KYIV, Ukraine — Stanislav Aseyev spent two and a half years in an infamous prison run by Russian-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine, where he said he and other inmates were regularly tortured, beaten, humiliated and forced to put bags on their hands. head to bear. Yet even he was unprepared for the grim scenes of beatings and executions he witnessed in the Kiev suburb of Bucha.
“I wasn’t ready for this yet,” he said. “I didn’t think I would see genocide with my own eyes, despite the fact that I have a lot of experience in this war.”
Mr Aseyev, a 32-year-old journalist, had documented his time in prison in a 2020 memoir, “The Torture Camp on Paradise Street”. Today he bears witness to a new brutality, a Russian invasion and the physical and emotional scars that are being re-inflicted.
In Bucha “the corpses lie in front of every private house,” said Mr Aseyev, who had recently traveled there with a volunteer military unit to help ensure the security of the region after Ukrainian forces pushed back the Russians.
Mr Aseyev had moved to Kiev to leave his prison years behind, but the war and associated trauma found him again, in February, when rockets shot into the city’s eastern suburb of Brovary.
“I would have thought it was all over, that I still had a very long process ahead of me to work on it,” he said of the lingering scars in an interview in the back seat of a car because it was too dangerous to drive. House. “But now it’s all irrelevant, because now the old psychological traumas from captivity are slowly starting to manifest again.”
Withdrawn to wartime, Mr. Aseyev has also chosen a new way to deal with his fears and anger. He took up arms for the first time in his life and defended his adopted city militarily as part of the Territorial Defense Forces, a volunteer unit of the Ukrainian army.
Mr. Aseyev’s story is an extreme version of the story that many Ukrainians are experiencing today as the Russian military spreads violence, indiscriminately and otherwise, throughout the country. His experiences have made him – someone who was brought up with the Russian language and culture, with a worldview relatively sympathetic to Moscow – reject all that to the extent that he is not only willing but also willing to kill Russian soldiers.
He was born in the city of Makiivka, just outside Donetsk, the largest city in eastern Ukraine. A native speaker of Russian, he grew up listening to Soviet rock bands such as Kino, reading Dostoevsky in original Russian, and learning history from a predominantly Russian perspective.
Before the separatist war that broke out in 2014, he says he is sympathetic to President Vladimir V. Putin’s view of Ukraine as part of “Russky Mir” or “Russian world”, a nationalist and chauvinist ideology centered on the idea of the Russian civilization. superiority. “I really had such ‘Russky Mir’ illusions about Putin, Greater Russia, all these things,” he said.
Those were shattered by his experiences after 2014, just as they are now shattered for millions of other Ukrainians. He prefers not to speak Russian now, except to talk to his mother.
In 2014, Makiivka, a place Mr Aseyev has described as “a city of Soviet sleepwalkers”, was occupied by Russian-backed separatist forces loyal to the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic. Many of his friends signed up to fight on the side of the pro-Moscow rebels and bought the Russian propaganda line that Ukrainian fascists had taken over in Kiev. Shortly afterwards, he said, he realized it was the separatists who were violating human rights.
In 2015, he began writing about the abuses for a daily newspaper Ukrayinska Pravda, as well as the US-funded RFE/RL outlet and liberal-oriented newspaper, Dzerkalo Tyzhnia, or Mirror Weekly. He continued that line of reporting under a pseudonym for two years, until he was detained on June 2, 2017.
Mr. Aseyev was first taken to ‘The Office’, a prison camp in a group of buildings along a wide boulevard in the center of Donetsk that had served as office space before the war. After beatings and torture with electric shocks, he said, he spent six weeks in solitary confinement, in a cell so cold that he had to handle bottles of his own urine to keep warm.
He was then transferred to the Izolyatsia prison, named after a former insulation factory — both Russian and Ukrainian languages use the same word for isolation and isolation — which had become a cultural center after the Soviet-era factory went bankrupt. There, Mr Aseyev says he was beaten and tortured for more than two years before being released in a prisoner swap just before New Year’s Eve in 2019, after spending 962 days indoors.
Mr Aseyev said his own persecution, and the Russians who are today beating up towns around Kiev and in southern and eastern Ukraine, many of which are Russian-speaking areas, belied the Kremlin’s claim that it was waging war over ethnic Russians and To protect Russian speakers from the “Nazis” who were supposedly in control of Kiev.
“They don’t care who they kill,” he said. “I am a Russian speaker, I grew up with Russian culture, with Russian music, books, film, even Soviet in a sense.”
Despite this, he said: “I am definitely regarded as an enemy by these people, as are those who grew up somewhere in Lviv with completely different values,” he said, referring to the predominantly Ukrainian-speaking city in the west of the country, the beating heart of Ukrainian nationalism.
“For them,” he said of Russia’s leadership, “the Ukraine state just doesn’t exist, and that’s all. And anyone who disagrees with this is already an enemy.”
Mr. Aseyev spent the years following his release from prison trying to heal from his traumas. Much of that process revolved around writing his memoirs, which detailed the treatment he and others underwent.
He described the horrors in a powerful passage from the introduction: “The main tasks here are to survive after the desire to live has left you and nothing in the world depends on you anymore, to keep your sanity while you teeter on the brink of madness. and to remain a human being in conditions so inhumane that faith, forgiveness, hatred, and even a torturer who closes his eyes to his victim, are charged with manifold meanings.”
In thematic essays he describes how a father and son were tortured together; how a man received an electric shock in his anus; cases of rape and forced labour; the way cameras constantly monitored the inmates; and the wickedness of the commander of Izolyatsia.
War between Russia and Ukraine: important developments
Missile attack. A rocket attack on a crowded train station in eastern Ukraine left at least 50 dead and nearly 100 injured, Ukrainian officials said, blaming Russia for hitting a key evacuation point for those trying to flee ahead of an expected, stepped-up offensive.
A collection of his messages from the occupied eastern Donbas region of Ukraine, written before his arrest in 2017, was also recently published in English translation by Harvard University Press.
When the war started in February, Mr. Aseyev took his mother to the relatively safer west of the country and then took the train back to the capital. When he returned to Kiev in the early days of the war, he was one of only three people to disembark at the city’s main train station.
“There’s just nowhere else to run,” he said. “If we all leave Kiev, we will somehow be crushed in the rest of Ukraine.”
In prison, his mother was “constantly” on his mind. “For two and a half years, my mother went through hell,” he said, not knowing for a long time whether he was dead or alive, and unable to visit or communicate with him.
Although she is safe for now, Mr. Aseyev said he is furious at what she has endured and that he is ready for revenge. “I will kill them at every opportunity,” he said.
Aseyev said he was confident that “once” Russian troops “have the opportunity and infrastructure to build something like Izolyatsia in the occupied territory, of course they will.”
He has continued to write and advocate for Ukraine even during his military training. He recently visited the newly liberated town of Bucha, site of numerous alleged atrocities by Russian soldiers, and posted photos of a mass grave on Facebook.
In his memoirs, Mr. Aseyev included a chapter on how and why he had considered taking his own life in prison.
“The choice to take my own life, I thought, was the last freedom I had,” he wrote.
In a video message shared by Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken on his Instagram account, Mr Aseyev recalled this thought as he spoke about his time in Izolyatsia and pleaded with Western leaders not to fear Russia or Mr Putin.
“They took everything — relatives, friends, communications, even an old calendar” that had hung in his cell, he said. “But one thing they couldn’t take from me: I was ready to die. This is something that cannot be taken from a person, even if everything else is taken.”
And that, he said, is why Ukraine has resisted the supposedly superior Russian forces, and why it will ultimately prevail.
“This is what our whole country is now,” he said. “We are more willing to die than to give up or lose. And that is why the Russian Federation has already lost in this war.”