“They put a bag over my head and tied my hands”, says a Ukrainian elected official, detained by the Russians for almost a year

By refusing to flee the occupation and displaying his pro-Ukrainian sympathies, Ivan Samoydiuk knew he was threatened. His life changed on March 19, 2022, just two weeks after the Russians arrived in his city. “They came in the early morning, they put a bag over my head, tied my hands and threw me in one of their carssays the deputy mayor of Energodar. They were soldiers, with automatic weapons.

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“The first 138 days I was locked up alone in the basement of the Melitopol prison, continues the chosen one. Then they transferred me to a garage with other prisoners, still in an occupied zone, without heating, electricity or any hygiene”. Ivan Samoydiuk will thus be held captive for 11 months without any charges being brought against him. He remembers having often been interrogated by Russian FSB agents about his links with the Ukrainian resistance but he was never tortured. Incredible luck.

“You constantly hear in the cells next door the sounds of beatings and these cries so awful that they make your hair stand on end and you wonder when your turn will come.”

Ivan Samoydiuk, captive for 333 days

at franceinfo

A psychological torture in the end, he explains: “You even manage to say to yourself: let them come once and for all!, because you saw that those who were tortured generally left after a month. It is a torture far more terrible than beatings”.

Ivan will be released in February thanks to an exchange of prisoners of war. A second stroke of luck? Normally Ukraine does not exchange civilians for Russian soldiers, so as not to encourage them to multiply kidnappings, and to use them as bargaining chips. Some 24,000 Ukrainians have been missing since the start of the war, most of them in the occupied zone.