Four years after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the war is still being fought far away from the frontlines – behind locked doors, in windowless cells, and in silence.
Thousands of Ukrainians remain in Russian captivity. Others have returned carrying memories they struggle to put into words.
One of them is Oleksii, a Ukrainian serviceman of the 13th Brigade of Ukraine’s National Guard, Khartiia, who spent nearly two years in Russian detention.
Speaking exclusively to Kyiv Post, he described torture, psychological pressure, and what he says was a systematic attempt to erase prisoners as individuals – while clinging to a single reason to survive: his newborn daughter.
“I’m not hiding,” Oleksii said. “You can use my name.”
From training abroad to the Kharkiv front
Oleksii joined the Ukrainian military on Feb. 25, 2022, one day after Russia began its full-scale invasion. By 2024, he had been fighting for more than two and a half years.
He served with the 13th Brigade, a newly formed National Guard unit that he describes as “a brigade of a new model,” emphasizing modern training, advanced technologies, battlefield medicine, and cooperation with Western instructors.
“We didn’t sweep parade grounds,” he said. “Everything was about training, tactics, learning how to survive and do the job properly.”
When Russian forces launched a renewed offensive in the Kharkiv region in 2024, Oleksii’s unit was ordered to move north and take up defensive positions to block Russian advances toward the city.
“Our task was simple,” he said. “Hold the line. Do not let them through toward Kharkiv.”
“You can die once”
War, he said, quickly becomes routine – a routine built on constant alertness.
“A normal day at war is like a dangerous amusement ride,” Oleksii said. “One where you can die only once.”
Russian forces, he said, relied heavily on artillery, reconnaissance drones and first person view (FPV) drones, striking Ukrainian positions with precision. He also accused Russian troops of firing even during evacuations of wounded and dead Ukrainian soldiers – violating a basic rule of warfare.
He recalled trying to retrieve the body of a fallen Ukrainian soldier from an open field, unarmed and clearly not engaging in combat.
“They could see everything from the drones,” Oleksii said. “It was obvious I wasn’t attacking anyone. I was just trying to pull our fallen comrade out so he wouldn’t be left lying there.”
But Russian fire continued, he said.
“For us, every fallen soldier must be recovered and buried,” Oleksii added. “So their family can say goodbye. The Russians don’t share that view.”
“I shook hands with death”
One moment from the fighting remains vivid.
Oleksii was in a trench, maintaining radio contact with commanders, when a Russian FPV drone flew directly into his position.
“It landed just centimeters away from me and didn’t detonate,” he said. “At that moment, I shook hands with death.”
He said he threw the drone out of the trench and continued fighting.
“If it had exploded,” he added quietly, “I wouldn’t be recording this message today.”
A phone number memorized just in time
Days before his capture, Oleksii did something he had never done during years at war: he memorized his wife’s phone number.
“I don’t believe in mysticism,” he said. “But for some reason, right before that deployment, I learned her number by heart.”
After he was taken prisoner, that memory became crucial. Knowing the number allowed him to eventually pass word to his family that he was alive.
During captivity, he said, he repeated the number every day – afraid that if he forgot it, he might disappear completely.
“You stop being a person”
Oleksii was captured on June 8, 2024, after Russian forces overran his position in the Kharkiv region. His ammunition was depleted, and resistance was no longer possible.
What followed, he says, was not simply detention but a systematic process of dehumanization.
“We had no names,” Oleksii said. “No surnames. They didn’t call us soldiers or prisoners. Only insults. ‘Khokhol.’ That’s it.”
According to Oleksii, guards made it clear from the first days that identity itself was the target.
“At some point, you catch yourself thinking you’re turning into something faceless,” he said. “Like you don’t exist anymore.”
Mock executions and threats
Oleksii says Russian interrogators repeatedly threatened him with execution – and carried out mock shootings to reinforce the fear.
“Twice they fired over my head,” he said. “Twice they pressed a gun to my forehead and pulled the trigger with an empty magazine.”
“Every time, you say goodbye to life,” Oleksii added. “You really believe that this is the end.”
During interrogations, he said, Russian counterintelligence officers demanded information far beyond what a frontline infantryman could know – including air defense locations, supply routes, and command headquarters.
“They knew I couldn’t answer,” Oleksii said. “But they kept asking anyway. Under the threat of being shot.”
“Your family abandoned you”
Oleksii says psychological pressure was constant and calculated.
“Every single day they told us the same things,” he said. “‘Your families abandoned you. Your wives divorced you. Ukraine doesn’t need you.’”
Guards repeatedly claimed that the Ukrainian state had forgotten its prisoners.
“They said our commanders didn’t care anymore because we were no longer combat units,” Oleksii said. “That we were useless.”
The goal, he said, was to make prisoners internalize the idea that survival no longer mattered.
“They wanted you to believe that no one was waiting for you,” he said.
Life without sunlight
Oleksii said prisoners were kept in sealed cells, windows covered with metal sheets. In nearly two years of captivity, he saw the sun only once.
“There was no sky, no weather, no sense of time,” he said. “Just the cell.”
He lost 15 kilograms while in Russian captivity.
“They turned us into living dead,” he said.
He also described witnessing the torture of other prisoners – including one Ukrainian detainee whose back, he said, was burned with a gas torch, leaving permanent scars.
“You become each other’s lifeline”
Oleksii said not everyone endured captivity the same way. Some prisoners, he said, mentally withdrew.
To counter that, he sometimes deliberately provoked arguments in the cell – not out of anger, but to force others to stay engaged.
“If a person closes in on themselves, it’s very hard to pull them back,” he said. “I tried to keep people reacting, talking, alive.”
“You are in Belarus”
Oleksii did not know he was being released until the last moment.
Blindfolded and bound, he was loaded onto a transport aircraft. He assumed he was being transferred deeper into Russia – possibly for decades.
Then he heard a voice when the aircraft door opened.
“‘Guys, breathe out – you are in Belarus,’” someone said.
“That was the moment I allowed myself to hope,” Oleksii recalled.
Even then, guards warned that any “misbehavior” could cancel the exchange and send them back.
“When they finally told us it was an exchange, I still couldn’t believe it,” he said. “The emotions are impossible to describe.”
“Europe must know”
Oleksii says his story is not unique – and that is precisely the problem.
He alleges that Russia systematically violates the treatment of prisoners of war and detains civilians alongside soldiers, using them as bargaining chips.
“People who never fought were taken from their homes,” he said. “And treated the same way.”
As Ukraine marks four years since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion, Oleksii says international audiences must understand that the war does not end when the shooting stops.
“The price of this war is human lives,” he said. “Not money. Lives.”
His daughter will grow up, he knows, as a “child of war.”
“I would give everything so she would never know that word,” Oleksii said. “But now my task is to make sure she grows up free.”