“Marioupol is ‘Silent Hill'”, testifies a soldier captured after the surrender of the Azovstal factory

yurii lost a leg, torn off by an enemy rocket on March 10, while defending Mariupol. This soldier of the 36th marine infantry brigade, captured by the Russian army, was then benefited from a prisoner exchange in June. He regains strength in a rehabilitation center for military amputees, in western Ukraine.

He testifies first of all to the violence of the fighting and the bombardments in Mariupol: “This is ‘Silent Hill’he says in reference to the famous horror video game. I saw dead people sitting at bus stops. They were petrified, dark blue, with shrapnel still lodged in their bodies and heads. And there were bodies of civilians everywhere, lying on the ground.”

After the surrender of the last fighters of Mariupol, refugees in the Azostal factory, Yurii spent several weeks in the prison of Olevnika, near Donetsk: “They were killing us mentallyhe said, in cells four meters by four, with a very small screened window.”

“The cells are normally for four people, but the Russians put 12 to 26 people in them.”

Yurii, Ukrainian soldier

at franceinfo

“The food was three times a day. In the morning four or five spoons of boiled cereal, for lunch eight spoons of soup and a piece of bread, and in the evening the same as in the morning. They fed us just so that ‘we don’t die, so that our body works.