tortured with electric shocks, hit with hammers, doused with boiling water. These are some of the torture methods suffered by a Ukrainian woman who was held in captivity in Russia for six months, and who narrated what she experienced to the Ukrainian national news agency called ukrinform.
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Hanna O.*, 26, is a Ukrainian soldier who was held in Russia in the midst of the war that broke out between those countries in early 2022. She was able to return home on October 17, after an exchange in which another 107 women who were in Russia were released.
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“They treated us like animals. I’ll tell you more: not even animals behave like that. They beat the girls, tortured them with electric currents, they hit with hammers, that’s the easiest. Girls were hanged. I’m not talking about the food at all, because it was sour. Even dogs are not given that food,” she told reporters when she was released.
Hanna went on to explain that people who had tattoos They wanted to cut off their hands “cut off our tattoos, burn us with boiling water just because you exist, because you are a marine, because you speak Ukrainian,” he said.
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Asked what helped her survive, Hanna replied: “The dream of coming home,” adding that even in captivity they did not betray their oath as soldiers or doctors who were, “this is what we live on. Just the hope that we will return home.”
Her son, her mother and her sister are waiting for her at home, but her husband, she said, is still “captive somewhere. I don’t know where he is.”
*His name has been changed to protect his safety.
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