You're reading: Ukrainian student recounts horrifying story of torture in Russian captivity

Yuriy Yatsenko lived a nightmare. But remarkably, he can smile because the nightmare of being imprisoned in Russia is finally over.

Yatsenko, a law student in Lviv, was kidnapped with his friend Bohdan Yarychevskiy in the Russian town of Oboyan in Kursk Oblast on May 7, 2014. The two were on a business trip.

When Yatsenko and Yarychevskiy arrived to spend a night at a hotel, a police officer checked Yatsenko’s address in his passport, and saw the student was registered as living on Bandery Street in Lviv (named after the 20th century Ukrainian nationalist leader Stepan Bandera). Both Ukrainians were immediately arrested – the start of a long ordeal. The Kremlin’s security agents released Yarychevskyi after three months, but Yatsenko spent a year in captivity.

After Yatsenko was detained, the police went through their files. “After an hour, an FSB (Russian Federal Security Service) agent came to me and showed photos of me taking part in the EuroMaidan Revolution,” Yatsenko says. The photos were taken from one of his friend’s social media profiles. Yatsenko said he immediately understood he wouldn’t be released anytime soon.

He was told to confess on a TV show that he had been sent to commit acts of terror by Dmytro Yarosh (the leader of the ultranationalist Right Sector organization) and other Ukrainian authorities. But Yatsenko refused to do so.

“And a cheerful life began after that,” he says, with irony. Declining to strike a plea bargain with investigators, he was then tortured in various ways while in custody – with beatings, food and sleep deprivation, and threats of being injected with drugs.

 

At his first hearing, Yatsenko was formally charged with giving incorrect information on his immigration card – rather than stating that he was on a private visit, he had ticked the box indicating he was on a tourist trip.

“(That charge) made me happy, because I just had to pay a 2,000-ruble fine and be expelled back to Ukraine within 10 days,” he says.

But that didn’t happen.

After two weeks in a special detention center, Yatsenko was able to smuggle out a note via a released jail mate to inform his family in Lviv of his whereabouts.

In retaliation, he was taken to the FSB office in Kursk Oblast and beaten with a bag on his head.

“I was choked, kicked in the stomach, and hit on the head in a way that doesn’t leave any marks,” Yatsenko said.

Later, in a desperate bid to avoid being tortured again, and to leave evidence of injury on his body, Yatsenko smashed his head against the wall in toilet.

“They heard the blow, started laughing and told me ‘Have you forgotten where you are? Who do you think you’ll scare by doing that?” Yatsenko says.

The worst treatment came after that. FSB agents took Yatsenko to a forest about an hour’s drive from the city. They tied his wrists together behind his back, and hung him from a tree, in a way similar to the strappado medieval torture method.

“They beat me in the groin, stomach, kidneys, liver, threw sandbags at my head, choked me,” he says. “The worse thing is that when you have a bag on your head, you can’t brace yourself for a blow.”

He wanted to pass out, but the FSB agents kept him conscious so that he could feel every blow. There was blood in Yatsenko’s urine for days after that incident.

He was threatened with the same torture the day after the incident in the forest, but this time together with his friend Yarychevckyi. In desperation, the two hatched a plan to avoid torture – by self harming.

On May 23, Yatsenko cut the veins on his arms, while Yarychevskyi cut his stomach with a razor blade. “I came out of the toilet, called for a guard, stayed in front of the surveillance camera and said that I wouldn’t let them stitch up the wound until they let me call home,” Yatsenko said.

Yatsenko was allowed to call home, and his wounds were stitched in a hospital – without anesthesia. “It hurt much more when they were stitching me up than when I cut myself,” Yatsenko said. The surgeons didn’t sew the veins, only the skin, and as a result Yatsenko wasn’t able to move his hand for three months.

But the desperate action worked: Yatsenko was given a lawyer, had several meetings with the Ukrainian consul, and was never tortured again. On several occasions he put a razor blade to one of his carotid arteries, threatening suicide. “But I never considered suicide, so that was just threats and blackmail – but they didn’t know that,” Yatsenko said, explaining his actions.

In violation of Russian legislation, Yatsenko and Yarychevskyi were imprisoned for three months without charge. Yarychevskyi was then released, but Yatsenko was sentenced to nine months on a faked charge of being in possession of explosives.

Since Yatsenko was released on May 6, he has been working with activists and Helsinki Human Rights Union representatives on filing a case against Russia at the European Court of Human Rights. He says the Foreign Ministry should assign a person to take charge of all of the cases of Ukrainian hostages held in Russia, and that the government should cover lawyer fees.

For its part, the ministry says the other Ukrainians who have been kidnapped by Russia will be freed, but only after the Ukrainian and Russian governments reach an agreement on the matter.

“(Yatsenko’s) release is a miracle, and it happened because of many people,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Dmytro Kuleba told the Kyiv Post. “I have no doubt that the other (imprisoned Ukrainians) will be released, but it will be through a political agreement at the highest level,” he said.

Kyiv Post staff writer Yuliana Romanyshyn can be reached at [email protected]