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Two Ukrainian volunteers who say they spent three weeks in Russian captivity are now open about their harrowing experience, describing the beatings and conditions they allegedly endured as a “nightmare come to life”.
According to Reuters, Volodymyr Khropun and Yulia Ivannikova-Katsemon were working for the Red Cross and helping people escape from villages along the front lines in northern Ukraine when they were captured by the Russian military in March. On April 9, after being held in Belarus and in detention centers in Russia, they were released as part of a prisoner exchange.
“It was like a nightmare come to life,” Khropun told Reuters, recalling how he and Ivannikova-Katsemon were being held with about 40 others in an unheated room at a factory in Dymer, north of Kyiv, holding a plastic pot shared as a toilet.
Volodymyr Khropun, Red Cross volunteer, folds his hands to show how his hands were tied while he was held at a factory by Russian troops during the Russian invasion in the village of Dymer in Ukraine’s Kyiv region. (REUTERS/Alessandra Prentice)
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“They arrested me, closed my eyes — like in, they pulled a hat over my eyes, tied it with duct tape — and then wrapped my hands in duct tape, like a terrorist,” he added.
After surviving on one to two meals a day for about a week — sometimes consisting of nothing but army crackers — the pair said they and about a dozen others were taken in a military truck to Belarus, where they were interrogated, reports said Reuters.
“The first phase was being stripped naked, being photographed, noticing scars, I have a few. Then the pouring of water [on me] and beatings,” Ivannikova-Katsemon told Reuters.
Dirty mattresses are seen on a cement floor of a factory room where Russian troops have been holding Red Cross volunteers Volodymyr Khropun and Yulia Ivannikova-Katsemon along with dozens of other locals in the village of Dymer, Ukraine. (REUTERS/Alessandra Prentice)
The volunteers said they each received documents with their IDs and details, which they accused of being “a person who spoke out against the military special operation.”
At some point after being transferred further to a detention center in Russia, Ivannikova-Katsemon claims she was told she was being sent to work at a logging camp in Siberia.
Khropun said that during interrogations in all three countries, he was forced to kneel for long periods or had his knees and ribs attacked. Other prisoners, he told Reuters, had their hair, beards and mustaches partially shaved off as an act of humiliation.
Families wait to board a train at Kramatorsk Central Station as they flee the eastern Donbass city of Kramatorsk in early April. (Photo by FADEL SENNA/AFP via Getty Images)
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The pair were eventually freed after learning they had been chosen to be swapped in a prisoner exchange.
“By God there was always hope that I would come back,” Ivannikova-Katsemon told Reuters. “The difficult part was not being able to tell family and friends that I was alive and in captivity.”