The shock testimony of a Ukrainian veteran

A flared gray jacket on the back, jeans that falls on his black sneakers and a relaxed look … Vladyslav Zadorin could almost blend among the young people who wander the streets of Grenoble (Isère). Almost. Around his neck, the Ukrainian keeps a military plaque, the witness of his painful history.

War veteran at 26 years old, he spent almost two years in the Russian prison camps. Released in 2024, he has traveled Europe for several months to tell his ordeal and alert public opinion, helped by a program of a Ukrainian NGO.

His life changed on February 24, 2022. That day, Russia invaded its country. The soldier, responsible for shooting in the event of a air attack, has been in office for two months on the island of snakes, within the 35th brigade of the Ukrainian navy. Strategic watch in the Black Sea, the island becomes, from the first days of the offensive, a symbol of the Ukrainian resistance.

When a Russian ship orders the garrison of 80 Ukrainian soldiers to abandon its position, the response slaps dry on the radio: “will make you fuck. The message goes around the planet. But twelve hours later, the island falls and Vladyslav is taken prisoner.

Hungry in Russian prisons

For his relatives, the soldier disappears in the limbo of war. He rushes into the labyrinth of the Russian jails. Transferred from prison to prison, he failed a year later in Koursk (southern Russia), “hell on earth”. Raise every day at 6 am to sing the Russian anthem.

Infect breakfast: “Three pieces of bread mixed with sand and bark”. Not enough to calm hunger, then the prisoner and his eleven companions swallow what they find in their cell. Sometimes a earthworm, sometimes a rat, sometimes even soap …

Terrible physical and psychological abuse

Then arrive at the executioners who choose the victims of the day. The unfortunate selected await their turn in Indian queue. The tortures are sometimes psychological: “Your country has disappeared”, it is screaming, when he does not know the progress of the war.

Added to the physical abuse: electrodes on the private parts, needles planted under the nails, tobacco passages with hammer blows, dog attacks … “You do not imagine the number of castrated or raped men”, he asserts. The young man loses his gallbladder and two toes. He tries to commit suicide twice, saved each time by his comrades.

“I didn’t feel any emotion, I was empty”

One morning, his guards ordered him to wear the Russian uniform and then tape a cap on his face. Yet yet an abuse? No, his release. After 679 days behind bars, he found his country in January 2024 with 230 other Ukrainian prisoners of war.

A week later, he embers his parents, back in their family home, in the center of Ukraine. His mother melts in tears, under the eyes of his father with a blushed face. “I didn’t feel any emotion, I was empty,” he says.

A haunting fight

After a long psycho-logical and physical rehabilitation, he wants to be the vote of all the thousands of prisoners- soldiers and civilians- who roam the Russian camps. “Russia is cruel and must be found guilty,” he said. For the time being, diplomatic exchanges are dedicated to a partial ceasefire.

But as long as his companions in misfortune remain captive in Russia, the war veteran will not abandon. His fight obsessed him, at the risk of entering a new prison, mental this time