Putin’s torturers couldn’t break these Ukrainian prisoners

The fresh arrivals at a jail in the Russian border city of Kursk were undergoing a routine and brutal procedure known as priyomka, or admission.

“You," a Russian guard singled out Ukrainian Marine Capt. Yulian Pylypey after spotting a large tattoo of a trident, Ukraine’s national symbol, on his right leg. “Come with me."

Six Russian guards dragged Pylypey to an interrogation room, threw him to the floor and kicked him repeatedly. Then the questioning began, interspersed with beatings using rubber truncheons and wooden hammers, and shocks from stun guns, Pylypey later recalled.

After several hours of violent interrogation, the guards dragged his limp and bruised body to a cell and dropped it on the floor. Pylypey couldn’t walk for several days and urinated blood.

The priyomka in Kursk was an early stage in an ordeal that lasted 2½ years before Pylypey was exchanged—torments that reflect the treatment that Russian prison guards mete out systematically to tens of thousands of Ukrainian prisoners.

The Wall Street Journal spoke with several former prisoners of war, whose accounts echo reports from human-rights groups, Ukrainian officials and the United Nations, which conducted extensive interviews with former detainees.

Pylypey says his tattoo of Ukraine’s trident emblem caught the attention of Russian guards.

A United Nations report last year noted 38 prisons where beatings like those Pylypey suffered, as well as sexual violence and use of dogs to attack prisoners, took place. Torture, the report concluded, is “widespread and systematic." Kyiv authorities say up to 200 Ukrainian prisoners have died in captivity. Hundreds who have been exchanged returned emaciated and with physical and mental wounds.

The Kremlin and Russia’s Federal Penitentiary Service didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Russia’s brutal treatment of Ukrainian prisoners is the latest chapter in centuries of violence against Ukrainians who refuse to accept Russian rule, from the torture and murder of insurgents and cultural figures fighting for independence to a forced famine that killed millions in the 1930s.

The abuse, prisoners and human-rights defenders said, seeks to break Ukrainians’ will and extract false confessions to affirm the Russian view that precipitated the war: that true Ukrainians are loyal to Russia, while anyone opposed to Moscow is a dangerous deviant.

From the start of his ordeal, Pylypey steeled himself for survival during repeated torture sessions.

“You close your eyes," said the 29-year-old. “Your body stays there, but your mind goes to the person you love, and you’re flying."

Pylypey had been fighting to defend the ruined Ukrainian city of Mariupol, pictured in a still from drone footage, at the time of his capture.

Capture

Pylypey was captured in mid-April 2022 as Russian forces seized Mariupol, the eastern city he was defending. He and seven of his men were seeking to escape when they were ambushed by the Russian Federal Security Service, or FSB. During the capture, a Russian officer stripped off Pylypey’s smartwatch, calling it the spoils of war.

Pylypey and his men were sent to Olenivka prison in occupied eastern Ukraine, where guards soon stole his wedding ring.

Then came a morale boost from a familiar voice: “Hey buddy, I can’t believe it. I was sure you were dead." It was his fellow Marine Capt. Serhiy Taraniuk, who had also been captured near Mariupol.

Russia was seeking to prove that Ukrainian soldiers in Mariupol, like Russians around Kyiv, had slaughtered civilians. Pylypey said he received special attention because he had spent 14 months training in the U.S., enough for FSB interrogators to falsely accuse him of being hired by the Central Intelligence Agency and trained to kill Russians.

Capt. Serhiy Taraniuk suffered physical torture as well as the disorienting experience of solitary confinement.

Taraniuk said he was also accused, without basis, of ordering the murder of civilians and interrogated with a torture method known as “a call to Putin" using a Soviet-era field telephone. Investigators attached the wires of the battery-powered communications device, which is about the size of a handbag, to his feet, hands and genitals and delivered electric shocks by turning the phone’s dial.

“When they are doing this, you don’t even understand what they want you to say," said Taraniuk, now 30 years old.

No news

Ukrainian prisoners are shuttled between facilities in occupied Ukraine and Russia, keeping them off balance and making their location hard to track for relatives and Ukrainian authorities.

Pylypey went from Olenivka to Taganrog, a Russian city near the border with Ukraine, then another Russian jail before being taken to Kursk, where he spent nearly two years. That was followed by another stint elsewhere in Russia before his release in September. Taraniuk was moved to Taganrog then back and forth between Russia and occupied Ukrainian cities.

Olenivka prison in occupied eastern Ukraine is among the facilities Russia has used to hold POWs. Former captives say they were often moved from site to site.

One of the first things a prisoner loses is a sense of time. Pylypey soon learned to estimate it from the sun’s position or by glancing at guards’ watches.

Taraniuk, who spent several months in solitary confinement without a window, measured time by placing cups under a dripping water tap. Three full cups of water meant it was time for dinner.

In Olenivka, Taraniuk managed a quick call to his girlfriend on another inmate’s contraband phone. Pylypey worried his family would think he was dead.

In April 2023, one year after he was captured, Pylypey unexpectedly received a letter from home and caught the scent of his wife’s perfume when he opened it. He wept silently on his bunk for a half-hour. Later, he wrote back with a saying invoking the strength of Ukrainian warriors: “The Cossack spirit lives forever."

Hunger

One day in December 2023, Pylypey spotted another prisoner in his cell slumping to one side. The middle-aged man, whose name was Borys, had seen his weight drop from around 300 pounds to 175.

Pylypey and another prisoner caught Borys and, after guards opened the cell door, carried him to a daybed in the corridor. He held Borys’s hand as the man weakly called his name, waiting more than an hour for medical assistance. Borys died within days.

Other prisoners would collapse from exhaustion when forced to leave their cells for inspections. Pylypey himself lost 44 pounds during captivity. He often combined all his three daily food portions into one to have a full stomach at least sometimes.

Some guards, particularly military veterans, showed some humanity, giving the prisoners soap and candies and urging them to hang on for a prisoner exchange. Pylypey said some Russian inmates took pity on Ukrainians, leaving books on a windowsill near their cells. “We are sorry for you, guys," one of them told Pylypey.

Survival

During a random check early last year, a guard forced Pylypey to spread his legs and kicked his inner thigh. The following day, a detective pressed him to confess to ordering civilian killings while beating him on the injured leg. Pylypey refused.

In the following weeks, Pylypey’s knee swelled, and his leg developed a large lump. Each step caused searing pain. Guards also tried unsuccessfully to burn off Pylypey’s Ukrainian trident tattoo with a stun gun.

Taraniuk recalls that the Russians hung him by his legs and beat his chest and back. They placed a plastic bag over his head to suffocate him. They also tortured soldiers from his unit, trying to force them to sign accusations that Taraniuk had ordered them to kill civilians. Sleep deprivation was common.

Taraniuk resisted for more than two years until, exhausted by torture and told he could be exchanged after conviction, he decided to sign whatever the Russians wanted. They sentenced him to 29 years in prison for allegedly killing civilians in Mariupol.

Ways out

Pylypey noticed how some prisoners lost their grip on reality. One sat silently for days, hugging his knees and staring in one direction. Another washed the cell day and night. Pylypey tried to cheer them up, but struggled to maintain his own spirits.

“I called it the period of my reprogramming," he said.

Prisoners bonded. Pylypey and his cellmates caught a mouse and made it their pet, sharing their meager food with it and hiding it from guards under the floor.

Pylypey taught the other prisoners English and hand-to-hand combat. He constantly daydreamed about traveling with his wife. “I traveled the entire world with her in my mind," he said.

Taraniuk recalled a prisoner who hanged himself on an iron grate in the cell next to his own. After that, guards ordered everyone to remain in their beds the whole night with their hands above their blankets.

The Russians offered another way out: to take Russian passports and join a Russian battalion formed of Ukrainian former prisoners.

The beginning of last year was one of the toughest times for Pylypey, as the Russians piled on the pressure for a false confession. By late February, he considered giving up and telling the Russians what they wanted.

Then he received a second letter from home. “The only thing I’m asking you is just to hold on," his wife wrote.

He did, but one day in September, he was brought to an interrogation room with a court verdict on a table sentencing him to 20 years in prison for killing civilians and other war crimes. The trial had taken place without him.

Release

The next day, guards told Pylypey to gather his belongings. They placed a sack over his head and transported him, first by car and then by train, to an unknown destination. Expecting to arrive at a new prison, he was surprised to find himself on a civilian bus in Belarus. He felt a hand on his shoulder and turned to see Taraniuk.

“Hey buddy, this is the prisoner exchange," Taraniuk said. They embraced.

As they crossed into Ukraine on foot, a group of Russian prisoners walking in the opposite direction asked whether they had been tortured. The Ukrainians passed by in silence.

Taraniuk, far left, and Pylypey, holding a phone, eat McDonald’s with other newly released POWs at a rehabilitation center.

A few days after his release, Pylypey stood under a summer downpour for the first time in years, soaking in smells and sounds he had almost forgotten. “Now I know that freedom has its smell," he said.

Pylypey learned he had received an award for courage. Taraniuk married his girlfriend. But the men don’t celebrate birthdays or weddings while more than half of their units remain in captivity.

Taraniuk suffers from headaches and partial hearing loss. Pylypey limps because of the injury to his right leg. He is planning to fulfill a promise he made to himself while in captivity: to extend the Ukrainian trident tattoo with a portrait of Kyivan Prince Sviatoslav the Brave.

His sister has prepared a sketch incorporating a phrase attributed to the medieval leader: “We shall not disgrace our native land. For the dead seek no shame."