believed to be far fewer Russians held by Ukraine.
Some Ukrainian soldiers have also been placed on trial in Russia on dubious charges, and have received lengthy sentences in the Russian penal system, said Oleksandr Pavlichenko of the Ukrainian Helsinki Human Rights Union.
Among the prisoners of war are 500 medical personnel and hundreds of female soldiers and wounded, said Andriy Kryvtsov, the chair of Military Medics of Ukraine. He said 61 military medics remained in captivity and called for their release.
Members of the Azov battalions, long painted as neo-Nazis by Russia as part of its justification for the war, came in for especially harsh treatment, according to Maj. Dmytro Andriushchenko, who was a deputy commander of the Second Azov Battalion when he was taken prisoner at Azovstal. “Azov was like a red rag for them,” he said.
Andriushchenko was in a penal colony at Olenivka in July when an explosion ripped through a barracks, killing at least 50 Azov members. Like several former inmates of Olenivka who were interviewed, he accused Russia of orchestrating the explosion.
The prison guards closed the gates to the barracks, preventing survivors from escaping, Andriushchenko said.