Dmytro Raskevich, 25, is a military engineer in the Ukrainian army. At the beginning of February this year, Russia had between 130,000 and 200,000 troops stationed along the Ukrainian border, not only on Russian territory, but in Belarus and the Crimean peninsula – Ukrainian soil that had been occupied by Moscow in 2014.
The invasion was imminent, according to British intelligence, but President Vladimir Putin publicly denied the intention to send his troops to the neighboring country. He said it was all just a military exercise.
Raskevich and his comrades in arms were sent to the port of Berdiansk, on the Ukrainian coast, to lay mines, with the aim of delaying an eventual Russian amphibious invasion.
The Ukrainian people, like most analysts, were betting that Russian military action would be restricted to the east of the country, in the Donbas region. Berdiansk was an unlikely target. But on February 24, after a hail of missiles over major Ukrainian cities, Russian troops began a full-scale invasion of the neighboring country.
Russian soldiers left Crimea for Kherson, Melitopol and Berdiansk. From the Russian city of Taganrog, soldiers advanced on Mariupol. Before long, Berdiansk was dominated by the Kremlin and Raskevich’s platoon found itself surrounded. It was no longer possible to reach Zaporizhzhia, the closest region still under Ukrainian control.
He and his companions were ordered to travel to the nearby village of Primorsk, shed their military uniforms and blend in with the civilian population. They came into contact with collaborators who would become the Ukrainian resistance. They were then taken to a safe house, where they stayed for a week.
After days in the shadows, the impetuous young soldier began to think of a plan to try to secretly return to unoccupied Ukrainian territory. He then returned to the city of Berdiansk.
“I started to help other military colleagues to settle in Berdiansk, but soon the Russian military police started looking for us. We started constantly changing addresses to avoid capture,” Raskevich told this columnist.
Disguised as a local student, the soldier made contact with Ukrainian special forces, who were trying to organize a partisan resistance movement in the occupied territories.
“I started helping the ‘experts’. I started taking pictures of Ukrainian police officers who switched sides,” she said. Among the tasks of resistance members in occupied areas were sabotaging railway lines, carrying out attacks against Russian authorities and, in Raskevich’s case, locating and identifying the “vatnik”, slang for Ukrainian citizens who changed sides and started to support the invading Russians.
All was well on Raskevich’s new mission, until his colleagues in Primorsk were captured by the Russian secret police. But he didn’t know that. His companions were forced to call and tell Raskevich that they needed to meet him in Berdiansk. He provided his location and made an appointment. In a matter of hours, he was surrounded.
“I don’t know who they were because they put a mask on my face and I didn’t see anything. Then they took me to a place I didn’t know where it was, then I saw that it was a police station. They tried to find out who the special ops people were that worked with me,” she said.
“They wanted maps of the mines we installed, the fortifications we built and the identities of the civilians who helped us.”
Raskevich tried to keep up his student guise. “I said I didn’t know anything I was being told and what was happening. There were various types of torture, the main one was the use of electricity,” he said.
“I was placed in a metal chair. I couldn’t move and they used electricity to torture me and get information. They also used batons to beat me and tried to asphyxiate me using plastic bags. They broke my nose,” she said.
The soldier was placed in a cell with four other people he did not know. One of the prisoners began to say that the Russians cut the sexual organs of anyone who did not provide information. He said he saw people who were said to have been mutilated during the torture. What he didn’t know is that there were Russians undercover as prisoners.
“I was taken to the torture room and my pants were taken off. I thought all was lost. They started putting something on my genitals and I didn’t understand what it was. Then they started giving shocks,” she reported.
The day after this torture session, Raskevich’s captors presented him with his cell phone, which had been seized. He was relatively calm as he had erased all compromising information. But the Russians accessed a folder from the Telegram app that saved photos and conversations. Raskevich was unaware of the feature’s existence.
“They showed pictures of me wearing my military uniform, proving that I was not a student. My cover ended at that moment.”
The soldier then gave the Russians the names of his team members and information about their missions. “I am very ashamed of it,” he said.
Even having given information to the Russians, the young man was subjected to several other aggressions, including the simulation of execution.
“The moment they broke me was when they said they were going to shoot me and they lined me up. In that moment, I died in my thoughts,” she recalled.
According to him, all the prisoners were blindfolded and it was possible to hear sounds similar to gunshots. “I was noticing that there were fewer and fewer people in line,” he said.
However, Raskevich realized at one point that he would not be killed. The pops were fireworks, not gunshots. “That was like a vaccine for me, since then I started to think that I would not die there.”
The soldier was taken to the Russian naval base in Sevastopol, where his treatment began to improve. There, the Russians asked if he wanted to be part of the prisoner exchanges. However, to participate, he had to sign documents without reading them. He later learned that the papers contained statements that he witnessed Ukrainian troops committing war crimes and genocide in Luhansk, a province in eastern Ukraine. All lie.
Raskevich remembers a group of 50 prisoners who were taken in for an alleged prisoner exchange – a fact that boosted everyone else’s spirits. “But then five of them were brought back with multiple fractures. They had been taken to Taganrog, Russia. I don’t know what happened to the others,” he said.
“There were many reports of people who saw our soldiers being sexually assaulted. I even spoke to one of them, but then I never saw her again. I hope he’s okay, if that’s even possible,” she recalled.
After more than four months in Russian prisons, Raskevich was selected to be exchanged for Russian prisoners.
“I didn’t believe until the last moment that there would be an exchange. First I saw a man crossing a bridge in our uniform. There was a civilian and military. It is impossible to describe the emotion. It’s like someone is shaking you as hard as you can to get something out of his body,” he reported.
The soldier was then taken to a rehabilitation center on Ukrainian territory. “There was the first time in months that I saw someone smiling at me, they weren’t indifferent,” he said.
Days later, he met his wife and family at a reception ceremony. “My soul couldn’t fit in my body with so much happiness,” he said.
Since the beginning of the war, about a thousand Ukrainians have returned to their country in 30 prisoner exchanges.
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