“What would happen if we cut off your ear?” the soldiers asked Oleksandr Vdovychenko. Then they hit him on the head.
The blows continued when his interrogators — a mixture of Russian soldiers and pro-Russian separatists — didn’t like his answers, he later told his family.
The men asked about his politics, his future plans, his view of the war. They checked his documents, took his fingerprints and stripped him to see if he had any nationalist tattoos or marks caused by wearing or wearing military equipment.
“They were trying to knock something out of him,” his daughter Maria Vdovychenko told DailyExpertNews in an interview.
Maria said her father received so many blows to the head during the interrogation last month that several medical examinations have now confirmed that his eyesight is permanently damaged.
Still, Oleksandr was one of the lucky ones. He made it through “filtration.”
When Russian forces first began taking over towns and cities in eastern Ukraine in early March after invading the country, evidence emerged that civilians were forced to undergo humiliating identity checks and often violent interrogations before being allowed to leave their homes and travel. to areas still under Ukrainian control.
Three months into the war, the dehumanization process called filtration has become part of the reality of life under Russian occupation.
DailyExpertNews spoke to a number of Ukrainians who have gone through the filtration process in the past two months. Many are too afraid to speak in public, fearing for the safety of relatives and friends who are still trying to escape from Russian-occupied territories.
All the people who spoke to DailyExpertNews have described facing threats and humiliation during the trial. Many have witnessed or know people who were rounded up by Russian troops or separatist soldiers and then disappeared without a trace.
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