You're reading: Last prisoner released by Donbas armed groups says he was ‘kept in hell’

Anatoliy Polyakov, a Russian activist who moved to Ukraine from the Karelia Republic of Russia during the EuroMaidan Revolution in December 2014, was released from captivity of Donbas armed groups on Dec. 28, after spending 10 months in detention in a basement in Luhansk.

He is the last hostage to have been released from a Russian-backed armed group’s jail. He was beaten and starved while in captivity, he says.

The prisoner exchanges between Ukraine and the Russian-backed armed groups of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts have practically been in limbo for almost a year.

The humanitarian subgroup of the Trilateral Contact Group in Minsk has failed to broker an agreement between the sides: the Russian-backed armed groups are demanding the holding of elections before there is a full prisoner exchange, which Kyiv refuses to agree to.

More than 136 Ukrainian prisoners are thought to be detained in basement jails in Donetsk in Luhansk, while nine Ukrainians are known to be in captivity in Russia, Iryna Gerashchenko, a Ukrainian representative in the Trilateral Contact Group in Minsk, told Ukrainian news agency Interfax-Ukraine on Feb. 12.

However, there are repeated reports from humanitarian volunteers in the areas of Ukraine where Russian-backed armed groups have seized control that more citizens have already been taken captive this year.

On Feb. 11, the day before the first anniversary of the Minsk-2 peace agreement, volunteer and negotiator Ihor Kuraksa, who helped to secure Polyakov’s release, told the Kyiv Post that prisoner exchanges have become very difficult since the spring of 2015.

The Ukrainian government shouldn’t take part in the process of prisoner exchanges. Governments of the world have one common rule – no negotiations with terrorists,” said Kuraksa.

When volunteers like me, Volodymyr Ruban and Vasyl Budik were handling the exchange process, it moved better. (That was) because the terrorists couldn’t demand elections from us. The more serious the negotiator that joins the process, the more serious are the demands that can be made,” he added.

Kuraksa said the Russian-backed armed groups have ditched the Ukrainian Criminal Code and use its Soviet predecessor instead. That means they can jail people under article No 111 of the Soviet criminal code – treason against the Motherland.

Polyakov was jailed by the Russian-backed armed groups in Luhansk as a “traitor to the Russian world” in March 2015, during his first visit to Luhansk as a representative of the Humanitarian Corps volunteer organization.

Polyakov said he was trying to set up a dialog between the Ukrainian side and the Russian-backed armed groups, and was in Luhansk to organize the food and medical supplies to local hospitals from territories controlled by Ukraine.

When armed men kidnapped him from the streets of Luhansk, his Russian passport only made things worse.

They were even more ruthless with me because I’m a Russian who supported the Maidan (popular uprising). Ukrainians are enemies for them – but I was a traitor,” Polyakov said.

Polyakov finds it hard to talk about all the physical and mental tortures he had to endure while in captivity. The armed men who jailed him even lied about their affiliation, calling themselves “Ukrainian partisans.”

At first they spoke to me in Ukrainian and said they had jailed me because I’m a Russian military instructor who came to Donbas to teach separatists how to kill Ukrainians,” Polyakov said.

He said he would have believed them, if it weren’t for the fact that his jailers kept him in the so-called Ministry of State Security, which is located in the Department of Revenue Services building in Luhansk.

They kept me in the basement in handcuffs and with a bag on my head. After a month they got tired of their Ukrainian partisans show, and started showing me to their guests for entertainment,” said Polyakov.

The Luhansk mercenaries brought visitors to Polyakov’s cell, where he was sitting alone, sick, always hungry, and wearing only dirty old pants and a shirt.

“’Here is our main attraction – the legendary fifth columnist and EuroMaidan gunman Polyakov, who dreams about the revolution’, they said, and then they laughed at me because I was so helpless,” Polyakov recalled.

Polyakov was released due to the efforts of Iryna Gerashchenko and Viktor Medvedchuk, Ukrainian delegates to the Trilateral Contact Group. He got no help from his motherland Russia.

But the main person he thanks for his release is his Ukrainian wife Alyona, whom he married in 2014. When in March she discovered that Polyakov had been kidnapped, she immediately informed the Security Service of Ukraine and the Defense Ministry, and did everything she could to secure his release.

Now Polyakov lives with his wife in Odesa, recovering from the emotional trauma and chronic health problems he developed during captivity.