Stanislav Aseev spent two and a half years in a notorious prison run by pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine, where he said he and other inmates were regularly tortured, humiliated and forced to wear sacks over their heads.
However, even he was not prepared for the painful scenes of abuse and execution that he witnessed in the small town of Bucha in the Kyiv region, writes the "New York Times".
"I thought I wouldn't see the genocide with my own eyes, even though I have a lot of experience from this war," said 32-year-old Aseyev.
He documented his time in prison in a memoir published in 2020. Now the Russian invasion is inflicting new physical and emotional scars.
In Bucha, "dead bodies are lying in front of every private house," said Aseev, who was there recently with a volunteer military unit to help secure the area as Ukrainian forces pushed the Russians back.
Aseev moved to Kiev to leave his years of imprisonment behind, but he felt the trauma of war again in February, when rockets whizzed by in the eastern suburb of Brovari.
Aseev chose a new way of fighting against his own fears and anger. He took up arms for the first time in his life, fighting for the city as part of the Territorial Defense Forces, a volunteer unit in the Ukrainian army.
Grew up with the Russian language and culture
The New York Times states that Asev's story is an extreme version of what many Ukrainians are experiencing today, as the Russian military perpetrates violence, indiscriminately and otherwise, across the country. His experiences led someone who grew up with the Russian language and Russian culture, with a view of the world that is relatively favorable to Moscow, to reject all that to the point that he is ready to kill Russian soldiers, writes the American newspaper.
He was born in the city of Makiivka in the east of Ukraine. Russian was his native language, and he grew up listening to Soviet rock bands, reading Dostoyevsky in the original Russian, and learning history from a predominantly Russian perspective.
He said that before the separatist war that broke out in 2014, he was sympathetic to President Vladimir Putin's vision of Ukraine as part of the "Russian world".
"I really had such illusions about Putin, about Great Russia, all that stuff," he told The Times.
They were shattered by his experiences after 2014 and now he does not want to speak Russian, except when talking to his mother.
His experiences have led someone who grew up with the Russian language and Russian culture, with a relatively pro-Moscow worldview, to reject all of that to the point of being willing to kill Russian soldiers.
In 2014, Makiivka was occupied by pro-Russian separatist forces loyal to the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic. Many of his friends have signed up to fight on the side of Moscow-backed rebels, influenced by Russian propaganda that Ukrainian fascists have seized power in Kiev, the New York daily reports. Aseev said that not long after that he realized that it was the separatists who were violating human rights.
He started writing about these abuses in 2015 for the daily newspaper "Ukrainian Pravda" as well as for the American-funded Radio Free Europe and for the liberal weekly "Ogledalo". He continued reporting under a pseudonym for two more years, until he was detained on June 2, 2017.
Aseev was first taken to the "Cancelaria", a prison in a group of buildings along a boulevard in the center of Donetsk that served as office space before the war. After being beaten and tortured with electric shocks, he spent six weeks in solitary confinement, in a cell so cold that he had to hold bottles of his own urine to keep warm.
He was then transferred to the "Isolation" prison, named after the former isolation factory, which became a cultural center after the Soviet-era factory went bankrupt. Aseev claims he was beaten and tortured there for more than two years, before he was released in a prisoner exchange in 2019, just before the New Year, after 962 days of captivity.
"They don't care who they kill"
A Ukrainian journalist says his persecution and today's demolition of towns around Kiev and across southern and eastern Ukraine, many of which are Russian-speaking, belies the Kremlin's claim that it started the war to protect ethnic Russians and Russian-speakers from "Nazis" who supposedly rule in Kiev.
"They don't care who they kill. I speak Russian, I grew up on Russian culture, Russian music, books, cinema, even Soviet in a way".
Despite this, he added, "these people definitely consider me an enemy, just like those who grew up somewhere in Lviv with completely different values," Aseev said, referring to the predominantly Ukrainian-speaking city in the west of the country, where, as writes "The Times", "beats the heart of Ukrainian nationalism".
"For them, the state of Ukraine simply does not exist, and that's all," Aseev said of the Russian leadership. "And anyone who disagrees with that is already an enemy."
He continued to write and advocate for Ukraine even while undergoing military training. He recently visited the newly liberated city of Buča, the site of numerous alleged atrocities by Russian soldiers, and posted photos of the location of the mass grave on Facebook.
Suicide as the only freedom
In his memoirs, Aseev wrote a chapter about how and why he considered taking his own life in prison.
"Choosing to take my own life, I thought, was the last freedom I had," he wrote.
In a video message shared by US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken on his Instagram account, Aseev recalled this thought while talking about being held in "Isolation" and appealed to Western leaders not to fear Russia or Putin.
"They took away everything - relatives, friends, communication, even the old calendar" that hung in his cell, he said. "But they couldn't take one thing away from me: I was ready to die. That's something that can't be taken away from a man even when everything else is taken away from him".
And that, he said, is why Ukraine stood up to the supposedly superior Russian forces and why they will win in the end.
"It's our whole country now. We'd rather die than give up or lose. And that's why the Russian Federation has already lost this war."
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