A 16-year-old Ukrainian boy has described how he was held hostage by Russian soldiers for 90 days as he heard other prisoners being tortured in a nearby cell.
Vladislav Buryak, who was separated from his family on 8 April at a checkpoint while attempting to flee the city of Melitopol, was released after a months-long negotiation between his father, Oleg – a local Ukrainian official – and Russian soldiers, who wanted to exchange Vladislav for an individual of interest to the Russian military.
Vladislav’s vivid account of his time in captivity is a depiction of violent interrogations involving brutal beatings, and confirms other reports of Russian and pro-Russian separatist forces mistreating detainees.
He is one of about 500 cases of civilian hostages whose information has been collected by the Centre for Civil liberties in Ukraine, including several other young people, although the organisation says that total is likely to be the tip of the ice berg.
In an interview with the Guardian, Vladislav described his long ordeal and how he was taken from a convoy of vehicles.
“We’d left Melitopol for Zaporizhzhia at 9am in the morning,” he said, sitting next to his father. “Around 11 o’clock we were stopped at the checkpoint, where Russian soldiers started checking documents.
“They asked me if I’d filmed the checkpoint and demanded I give them my phone. Then found a video from a Ukrainian Telegram which had Russian soldiers on it talking about how they didn’t want to fight.
“That made them angry, and a soldier with a machine gun pointed it at me and said I needed to follow him and took me to the tent where they were ‘filtering’ people who were leaving. That’s when they found out I was the son of a local official and valuable as a hostage.”
Vladislav said he was taken to a location being used as a prison in Vasylivka, where he was kept for more than 40 days in a single cell before being transferred to a hotel for his last month in captivity.
“They had me working washing the floor of the room they used for interrogations, cleaning officers’ rooms and throwing out the trash. The cell where I was kept was a few metres from where they did the interrogations. I could hear people shouting, and when I cleaned the room I could see bloodstains. Because I could move around when I was cleaning cells, I sometimes had the chance to see what had happened to people and they could sometimes talk to me for a minute or so when the guards weren’t watching.”
Vladislav described the room where the interrogations took place: “There was a metal table and two chairs. One was for the person being questioned and the other was for the person taking notes.
“There were bloodstains and soaked bandages. I could hear the questioning too, at least three times week. ‘Do you have weapons? Who else has weapons?’ They were shouting and the people being tortured were yelling really loudly.
“People were being beaten up and tortured with electric shocks. If someone didn’t say something, the torture would continue, sometimes for several hours.”
“I saw people afterwards as well, and their faces were bruised. I was really scared that they would beat me up as well, so I tried to keep myself emotionless. No one ever told me why they were keeping me but I guessed that it was to exchange me.”
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