Apparently, Russian soldiers held the Ukrainian Vladyslaw Burjak prisoner for three months. What the 16-year-old reports about this time is like a horror film. Among other things, he witnessed how his cellmate was tortured.
A total of 203 children and young people have been reported missing in Ukraine since the beginning of August. What happened to them? Often unknown.
But what can happen to young Ukrainians is now shown by a frightening report on the experiences of a 16-year-old boy named Vladyslaw Burjak in the Ukrainian online medium “The Kyiv Independent”. According to his own account, he spent 90 days in Russian captivity before being released on July 7.
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His ordeal began at the beginning of April in the occupied city of Wassilivka in the east of the Ukrainian Oblast Mykolaiv. A Russian soldier became aware of a boy sitting in a car checking something on his cellphone, the article said.
“What are you doing there, are you filming me?” the soldier is said to have shouted. He dragged the boy into the backyard of a nearby cafe and verified his identity. He found out that Vladyslaw was the son of one of the highest-ranking Ukrainian officials in the region.
Vladyslav’s father, Oleh Buryak, was the head of the Zaporizhia State District Administration. The soldier arrested Wladyslaw without further ado. Thus began the boy’s 90-day ordeal, who had to witness the atrocities of the Russian soldiers.
Since the beginning of the Russian war of aggression in February, there have been repeated reports from Ukrainians who have spoken about their experiences in Russian captivity and made serious allegations. Many report harsh prison conditions with little food, and there is also talk of torture. The Russian side has always denied these allegations.
She contradicts the eyewitness reports. In the case of Wladyslaw, his statements cannot currently be verified with certainty. The Kyiv Independent article is based solely on his account and that of his father.
Locked in a tiny prison cell in the Vasilivka detention center, Vladyslaw says he heard horrific screams from Ukrainian prisoners of war who were being tortured by Russian soldiers.
He saw some of them die after hours of torture and was forced to clean the “torture room” soaked in their blood. “Every minute there was a big challenge because every minute could have been my last,” Wladyslaw told the portal.
During the first days of captivity, the soldiers gave Wladyslaw neither food nor water. He didn’t even want that because of the stress. They only gave him something to eat and drink for the first time after five days.
After about two weeks they would have allowed him to shower. And it was only after a month that he was finally allowed to do his laundry. An even greater challenge: according to Wladyslaw, he had to witness the immense suffering of the other prisoners.
“When I arrived on the first day, I couldn’t understand why anyone was screaming so loudly and wildly,” he says. Only later did he realize that these were Ukrainian prisoners who were being tortured by Russian soldiers and were screaming in pain.
“Most of the Ukrainian prisoners held there were members of the Territorial Defense Units or civilians whom the Russian military tortured and interrogated for information,” he says.
In an interview, Wladyslaw tells the tragic story of a man: on the fourth day of his imprisonment, the soldiers threw a 24-year-old boy into his cell. It was a local priest, married and the father of a young daughter. The Russian troops tortured him for several hours each day for two days.
“First they beat him very hard. Then he was electrocuted. On the second day, they took off his trousers and beat his genitals for another 20 minutes,” says Wladyslaw. The priest then returned to the common cell in tears. “I put him on the bed, covered him with a blanket, hugged him and supported him.”
When Volodymyr Zelenskyy – by then a popular actor and comedian – surprisingly won Ukraine’s presidential election in 2019, the world assumed he would be a weak leader and easily swayed by the Kremlin with the help of the oligarchs. But the opposite was the case: Selenskyj proved to be a man with backbone, courageous and inflexible. In the face of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, he became a true statesman, commanding respect even from his enemies.
Broken by the torture, the priest decided to commit suicide. Wladyslaw says he tried to talk him out of it and stopped him when he was about to hang himself in the cell. Finally, the man cut his wrists.
“He didn’t think he was going to get out of there alive. He thought it was better to die than to endure the torture again,” says Wladyslaw. A Russian soldier entered the cell shortly thereafter and called a doctor, who bandaged the man’s hands and took him away. Wladyslaw never saw the priest again. He doesn’t know if he survived.
But the man is the reason why he found the strength to survive imprisonment. “He told me: ‘Come out of this captivity and tell us what we went through,'” says Wladyslaw. “‘Tell my story so my death might not be in vain.'”
The Russian soldiers never tortured Vladyslaw, considering him a “valuable” prisoner. They would have wanted to use it for an exchange. Instead, they would have let the boy work.
In addition to supposedly normal tasks such as helping in the kitchen, cleaning the floor and collecting rubbish, Wladyslaw also had to clean the torture chamber up to five times a week, to his own dismay. The room was a slightly larger prison cell in which Russian soldiers interrogated Ukrainians and beat them with “iron fittings, rubber clubs and machine guns”.
According to Wladyslaw, he also saw a special tool with wires in the room that was used for electric shocks. He says the Russians often tortured their prisoners by sticking needles under their nails and sometimes connecting them to electric batons to increase the pain.
He sometimes heard Russian soldiers talking about torturing their prisoners. Once he heard them laugh when they were torturing someone. “These people are beasts,” Wladyslaw tells the Kyiv Independent. Torturing people is fun for them.
He often heard the Russians say they came to “save Ukraine and rid it of Nazism.” They called themselves the “Army of Good” and claimed they would “do everything to ensure that the Ukrainian people can live well.”
Wladyslaw spent a total of 48 days in prison. After that, the Russian troops transferred him to a hotel in occupied Melitopol, where he spent another 42 days. The conditions would have been much better – there was a toilet and a shower in the room – but Wladyslaw would still have been a prisoner. It was not clear whether they would agree to release him.
Already at the beginning of his son’s imprisonment, his father went public with his case. He had guessed what horror Wladyslaw was exposed to. During the boy’s three-month imprisonment, Oleh Burjak would have been shown a transcript of the testimony of a former inmate of the prison where Wladyslaw was being held.
This person said he survived torture, including sexual violence, for two weeks. Almost immediately after his son’s capture, a Russian officer contacted Oleh Buryak to begin the arduous negotiation process to free Vladyslav. Finally, on July 4, a Russian negotiator agreed to his release – three months after his capture.
Oleh Burjak was concerned that the Russians might change their minds. Even when Wladyslaw called him late in the evening of July 6 and said the Russians would release him the next day, Oleh Burjak advised him not to get too excited.
When he saw his son for the first time on July 7th, he felt that “a piece of his heart had returned home”. Seeing his son alive and at home feels like a personal “victory” for Oleh. “Now we need a victory for the country,” he says.
