He is still wearing the clothes he was wearing when the Russians sent him home a green military shirt and sweatpants. He looks pale and gaunt, over 31.
“I’ve lost a lot of weight,” he says, looking down. “I do not look good.”
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He changes his position on the bed. It’s been about two weeks since he was last able to stand and he has to move his legs regularly to stop the pain.
It’s a clear spring day in Zaporizhia, southern Ukraine, but the Russians are bombing the area and the hospital’s windows are blacked out. The air in the station is hot and muggy.
Nikita had been brought back to Ukraine just three days earlier as part of a prisoner exchange and taken to this hospital with another man.
They spent three dismal weeks in a prison in Russia. The other man, Serhiy Vasylyha, 28, was brought back with his feet amputated. “He wasn’t as lucky as I was,” says Nikita.
The exchange of prisoners is being negotiated by Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk, who confirmed that Nikita was sent back from Russia. “People were seriously injured in that exchange — amputees, sepsis, other serious injuries,” says Vereshchuk.
“There were clear signs of torture,” she says. “The stories they told us are terrible.”
Nikita’s ordeal began in early March when the Russian army entered Andriivka, a small village west of Kyiv.
Nikita, who was a laboratory assistant in a Kiev hospital, was hiding in a cold, damp basement under the garden with his father Sasha, their wives and Nikita’s fiveyearold son. Sasha is Nikita’s stepfather, but they have been calling each other father and son for years.
The Russians went from house to house and took the two men out of the basement and beat them, Nikita said. “There were shootings, people in the village were killed, it was terrifying.”
They were taken blindfolded and at gunpoint to a camp where they were tortured.
Nikita recently has a scar on his knuckle which he says was caused by a wrench pressed against his knuckles by the Russians. He could hear others around him, but he didn’t know how many or who they were.
“I just remember thinking, where is my father? What if he’s not with me anymore?”
The Russians took off their boots, filled them with water and put them back on. Then the prisoners in the camp had to lie face down in the freezing cold.
“We stayed like that in the rain for three or four nights, it was getting colder and colder,” Nikita recalls.
When he could no longer hear the Russian soldiers nearby, Nikita asked softly: “Dad, are you there?” And Sasha’s voice came back calmly. they were together From that moment on, they kept talking whenever it felt safe, reassuring each other.
As they stood in the field, Nikita felt a chill. Soon he could no longer feel her. Then the missiles began falling near them, heralded by shaky cracks.
“We stayed like that for a long time and said goodbye to our lives over and over again,” says Nikita.
Finally, they were lifted off the ground and loaded onto trucks. Blindfolded, Nikita had trouble estimating the length of the journey.
At one point they were reunited with another group of prisoners and loaded onto helicopters. Hunger set in — they’ve only had a bowl of porridge, a loaf of bread, and a biscuit since they were kidnapped, Nikita says.
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They were transferred from the helicopters to a cargo plane. Nikita felt the engines rev and the plane sped across the runway and took off. He assumed he was with about 10 or 12 other prisoners.
“Are you alright?” he said loudly over the sound of the engine.
“Yes, I’m fine,” Sasha replied.
Back in the village, Nikita and Sasha’s wives, Nadia and Svitlana, and Nikita’s son Artem had moved from their basement to larger accommodation in the basement of their neighbors’ house. They had no idea where their husbands were.
A few doors down, Sasha’s parents, Nadia and Volodymyr, also began to worry. Sasha stopped taking his calls, but it was impossible to venture outside to find out if he was safe.
Bullets rained down around the village and Russian soldiers looted the houses during the pauses in the bombing. For more than a month during the occupation, no family knew what was happening to the others in the neighborhood.
At some point, Nikita and Sasha crossed Russian airspace, and the cargo plane began to descend. They were taken to a detention center where they were eventually stripped of their blindfolds and turned around. They hugged each other.
The Russians also used the wrench on Sasha’s fingers, Nikita says, but worse, one of her fingers was dangling from a small amount of tissue and skin. He was taken to a field hospital for treatment.
Nikita could finally see her feet. The toes had turned black. He knew they were badly frozen from the cold and asked for medical attention. At the field hospital they dried and bandaged his toes, but that was all.
They put their boots back on, and after five days in the camp, the prisoners were transported by truck to remand prison number 1 a prison in the Russian city of Kursk.
The new prisoners were uniformed and had their hair cut. They were told they would be “vaccinated,” which turned out to be a euphemism for a beating, Nikita says.
When he and Sasha were locked in a cell with 10 other people, Nikita already imagined that he could lose both legs.
“That first night I realized I couldn’t feel or control my feet,” he recalled. “And they started to stink.”
Others faced the same grim situation. Some would later lose entire limbs.
Prison care was minimal one antibiotic injection and dressing change every three days. According to Nikita, the prison doctor said to her, “We have good medicine and medical treatment here, but not for you.”
Prisoners chatted in the cell, talking about their families and telling jokes. They were forced to memorize patriotic Russian songs and perform them for the guards, Nikita said.
“The anthem of Russia; another disgusting song that glorifies Putin. They gave us the songs in the morning and told us to learn them by lunchtime,” he says.
They were interrogated and beaten two to three times a day, he says. They were then made to sign documents stating that they had been well cared for and fed and that no harm had been done to them. So they knew where they were, because the documents were stamped “Remand Prison Kursk 1”.
After three weeks in prison, Nikita’s foot condition deteriorated dramatically and he was eventually taken to the hospital with two other people. A surgeon told him he would amputate all of his toes.
“They were in such bad condition that I just fell off a toe during the exam,” says Nikita.
He spent a week in hospital following the operation before an officer told him that he and several other seriously injured men were being sent home “to take care of their families”.
Deputy Prime Minister Vereshchuk says the Russians have tried to exchange civilian hostages for Russian military prisoners in Ukraine a move prohibited by the Geneva Convention.
“That’s why they took all these hostages — civilians, women, local councillors, to try to use them,” she says.
“We know there are over 1,000 hostages there including almost 500 women. We know that they are in prisons and detention centers in Kursk, in Briansk, in Ryazan, in Rostov.”
Nikita was never returned to Kursk prison, where he last saw Sasha. From the hospital he was again loaded onto a cargo plane, this time bound for Simferopol in Crimea.
Russian authorities told Vereshchuk that they had no backup ambulances, so seriously injured prisoners were placed in the back of empty trucks for the fivehour exchange journey.
At the rendezvous point, the Russians put the wounded on their stretchers on the street and left, and Ukrainian soldiers came to pick them up.
Nikita still couldn’t believe he was in Ukraine, he says, until one of the soldiers looked him in the eye and said in Ukrainian, “Welcome back, friend.”
“I was in pieces,” he said. “I knew I was back in my homeland.”
But he didn’t know if his family was still alive. He didn’t know anything about what had happened in Ukraine last month. Nikita gave his wife Nadia’s number to a Ukrainian official and waited, heart pounding.
“I was just waiting for the dial tone to at least know her phone was on,” he said. “Then it started dialing and she declined the call, and I knew she was alive.”
On the second try, Nadia answered. She told him she was in Belgium with Artem and they were safe.
“We cried on the phone for five minutes,” says Nikita. “We tried to talk to each other, but we couldn’t. I had tears running down my face. I just heard her say hello and I couldn’t breathe.”
Nadia called Sasha’s brother Vyacheslav and her parents Nadia and Volodymyr to break the news. But there was still a big piece missing.
“We know Sasha was alive when Nikita left, but that was two weeks ago,” says his mother. “So we’re still here, waiting. We’re still not doing well.”
Since arriving in Ukraine, Nikita has been trying to arrange a transfer from Zaporizhia to the Kyiv hospital where she works. The order seemed to have stalled. Then, on Tuesday morning, a nurse suddenly walked in to tell him he was going home.
After a long ambulance ride across the country, Nikita was greeted like a hero by his colleagues at Kiev Civil Hospital No. 5. He was taken to a private room with a large open window overlooking the pine trees.
The chief physician and the chief surgeon visited him. They nervously awaited news from Nikita and both cried at their return. Two of his other colleagues, a married couple, had recently been killed with their children by a Russian shell.
“It means everything to us to have him back,” says surgeon Yuriy Shylenko. “He will have to learn to walk again, but we will do everything for him.”
Nikita puts on a pair of hospital slippers and shows her progress by getting up and taking a few steps. Doctors discuss their recovery plans. But he wasn’t really listening.
“I only have one thing on my mind,” he says after they leave. “Back to my wife and child.”