The man claims he was caught and taken to the border, where he was blindfolded and beaten.
Three weeks have passed since the release of Ukrainian Volodymyr Khropun, and he is visibly shaken by the trauma he has suffered. The Red Cross volunteer was captured by Russian forces and taken to Russia.
On March 18, Volodymyr was driving a school bus to the village of Kozarovychi, about 40 km northwest of Kiev, to evacuate some civilians trapped in the middle of the fighting. He was arrested when he tried to persuade Russian soldiers to pass through the checkpoint.
In the early days, he was held in the basement of a factory in a nearby village, along with other civilians? 40 people in a 28 m² room.
“We were beaten with shotguns, punched, kicked. They blindfolded me and tied my hands with duct tape. They used electroshock weapons and kept asking for information about the military,” says Volodymyr.
“One of the soldiers was very young, almost a child. He used electroshock guns on people’s necks, faces, knees. He looked like he was having fun.”
After nearly a week of detention in Ukraine, the detainees were transferred to Belarus.
“They thought we wouldn’t see it, but I saw the villages we passed, Ivankiv, Chernobyl, and then I saw us cross the border,” he says.
In Belarus, detainees were given an identity document issued by the military of the Russian Federation, identifying Volodymyr’s birthplace as the “Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic”. Was this Ukraine’s official name before the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, thus becoming an independent country? A clear sign of Russia’s ambitions in the region.
Volodymyr from Belarus says the group was taken to a prison in Russia.
“The torture continued. They humiliated us, they made us kneel, they put us in uncomfortable positions. We were beaten when we looked into their eyes. If we did it slowly, we were beaten. They treated us like animals,” he says.
One night, Volodymyr counted 72 prisoners in addition to himself. But I could hear there was more.
“We tried to support each other. Some days we couldn’t believe it was happening. We felt like we were transported from the 21st century to the 16th century,” she says.
After two weeks in detention, Volodymyr left prison on April 7th. He and three Ukrainian civilians from another detention center were taken to Crimea, which Russia annexed from Ukraine in 2014.
The women told Volodymyr that they had been beaten, too. The group did not understand where they were transferred, but they heard soldiers use the word “change” often.
They were taken by road from the Crimea to a point 32km outside of Zaporizhzhia and allowed to cross a bridge into Ukrainian-controlled territory. The exchange of military prisoners of war on both sides took place before the Ukrainian civilians could pass. It was April 9th. The journey took two days.
Volodymyr has trouble expressing how he feels, but he wants the world to hear his story.
“The fact that Ukrainian civilians are being held there [na Rússia] 100% correct.”
In prison, Volodymyr heard that people from the Chernobyl nuclear power plant were being held in an adjacent room.
It is unclear exactly who the men in the prison are, but 169 Ukrainian national guardsmen responsible for protecting Chernobyl are missing. They were first detained in the basement of the nuclear power plant and remained there for weeks when the plant was occupied by Russian troops.
Valeriy Semonov, one of the engineers at Chernobyl, says that when Russian forces withdrew in late March, they took bodyguards with them.
In a nearby village live the family of one of the missing men. Their identities will not be disclosed to protect them.
The soldier serving in Chernobyl called his wife on the first day of the occupation, when the nuclear power plant was taken over, and asked him to leave the village where the family lived.
He moved with his parents and young son to the city of Lviv in western Ukraine, the main route for Ukrainians to escape to the West.
Between February 24 and March 9, the woman was able to reach her husband by mobile phone.
“He didn’t give much details on the phone. He just said ‘we’re fine.’ He said don’t worry. Then there was a power cut and I couldn’t contact him anymore.”
Still, she says she managed to reach her husband several times over the landline at the facility.
“I last spoke to my husband on March 31, when they were forcibly removed from Chernobyl. He said to me, ‘Physically I am fine, but emotionally it is very difficult.’ I could tell in his voice that he was very worried.”
“Your son always asks about his father,” she says.
“I tell him his father is at work, but he’s terrified. He’s worried that I’ll disappear too, and he follows me everywhere, to work, to stores,” she says. “It’s very difficult for us. I just want Russia to release my husband.”
The Ministry of Internal Affairs of Ukraine informed the family that the man was being held in Russia.
The married woman of six and a half years says her husband has always given her the support she needs and loves her job.
The BBC interviewed the families of more than a dozen people held hostage by Russian troops.
Only a few have returned. Many, like Yuliia Payevska, are still missing. Her husband, Vadym, said she was captured by Russian forces on March 14 while working as a paramedic in Mariupol, helping to evacuate injured soldiers and civilians.
A propaganda video featuring the woman was broadcast on some pro-Kremlin Russian TV channels, and she learned that she was in captivity. She believes she was taken to russia.
The Kremlin says that Ukrainian citizens went to Russia of their own accord.
“I don’t want to answer these big liars,” says Ukraine’s Prosecutor General Iryna Venicetova.
There are at least 6,000 civilians we could identify who were deported, and according to the mainstream press in Russia, 1 million Ukrainians would have been abducted.”
Venicetova said that there were cases where children were separated from their families, and that almost everyone who returned with a prisoner exchange was tortured and beaten.
As the war continues in southern and eastern Ukraine, there are new reports of forced deportations to Russia every day.
*Additional reports by Imogen Anderson, Daria Sipigina and Anastasiia Levchenko.
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source: Noticias
