Mariupoli Azovstali kaitsel osalenud ja septembris 2024 vangide vabastamisega vabaks saanud Azovi üksuse võitleja mälestused linna kaitsmisest ja vangistusest. Video allpool oleval lingil.
In September 2024, Mariupol defender Valery Horishniy, known as "Yarylo," was exchanged among 15 Azov soldiers who were returned home.
He had endured torture in the Donetsk torture chamber known as "Isolation," experiencing horrors difficult to imagine.
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AZOVSTAL
"To be honest, we didn’t think much about being taken prisoner. We were more inclined to think we’d just die there."
"Some commanders wanted permission from Redis to leave Azovstal on their own. Redis forbade it, saying that the priority was to preserve lives and help the wounded."
"Azovstal was a nightmare. There were so many critically wounded. Redis risked his life repeatedly, coming to check on us, even though we were under constant bombardment—artillery, airstrikes, everything."
"Redis personally went to negotiate with the Russians. Some criticized him, saying he might be killed during the negotiations. But he deserves enormous respect for going to those talks himself."
TIME IN CAPTIVITY
"They once asked, ‘Don’t you need to pee?’ I said no. I’d heard they’d shock people with tasers on their genitals if they asked to use the toilet."
"Before leaving Olenivka, they searched us. I kept a diary and wrote notes in English, partly for practice and partly so they wouldn’t understand. I hid the notes in my seams...
...They threatened that if they found anything, it’d be worse for me. I started taking things out, but forgot some. One inspector found a note and began yelling, looking for someone to translate. They said I was being sent somewhere else."
"They put us in a van and sent us to the Donetsk pre-trial detention center. I learned I was in isolation—a notorious torture prison in Donetsk."
"At first, they suffocated me with a bag, used a taser on my genitals, beat me with low kicks. They tortured me for a long time, then one of them said, ‘Let’s shoot him.’ Another said, ‘Let’s hang him,’ and I thought, finally."
"The cell was one and a half meters square. I thought I had claustrophobia, but it passed quickly. There was nothing in the cell except a bottle of water and a bucket. There was also a camera I had to look into to show I was awake. Sleeping was forbidden."
"I spent almost a week like that. Each day, they gave us a loaf of bread and water, and emptied the bucket once a day."
"When they brought me into this garage, they said, ‘You’ve ended up in hell.’ There was a song playing loudly—a strange cover of a Pugacheva song. I realized they played loud music to drown out screams."
"They asked about my tattoos, then other nonsense. I had boxing gloves tattooed on my arm. ‘Are you a boxer?’ they asked. I said I did Thai boxing, and immediately they started beating me with low kicks."
"In the cell, I saw scratch marks on one wall counting 30 days and on another, 50. I was terrified I’d end up spending 50 days there. I closed my eyes, trying to focus on my memories, songs, and books I knew."
"Someone had scratched on the wall, ‘Everything passes, and this will too.’ I thought I had to grit my teeth and endure."
"...In isolation, they beat me and questioned me, like always. He asked, 'So, is Redis really a great commander?' Then he asked how old he is, and stuff like that. Finally, he says, 'So Redis is really cool, huh?' I was unsure how to answer—if I agreed, they...
...might beat me but I thought, whatever, and said, 'Yeah.' I was surprised by his reaction, apprarently they really thought Redis is a cool guy."
"When I closed my eyes, I saw Ivan Franko’s poem, ‘The Eternal Revolutionary.’ For some reason, it often came to mind.
"In Horlivka, journalists from a Russian channel interviewed us. They asked what rituals we did at Azovstal, whether we sacrificed cats, dogs, or people. They wanted me to play along. I laughed at the question, but the interviewer seemed very nervous...
They didn’t touch me after that. After the cameras turned off, that propagandist told me, ‘I’m an expert in information warfare. You’re brainwashed.’"
"When you see these people in those prisons, you realize that it’s exactly against them that you’re defending Ukrainian children and women."
"There were times when they treated us decently. We had a TV in the cell, could exercise a bit. Some guards in Donetsk referred to the Russian FSB agents as ‘katsaps.’ Once, during a transfer, they bought us some 'Jack' chocolate wafers."
"Chimik [Davyd Kasatkin] didn’t want to sign a document, so they beat him badly. The guards couldn’t understand how an officer could have tattoos—it was incomprehensible to them."
[Chimik was exchanged in September 2022]
"At one point, they put an African American guy in my cell. We got along well; we had similar views. He had attended pro-Ukrainian rallies at the start of the occupation in Kherson. They arrested and tortured him for that. He spent 50 days in isolation."
"They released him in November 2022. I thought they would deport him right away, but he ended up spending another six months in Donetsk because he had no money...
...somehow, he managed to convert his cryptocurrency into rubles, and then they finally deported him in an organized way."
"Before leaving, he gave me his slightly worn Asics sneakers and a Columbia hat. Over about two and a half years, I wrote around 40 poems. I hid them carefully in the tongue of the sneakers, making a small cut...
...But later they took the sneakers away and gave me some rubber slippers."
"We [with other POWs] tried to develop ourselves in any way we could. We shared stories about movies, books, taught each other languages. I knew English, one guy knew Polish. I explained the movie Home Alone in English; another guy recounted Game of Thrones in Polish."
"I knew I’d make it out. I didn’t ‘believe’ in the sense of believing in Santa Claus. I just knew, even though I also knew it wouldn’t be easy."
[Yarulo is playing his own song]