Vladislav Buryak was held for 90 days and describes screaming people and a room with bloodstains and soaked bandages
A 16-year-old boy from Ukraine described how he was held hostage by Russian soldiers for 90 days as he listened to other prisoners being tortured in a nearby cell.
THE Vladislav Buryak he was separated from his family on April 8, while trying to escape the city of Melitopolis. He was released after months of negotiations between his father, Oleg, a local Ukrainian official, and Russian soldiers, who wanted to exchange Vladislav for a person of interest to the Russian military.
Vladislav’s scathing account in the Guardian is a depiction of brutal interrogations, which the paper says include brutal beatings, and corroborates other reports of prisoner abuse by Russian and pro-Russian separatist forces. He is one of about 500 political hostage cases whose information has been collected by the Center for Civil Liberties in Ukraine, including many other young people, although the organization says these accounts are likely to be the tip of the iceberg.
In an interview, Vladislav described his long ordeal and how he was taken from a convoy of vehicles. “We had left Melitopol for Zaporizhia at 9 in the morning,” he said, sitting next to his father. “Around 11:00 we were stopped at the checkpoint, where Russian soldiers started checking documents. They asked if I had videotaped the checkpoint and demanded that I give them my phone. Then they found a video on my cell phone that had Russian soldiers talking about how they didn’t want to fight. This enraged them and a soldier with a machine gun pointed at me and told me to follow him. It was then that they discovered I was the son of a local official and valuable as a hostage“, he says.
Vladislav said he was taken to a prison site in Vasilivka, where he was held for more than 40 days in a single cell before being transferred to a hotel for the last month of his captivity.
“I was put to work washing the floor of the interrogation room, cleaning the officers’ quarters and throwing away the rubbish. The cell where they kept me was a few meters from where they were interrogating me. I could hear people screaming and when I was cleaning the room I would see bloodstains. Because I could move around when I cleaned the cells, I sometimes got a chance to see what had happened to people and they could sometimes talk to me for a minute or so when the guards weren’t watching“, he reveals himself.
Vladislav described the room where the interrogations took place: “There was a metal table and two chairs. One was for the person being interrogated and the other was for the person taking notes. There were blood stains and soaked bandages. I could also listen to the interrogation at least three times a week. Do you have weapons? Who else has guns?”, they asked. The people being tortured were shouting loudly. They were beaten and tortured with electric shocks. If someone did not say something, the torture continued, sometimes for several hours. No one ever told me why I was being held, but I assumed it was to trade me».
While Vladislav was detained, his father negotiated with them Russians to secure his son’s release.
The Buriak family’s account confirms other reports of torture, including a report by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, which said it found credible evidence of crimes against humanity committed by Russian forces during the invasion of Ukraine .
The report also documents the discovery of a “series of torture chambers separated by concrete walls at a summer camp in Bucha outside Kyiv, including a room that appeared to be used for executions, with bullet holes in the walls. In another room, where experts said there were signs of torture and waterboarding, five dead men were found covered in burns, bruises and gashes.».
View the news feed and get the latest news.
