Artem Dyblenko spent four months in a Russian prison. This ex-combatant from Azovstal, whom franceinfo met, today wants to warn about the conditions of detention of his brothers in arms.
The cup of coffee seems very fragile in the huge hands of Artem Dyblenko. In the back room of a restaurant in Mykolaiv (southern Ukraine), Friday, March 24, the 39-year-old former soldier is about to tell his story for two hours. That of a veteran of the Azovstal metallurgical plant in Mariupol who spent four months in detention in Russia, before being finally released as part of an exchange in the fall. Here he is today, who has become the spokesperson for his brothers in arms who are still in detention. Last month, it was in the room of the United Nations Trusteeship Council, in New York (United States), that he recounted his “3,000 hours of‘russian hell’ (testimony in English, from 1h21 of video)in a delegation led by Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba.
Artem Dyblenko puts his arms on the table and begins his story by going back to May 20, 2022. That day, it is one of the last to emerge from the basements of the Azovstal complex. The final surrender, after months of resistance from which he emerged already weakened. He is then taken to a bus where two Russian soldiers are waiting for him. “I talked to them a bit, they were from Dagestan [un territoire russe situé au nord de l’Azerbaïdjan]. They didn’t even know why they were there.” Direction Olenivka, south of Donetsk, where a sorting is carried out. “In the evening, they announced the list of those who were leaving. I stayed three days there”. The prisoner finally gets into a truck, with forty other companions in misfortune. “THE eyes taped and handcuffed, not knowing what awaited us.
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The journey seems to take four hours, “but of course I had no mshowed”, blows the former prisoner. It is much later that he will learn his base: Taganrog, in the Rostov region. “When we arrived, we were thrown out of the truck, and forcare to run. At the entrance, there were two rows of soldiers beating us with sticks.” During this “welcoming committee”, Artem gets up with several broken ribs.
“We never understood why the Russians beat us so much”
Afterwards, “At first there were 30 of us in a cell for two, our hands tied. And then they took us out one by one. Everyone was screaming.” The prisoners try on their new uniforms, their hair is cut. “I don’t have many, so they cut my beard. All this time we were hit,” recalls the former soldier. Artem Dyblenko says he was taken to a cell occupied by three other fellow prisoners.
“Forget everything you know about human rights and the Geneva Conventions [sur le sort des prisonniers de guerre].”
Artem Dyblenko, former prisoner of warat franceinfo
The program is immutable: get up at six o’clock, breakfast at seven. “After, nOrwe got out of the cell and beaten “. Then begin the “steps” outside the cells during which prisoners must lean forward with their hands raised behind their backs. “In Russia, it’s called the ‘black dolphin’ and it’s traditionally reserved for lifers. We would go down to the basement, where we had to do 20 or 30 push-ups, and then we would go back up.” Each time, the blows rain down. “We never understood why the Russians beat us so much. There is no logical explanation, so it must have been for fun. In four months, I feel like I walked the equivalent of twice the distance between Kyiv and Taganrog.”
At 2 p.m., lunch. Then at 15, everyone is still abused outside the cells. “Until 7 p.m., we were interrogated, always in the same position. Facing the wall, hands on the wall, legs apart. If we looked at the guards, we were beaten.”
“I would have traded my car for a piece of soap”
Artem Dyblenko evokes a number of rules, each more absurd than the other. “You shouldn’t look out the window, not look at the door, not sit down… Sometimes, you shouldn’t put your hands in your pockets, or cross your legs”, lists the ex-prisoner. Where appropriate, detainees were beaten. “The Russians sometimes used electric batons. There, it was the first time I smelled the smell of burning human flesh.”
“We were breaking our fingernails because it was forbidden to wear them long, but we had nothing to cut them with.”
Artem Dyblenko, former prisoner of warat franceinfo
In the morning and in the evening, the guards serve him a few spoonfuls of cereal porridge, embellished at midday “of a liquid substance, like a soup drowned in water”, of Baltic herring, half a cup of tea and bread. The 108 kg soldier loses forty in four months of detention. “We had no toothbrush, no toothpaste, no clean clothes, and it was summer. If I could, I would have even traded my car for a piece of soap”says the Ukrainian.
Artem Dyblenko says he has “lived four months in an absolute vacuum of information. I had no news from my family or from the front.continues the ex-lawyer, father of two children, aged 14 and 17. “The Russians asked for my wife’s number in prison, but I pretended to have forgotten it to prevent them from calling him.” Disinformation is also part of the psychological weapons. “While I was detained, the Russians even made it look like my town, Mykolaiv, had been taken.” Beyond the physical pain, the conditions of detention also weigh on his morale: “I realized that my mind was starting to deteriorate over time. I asked for books, a Bible… But the only answer, again, was I was beaten.”
“The Russians didn’t care about prisoners who died in captivity. They buried them, that’s all, without informing the Ukrainian side”ping the former soldier. One of his friends, Oleksiy, died in his arms in September. “He told me he couldn’t take it anymore. And after yet another ‘walk’ in the morning, his heart stopped beating. beat”he recalls. “Three months later, they finally swapped his body with that of a Russian.” Because during the war, we also exchange the dead.
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One fine morning, the guards take Artem out of his cell, undress him and give him a Ukrainian uniform, “completely rotten” And “not to [sa] size.” There follows a 30-day wait in a cell, upright. Artem Dyblenko and the others finally take a first plane, before being transferred to a second device, joined by inmates from another prison, installed on a high row.
“I walked in the mud and then I saw the Ukrainian flag”
“Next to me, another prisoner remarked that no one had hit us”an unusual thing, recalls the Ukrainian. “On arrival, I saw a civilian bus, and that’s when I understood that we were the subject of an exchange”. On the spot, armed men, in civilian clothes. That day, 188 soldiers were first taken to Homiel, in Belarus. Five Azovstal commanders are taken to Turkey and fifteen foreign fighters to Saudi Arabia. Russia, in return, gets 55 detainees, including former Ukrainian oligarch Viktor Medvedchuk.
Artem’s bus parks near the Ukrainian border. “I walked in the mud and then I saw the Ukrainian flag. And when I saw a policeman, I asked him for his phone number to call my wife.” At the end of the line, he first asks his wife if the whole family is alive. “But I had been used to whispering for four months, and she didn’t recognize the sound of my voice at first.” The veteran was then hospitalized in Poltava (about 300 km southeast of kyiv). Ashamed of his condition, he refuses to receive visits from his wife. “But of course she came anyway”he smiles.
Six months later, the colossus regained its initial physical appearance. He still keeps the traces of his “russian hell” at the wrists. “The redness, there, these are the marks of the plastic handcuffs”, confides to us the one who was made Knight of the Order of Courage. Psychological trauma is more difficult to assess. Only a minority of POWs have been exchanged since the start of the war, and most Azovstal fighters have been locked up for ten months.
At the end of March, in a report (PDF document in English), the UN human rights monitoring mission has accused Moscow and kyiv of committing summary executions of prisoners. “Ukraine – to its credit – provided free and confidential access to places of internment”, however, commented the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk. Unlike Russia, which still refuses access to its prisons.