A special presidential flight landed in Kyiv late on July 29 carrying 17 exhausted people, who then met with President Petro Poroshenko.
The group, which included 15
Ukrainian servicemen, one Swedish and one Georgian citizen, spent months as
hostages in Horlivka, one of the last remaining strongholds of the
Kremlin-backed separatists led by defiant rebel commander Igor Bezler who goes
by the nickname of “Demon.”
These people were set free in
an exchange for Olga Kulygina, believed to be a Russian Security Service agent.
One of the released was Vasily
Budik, a Georgian national and Ukrainian activist from Horlivka, who spent 88
days in captivity, enduring torture. In this time, he learned about the
executions of 35 people and the massive destruction of the city by Ukraine’s
artillery. At the same time, some 32 people were released.
“There were three months of
waiting for either exchange or execution,” Budik told the Kyiv Post in an
interview on Aug. 1.
On May 2, Budik and
his wife were coming out from a shop in Horlivka when a group of masked armed
men pushed him into a car and drove him to a separatist-controlled police
station.
He was then interrogated and
tortured by Russian agents, who accused him of links with Right Sector, Ukraine’s
far right nationalist group and planning to lead pro-Ukrainian volunteer
battalions.
“They were taking a knife and
picking my knee up to the bone… They broke our ribs on one side and three from
the other side. They beat my mid-section. They hanged me with my hands
handcuffed,” he said.
Then his captors put Budik in
a cellar, where he caught pneumonia, but survived thanks to the help of a nurse
who was treating the hostages. While Budik knows Right Sector leader Dmytro
Yarosh, he denied any links to the group.
After 20 years in Horlivka,
Budik and separatist chief Bezler — who also lived there for 12 years and once
managed a funeral home in the city – had many links in common.
“Many friends were calling him
and asking to release me, offering money. The maxim sum offered for was me $50,000,”
Budik said. “But they had no interest in money. They needed an exchange for
Olga (Kulygina).”
Kulygina
The mysterious Kulygina,
officially working as a journalist for the pro-Kremlin Anna News agency, was
arrested in late May by Ukrainian forces when she was crossing the border from
Russia along with a big sum of money and dozens of armed rebels. Numerous sources
reported she is a close friend of self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic’s
leaders Igor Girkin (Strelkov) and Aleksandr Borodai.
Bezler, who initially offered
five hostages for her exchange, claimed she is the wife of one of his men.
Budik, however, claimed it’s not so.
“Her husband died 13 years
ago,” he said. “She is apparently one of the leaders, inspirers and curators of
all this movement Novorossiya. She was preparing plan of all this. She is
political technologist and high-ranking FSB officer.”
Budik believes it was hard for
Poroshenko to agree to release Kulygina. The negotiations were led by retired
General Colonel Volodymyr Ruban.
When negotiations broke down,
Bezler staged a mock execution of Budik and two other hostages. “We were told
to fall down nicely. If we didn’t do this, they were promising to kill us for
real,” Budik said.
Bezler
Budik said he had numerous
conversations with Bezler, who he describes as a man of extremes.
“On one side he could feed you
with red caviar, to sit and cry about the killed, but on the other side he
could shoot you easy,” he said. “Human life meant nothing for him.”
Bezler, an agent of the GRU
Russian military intelligence agency, described executions as sending the
victims “to the country of sunshine.”
He imposed strict order in
Horlivka. Drunks were severely punished. Those accused of looting were killed.
So no one dared to rob banks
or ATMs, and the local mayor, after being found guilty of embezzlement, was
forced to give the money back. It was used to repair roads.
But Bezler was disappointed
that most residents in the Donetsk Oblast city of 250,000 didn’t support his
ideas.
Bezler didn’t believe in the
separatist Donetsk People’s Republic, despised the other rebel commanders and hated
the Cossack fighters, accusing them of killing his friend. So any captive
Cossack was inevitably executed. The captured members of Ukrainian volunteer
battalions were also killed after torture. The captured Ukrainian soldiers were
treated as prisoners of war and kept in better condition than the civilians.
Freedom
Budik briefly recounts his
release.
He said Ruban, the retired
general colonel who brokered the deal, “came unarmed along with his son to
Horlivka bringing Olga. We got into four cars and drove to Chuhuyiv (a city in
Kharkiv Oblast). The president sent a plane for us there,” he said.
Budik felt no emotion at the
time but drank whiskey with released Swedish guy. It was a sad day. His wife,
Natalia, said Horlivka was heavily shelled in the fighting and a close friend
of the family was captured.
Now Budik is trying to assist
Ruban in securing the release of more hostages.
He said that, in the last days
of his captivity, the Kremlin-backed insurgents, seemed to realize that their
seizure of the city was doomed. He also knew that Bezler left the city.
Budik plans to go back to
Horlivka when it is safer. “This is my home. Of course it will be a lot of work
to reconstruct it all, but I will definitely return there,” he said.
Kyiv Post staff
writer Oksana Grytsenko can be reached at [email protected]
