The big Aidar case. 18 captured Ukrainians and their path from Donetsk torture to Rostov sentences

Three soldier stories

Semen Zabayrachny

When the full-scale war began, Alevtina Zabayrachna had already packed a parcel with food and other items that she was going to send to her son Semen's unit: February 27 was his 25th birthday.

Alevtina was born in the village of Lyutivka, a few miles from the border with the Russian Belgorod region: “On one side was the USSR, on the other was the Ukrainian SSR.” Many years ago, she moved to Kharkiv and got married. Semen is her second and youngest son. “We were an average family: my husband worked as a cash collector, and I worked as a saleswoman my whole life,” says Alevtina. She raised her children with love, and they “protected her in everything.”

According to his mother, Semen’s “story is banal.” After school, he worked for a year, then did his military service in Poltava and returned home, where “he was in a relationship with a girl — not exactly mutual love.” In 2020, he decided to sign with the army: he wanted to “earn money for a place to live, come back, get married, and live like a normal person.” He was assigned to the Aidar Battalion, an assault unit that emerged in 2014, during the War in Donbas, as a part of Ukraine’s Territorial Defence, and became a separate army battalion in 2015.

On 24 February 2022, at five in the morning, Semen wrote to his mother: “Mom, take care of yourself. Mom, there’s a plane here.” 

“I wrote to him: ‘Kharkiv is being torn apart.’ That was our last correspondence,” Alevtina recalls.

Very soon she learned that her son was being held captive: an “interview” recorded by the Russian military appeared online as one of the first, because on February 25, Zabayraсhny was detained, “he and another guy got caught in a convoy of DNR fighters.” As Semen himself later recounted, the captors “rode around” with him for another day, and then kept him in the guardhouse in Donetsk until his official detention on April 11.

No one told his parents what was happening to their son. “He disappeared, and the search began: we were checking all the Telegram channels. We didn’t know where he was for a year,” says Alevtina. “I traveled everywhere I could: Dnipro, Kyiv. I went everywhere that mothers of POWs were allowed to go.” Later, through “channels,” his parents were able to find out that Semen was “alive and in Donetsk.”

Alevtina says that her son only “appears to be a brutal, rude, and withdrawn person,” but in reality, he is empathetic and sentimental. Since childhood, Semen “understood and protected everyone, fed everyone: while he was growing up, all the boys ate at our place.” He took care of his parents—he gave them his first paycheck: “They say that giants are like that. After all, why does the convoy beat him? Because he is two meters tall. And once he weighed 100 kilos.”

Alevtina couldn’t open her son’s birthday package for a year—until she found out where he was.

Oleksandr Taranets

Oleksandr Taranets, then 21, was completely unprepared for the start of the war. When it began, the young man had served in the Ukrainian Armed Forces for just over six months and was listed as a rifleman. “He told me, ‘I've only just started learning this, and now I have to know everything. Because if you don’t, you’re dead,’” his sister Kateryna told Mediazona. She said that it was “morally difficult for my brother to see all the dead bodies and just kill people.”

The brother and sister were separated at an early age—they grew up in a dysfunctional family in Orikhiv, Zaporizhzhia region. In 2014, Alexander ended up in an orphanage, and after their mother’s death, Kateryna was given to foster parents. A few years later, the young man went to study to become a car mechanic.

According to Kateryna, her brother “lived an average life: he wasn’t poor, but he wasn’t exactly rich either.” He had a girlfriend, they rented an apartment together, and he “tried to earn extra money for his family wherever he could—finding work was a bit of a problem at the time.” He played sports, liked to work out and wanted to gain weight.

In the summer of 2021, work became very difficult, and Oleksandr decided to sign a contract with the AFU, “at least some stability.” He was sent to Aidar.

At the very beginning of the war, Kateryna was in the Russian-occupied territory, so she didn’t  call her brother often: it could have been “bad news” for one of them. She only knew that he was in Siverskodonetsk, and that it was “hot” there: the Ukrainian military had been “surrounded several times,” but they broke through and left for Zaporizhzhia.

Like Alevtina Zabayrachna, Kateryna learned that her brother had been captured from footage of his interrogation that was published online. “The video clearly showed how he was, let’s say, afraid. And at times, it seemed as if someone had written some kind of script for him,” Kateryna recalls. “I could see his eyes staring at one point, you know, as if he were reading, they were darting around a little.” In this video, Taranets said that the commanders “abandoned the soldiers.”

As Kateryna later learned, the circumstances of her brother’s capture were different: “A rocket hit the car, and the commanders were killed. The guys gathered all they could and tried to walk in the direction of our positions. But since they were in new territory—they weren't locals, so to speak, it was something new for them—they thought that they walked in our direction, but ended up in captivity.”

While Alexander was “in the camp,” he called his sister several times. At the time, Taranets did not know where exactly he was: “They didn't tell us, there was just a camp where they gathered all the prisoners and took them to the detention centre.”

As Taranets later recalled, on March 13, Russian troops captured him in the village of Kinski Rozdory in the Zaporizhzhia region. Before his official arrest on April 14, he was held at the Melitopol airfield, at a military guardhouse in Donetsk, and at a detention centre.

Mykola Chupryna

The war caught rifleman Mykola Chupryna, then 44, in the village of Hranitne in the Donetsk region. He was unable to contact his command, stayed behind to cover the retreat of his comrades, then waited for them to return for him, but they never did. Then the soldier went to a woman named Anastasia, with whom he had sometimes stayed overnight in the last month, and asked to live in her house for a while.

At that time, Chupryna had been serving in Aidar for less than a year. He arrived in Hranitne straight from his native village of Lukashivka in the Kharkiv region. He met Anastasia when she was passing by his post.

She took the soldier in. First, his uniform went into the stove (as Anastasia later said in court, Chupryna explained that it was because the uniform was dirty), followed by his chevrons and boots. But he kept his weapon: “They could punish him for that.” Anastasia was worried. There were children in the house, so Chupryna, “even when he went to bed, put his machine gun at his feet” and kept his eyes on it.

On February 28, Anastasia went to the store and saw tanks and Russian soldiers on the street. After a while, someone knocked on her window. The woman came out onto the street, introduced herself, and said who was “visiting” her. When the Russians decided to enter, she “unquestioningly” let them into the house “so they could see what was wrong” and “took out and showed” them “everything that was available.”

Chupryna was detained, “with some kind of rag wrapped around his head,” and was first taken to the central square, and from there to the Donetsk organised crime fighting police unit (UBOP). Before that, he was interrogated—according to Anastasia, after questions about the tattoo that Chupryna got in Aidar, he himself told his captors “where he was from and where he served.” Before his official arrest on March 31, Chupryna was first held at the UBOP, then at the temporary detention centre and the former colony in Yelenovka. Like Zabayrachny, he was forcibly filmed in a propaganda video.

Anastasia was questioned in connection with a case of harboring, but was released.

Chupryna, Taranets, and Zabayrachny, along with fifteen other POWs, became defendants in a large trial concerning their participation in the Aidar Battalion.

The charges

“Structured paramilitary organised group, volunteer paramilitary community Aidar”

In the indictment in the Aidar case, the investigators begin from afar: the first pages of the document state that in May 2014, “unidentified officials,” including commanders of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, created “from civilian formations, whose members adhered to the ideology of neo-Nazism and National Socialism,” “a structured, militarised, organised group, the volunteer militarized community Aidar.”

Later, this “community” was allegedly incorporated into the structure of the AFU as the 24th Separate Assault Battalion Aidar “in order to conceal its true criminal goals and objectives,” as well as to “legalise criminal activity” and provide the battalion with “the necessary means and forceful methods of influence.”

As a result of aggressive military actions, Aidar members carried out a violent seizure of power in the western part of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) and occupied it, preventing the restoration of the constitutional order and the functioning of the constitutional system of power. They were preparing to “eliminate the state sovereignty of the DPR” and return its territory to Ukraine “under the supervision” of the US military and using NATO “training materials,” regularly conducting military reconnaissance and participating in combat operations against the DPR People’s Militia. 

According to the investigators, the defendants, motivated by greed, as well as hatred and hostility towards the residents of the DPR and Russia “because of their political views,” signed a contract with the battalion. At the same time, they “were aware of the terrorist nature” of the organization, but “pursued its general criminal goals.”

The fact that the DPR Supreme Court recognized Aidar as a terrorist organization on April 21, 2016, is emphasised separately by the investigation.

Among the defendants were professional soldiers, drivers, and medical workers. The latter are Lilia Prutyan, Maryna Mishchenko, and Andriy Sholik; according to investigators, they also participated in the implementation of a “single criminal intent,” since providing medical assistance to military personnel “ensured the combat capability of the unit and its combat readiness to perform the tasks assigned.”

In addition to performing their contractual duties, some military personnel were also charged with having undergone basic military training “as part of preparations for the planned crimes and participation in achieving the goals and objectives of a terrorist organization,” and then using the knowledge they gained against the residents of the DPR.

The indictment was signed at the end of September 2022 by Anton Balashov, an investigator for particularly important cases at the DPR Prosecutor General’s Office, and approved by Roman Belous, Deputy Prosecutor General of the DPR. A month later, the case was sent to the DPR Supreme Court, and from there to the Southern District Military Court in Rostov-on-Don.

Charges change

Initially, the charges were classified under the criminal code of the self-proclaimed DPR.

All defendants in the case were charged with “seizing power” and “organising or participating in a terrorist organisation.”

The investigation named Taras Radchenko, Semen Zabayrachny, Serhiy Kalinchenko, and Ihor Hayokha as the “organisers,” while the other defendants were charged only with participation.

Eleven prisoners of war were charged with “undergoing training for the purpose of terrorist activity.”

At a court hearing in August 2023, the charges were reclassified in accordance with the Russian Criminal Code: all defendants were now charged with “violent seizure of power by a criminal organisation” and the “organization of or participation in a terrorist organization.”

In addition, some of the prisoners were charged with “undergoing training for terrorist activities.”

Story four

Ihor Hayokha

Many of the defendants in court emphasized that they had signed a contract with the 24th Separate Assault Battalion of the Ukrainian Armed Forces. In 2015, the Territorial Defence Battalion Aidar, which was made up of volunteers, was reorganised to “prevent illegal actions.” Since then, the unit has been known by this name.

But 37-year-old Ihor Hayokha from Krasnodon in the Luhansk region began his service in the “old” Aidar.

In April 2014, Russian troops entered his hometown, and Hayokha lost everything. Krasnodon is located right on the border — Ihor’s sister Halyna says that tanks drove through their yard, and a Russian armored personnel carrier with a “burnt-out engine” stopped in their garden, “and the neighbors covered it with branches.”

The Hayokha family remembered “how Ukraine gained independence” and “what it means for the country” — none of their relatives “wanted occupation,” and a Ukrainian flag hung on their house. Because of this, they were called “right-wingers” and “Banderites,” their house was “robbed several times,” and they were harassed with “searches and threats of execution.” According to Halyna, once armed men came for her, “saw two small children,” and only because of that did not detain her and gave her 24 hours to leave. “I took down the flag, gathered the children and a bag, and left on the last train,” Halyna tells Mediazona. Soon, “other people” came to her mother’s house — they couldn’t find Halyna and her brother and told her mother that it would be better for her not to stay either, “the third time won’t be so lucky.” Two weeks later, the elderly woman followed her daughter and left for nowhere.

After that, Ihor decided to “fight for his home.” He “asked everywhere,” but no one wanted to take the Luhansk native with no experience and no military ID. He was only accepted into the Aidar volunteer battalion, which was made up of locals who “didn’t want any republics, any occupations.” For over a year, Hayokha, while being a cook in the unit, “learned military affairs.” He didn’t know how to cook, but Halyna did it professionally, so his sister had to “teach him how to peel potatoes, make borscht, and everything else” over the phone. There was no opportunity to talk for long — it was important for the family to know that he was “alive and well,” and for Ihor to know that his loved ones were settling into their new home.

Hayokha is the youngest of three children and therefore has been “patient and resilient” since childhood, says Halyna. “He had to fight a little for his existence,” his sister jokes. She describes her brother as “a determined person with a great sense of humor” who never “got upset if something didn’t work out.” He just said, “Oh well, I'll try again.” After school, he trained as an auto welder in Luhansk and went to work in Moscow — “building something in the metro.” In November 2013, Hayokha returned home because he was banned from entering Russia for three years.

Ihor loved photography, but he only had time for his hobby in 2021, when he left the army. It was a happy time for the whole family, Halyna recalls. For seven and a half years, they had hardly seen Ihor, and now he was living at home. “We never had a car. He bought his first car. It was very beat up, very cheap, but very cool. And we all took turns learning to drive because we had no experience,” she says.

At the same time, Hayokha traveled abroad for the first time, to Egypt — he wanted to try “yoga, swimming, parachuting, and diving.”

However, shortly before the full-scale war started, Ihor decided to return to service: over the years in the army, he had risen to the rank of mortar battery commander. “The war didn’t stop. He understood that he had experience and opportunities. And then there was the military brotherhood: over seven years, he had formed a kind of a family there, and he was always on the phone with the guys. Jokes, banter, their own folklore, their own stories,” Halyna says about her brother’s decision.

When Russia’s full-scale invasion in Ukraine started, the family did not know where Ihor was or what had happened to him. Then he gave his sister a “birthday present”: he called and said he was alive, but “completely disoriented” and “did not understand why they were surrounded.” “I briefly told him that there was war throughout the country and that all cities were being shelled. And that I don’t believe him when he says he’s safe, because no one is safe right now,” Halyna says.

Throughout the next week, she saw that her brother was “sometimes online” and thought that “everything was okay.” Then Halyna received a call informing her that Ihor had died on March 3: “this is 100% accurate information, because no one survives such a direct hit to a car.” According to his colleagues, Hayokha “was completely broken, his arms and legs were almost torn off, he showed no signs of life,” and they had to leave his body on the battlefield.

Some time later, the family saw a video of Hayokha’s interrogation published on the Internet. It became clear that he was being held captive. At some point, Ihor’s mother received a message on Viber warning her that she was about to receive a call. The cal did indeed follow, from a Donetsk number. She heard Ihor’s voice. He told his family not to be sad: “I’m alive, why cry?”

“We said we cried because we didn’t know he was alive, but now we won’t,” says Halyna. Later, she learned that when Russian soldiers found her wounded brother, they “stripped him, shot him again, and threw him out.” But Ihor “proved to be stronger” and “survived in the cold, wounded, naked, and broken.”

In August 2022, the first Ukrainians to return from captivity told Ihor’s family that they had seen him in the hospital. The wounded man was “not provided with any help” there, only “sticks were tied to his arms and legs because he could hardly walk on his own.” His relatives didn’t know what happened to Hayokha after that. It was only in October, after another exchange, that former POWs who “shared a cell with him in the Donetsk pre-trial detention centre” said that Ihor had been “thrown into a cell without any help and told: ‘If you want to live, you will survive.’” He “survived again.”

In court, Hayokha himself said that civilians had saved him: they found him wounded, took off his military uniform, and brought him to a hospital in the village of Volodarske. There, he himself said “who he was” and was treated under the supervision of the military commandant’s office until March 23. After that, he was first taken to the Donetsk UBOP, then kept in a “rehabilitation hospital” from April 1 to 7 because “he was wounded, couldn't walk, and his arm was broken.” On April 7, Hayokha was taken to the guardhouse, and only on April 13 was he officially placed under arrest and sent to the detention centre.

What happened during the trial in Rostov (until it was closed)

The trial in the Southern District Military Court began in July 2023. After the prosecutor read out the indictment, Ihor Hayokha and Volodymyr Makarenko pleaded guilty.

The prosecution did not attempt to prove that any of the defendants were involved in specific war crimes. Instead, witnesses testified via videoconference from Donetsk, claiming that Aidar fighters as a whole committed crimes against civilians, shelled civilian infrastructure, and engaged in looting.

Olga and Alexei, residents of Starohnativka, half way from Donetsk to Mariupol, said that Aidar fighters were stationed in their village throughout the Russian-Ukrainian conflict. They treated the locals normally and did not commit any acts of violence. The rest of these witnesses’ testimony was contradictory. At the trial, Olga said that she only heard the shelling in the distance—but the transcript of her interrogation by the investigators recorded the opposite. Her explanation: “the local police officer wrote it down” and she “only signed it.” However, Olga confirmed the transcript and explained the discrepancies as follows: “During the special military operation, there was constant shooting. If I was at work, I couldn’t go out and see whether the shelling was coming from the village or from far beyond it. I wasn’t keeping track of that.”

Alexei said that the village was being shelled, but it was unclear who was doing it: “When there is shelling from that direction, it is difficult to tell exactly where the shots are coming from.” However, local residents decided that the shelling was coming from Vasylivka, a village to the north-west—and there were Ukrainian troops there too.

“If Ukrainian Armed Forces units were stationed in your village, does this mean this was friendly fire?” the judge asked.

“I can’t answer that question because we ourselves were surprised. They shoot and they hit their targets.”

During the initial interrogation, Alexei said that Aidar fighters were firing at the enemy directly from his farm, but in court he admitted that he could not say this with certainty.

Taras Radchenko insisted in court that the witness’s words “could not possibly be true” because “according to all military canons, rules, and regulations, this is subject to prosecution and impossible. During counter-battery combat, return fire is launched and the headquarters, that is, the entire command, is put at risk.”

Taxi driver Dmitry from the village of Hranitne also testified in court. He had driven Ukrainian soldiers and allegedly remembered that Chupryna served in Aidar. The driver said that the AFU’s 53rd Brigade had been stationed in the village since the end of 2021, with some of the fighters from Aidar and some from other units. The only way to tell them apart was by their chevrons. The prosecutor asked about the “crimes committed by Ukrainian soldiers,” and Dmitry said that “according to rumors” they had shot several people in a cafe and taken a car from one of the locals. Nevertheless, the taxi driver emphasised that he did not know whether Aidar soldiers were involved in this.

According to Dmitry, Hranitne was shelled in 2014-2015: “I can’t say what was firing or where it was coming from. Some infrastructure was damaged, power lines were damaged systematically, constantly. We were without electricity for a very long time.” Then it became quiet in the village — until the start of the ‘special operation.’”

“Were the Armed Forces of Ukraine stationed in the village at the time [of the shelling]?” the judge asked the witness.

“Yes.”

“So, it was shelling by the DPR forces?”

“I can’t say for sure. Because we were in the basement. Where did it come from? Where did it go? I can’t say anything,” the witness repeated.

For some reason, the prosecutor asked the taxi driver if he had provided any “assistance” to the Armed Forces of Ukraine after the start of the “special operation.” For example, if he had given them food. Dmitry assured him that this was not the case.

“Well, we are not considering the witness’s case, let’s get closer to the charges we have brought,” the judge rebuked the prosecutor.

Anastasia from Hranitne, who took Mykola Chupryna into her home, was also questioned in court. She was unable to say which side controlled the village at any given time: “I didn’t pay much attention and didn’t look closely at who was coming and going.” Aidar fighters were stationed in Hranitne back in 2014, and at that time there were “rumors” in the village that “they were allegedly killing people, children,” Anastasia recalled.

Other evidence presented by the prosecutor included internet pages and videos about the battalion’s activities, materials from criminal cases initiated at various times in the DPR in connection with shelling, photos and posts by individuals involved in the case on social media, as well as documents found on prisoners confirming their involvement with Aidar.

Even here, however, the prosecution encountered difficulties: for example, there was no mention of Aidar in either the employment record book or the military ID card of driver Dmytro Fedchenko. The case files of other defendants mentioned military unit A3488. And at least once, as the defense noted, the investigator simply mentioned, without any evidence, that this referred to Aidar.

On September 12, 2024, the court read out a letter from the Investigative Committee stating that Mishchenko and Prutyan were being investigated under the article on the “use of prohibited methods of warfare.” The court decided to sever their case and return it to the prosecutor. The next day, both women returned to Ukraine as part of a prisoner exchange.

About a month later, when the defense was supposed to question the defendants, the trial was suddenly closed to the press and the public in order to “ensure the safety of the participants and their close relatives.” The prosecutor referred to a post by Ukrainian blogger Dmytro Gordon, who wrote: “We know a lot about all these and other Russian judges. This is not the first time that Putin’s judges have staged a show trial against Ukrainians. They will all be punished for this. We already have all the information on the judges who handed down sentences to the defenders of Azovstal and other captured Ukrainian citizens.”

Lawyer Maria Eismont said at the time: “I am convinced that such cases should be heard—and have been heard quite fairly and correctly before—in open court... If these hearings become closed, it will mean that some Ukrainian blogger named Gordon is controlling the Southern District Military Court, which I consider unacceptable. Therefore, I ask that this trial remain open, as it has been.”

On 18 September 2025, Mediazona found out that the prosecutor’s office had requested prison terms of 20 to 24 years for 15 Ukrainians, with the first six years to be served in prison.

What Mediazona knows about the other defendants in the case

Vyacheslav Baydiuk, 51

Baiduk lived in the Dnipropetrovsk region with his wife and son. He is divorced. In 2015, while serving in the military, he met a woman in Volnovakha, Donetsk region, and stayed to live with her. From 2016, he worked as a delivery man in a shop and a loader at the market. Together with his partner, he grew mushrooms at home and then collected glass containers. He had health problems and was undergoing treatment. In 2018, he signed a contract with the Aidar battalion, returned home a year later, and tried his hand at business again. In 2020, due to financial problems, he signed another contract and served as a grenade launcher assistant. Once, he left his unit without permission, but his commanders brought him back. In May 2021, after his leave, he picked up his military ID and retired from service. When the Russian invasion began, he was not with Airdar.

On March 13, 2022, at the bus station in Volnovakha, armed men in uniform approached Baiduk, took him to a minibus marked “DPR Militia,” checked his passport, and detained him. He was held at the fire station until evening, then taken to the Donetsk UBOP for two or three days, and then sent to the temporary detention facility and from there to Olenovka. According to the case file, he was officially detained on 14 March 2022 and charged on April 5.

Vitaliy Hruzynov, 48

A native of Kyiv, divorced, has two adult children, an economist by education. In 2013-2014, Hruzynov participated in the Maidan Uprising as a “Kyiv resident and journalist” and volunteered. He is known in Ukraine under the pseudonym Kozak Vedmenko. In 2015-2016, he served in the Armed Forces of Ukraine, and in 2021, he signed a contract with Aidar and became a grenadier. He was captured by the “DPR militia” on February 27, 2022, near the village of Prokhorivka, while trying to find his headquarters. He himself does not know where he was held until the official date of his arrest on April 6: “No one told us about it.” But he definitely spent some time at the Donetsk guardhouse. A video of the prisoner’s interrogation was published by Russian pro-war Telegram channels.

A forensic psychiatric examination found that Hruzynov had a mosaic form of psychopathy and a mixed personality disorder, but found him to be sane.

Vladyslav Yermolinskyi, 37

Yermolinskyi lived in Novodruzhesk, Luhansk region. He signed a contract with the battalion in 2020 and was a driver. After the war began, he decided not to participate in combat operations. He tried to leave Mariupol, but on March 21, he failed to pass filtration in the village of Starobesheve. He was first held there, then in a temporary detention facility in Donetsk, and then in a former colony in Olenivka. According to the documents, he was detained only on March 26, 2022, and charged on April 21.

Serhii Kalinchenko, 31

A native of the village of Sadove in the Kharkiv region, he had recently been living in Kostyantynivka. He had a military education and was a platoon commander in one of Aidar’s assault companies. He and his wife were raising two children. Kalinchenko was seriously wounded: in court, he mentioned damage to his knee joints and other leg injuries. On April 14, 2022, Kalinchenko was captured by “unknown persons.” He spent two weeks before the official date of his detention in the Donetsk UBOP and in a detention centre.

Vitaliy Krokhalev, 45

A native of the village of Stepne in the Donetsk region, he served as a driver in Aidar from January to July 2018. When the war began, he worked shifts at a car wash in Kyiv. He was detained on March 18, 2022, by “people in uniform” when he arrived home. He was first held in a temporary detention facility in Donetsk, then in Olenivka, and then in Donetsk again. He was officially detained only on April 23.

Volodymyr Makarenko, 28

A native of the village of Drabiv in the Cherkasy region, he signed with the battalion in 2021 and was a sniper. On March 23, 2022, he was taken prisoner and held in Melitopol at the guardhouse, then in the Donetsk temporary detention centre. His detention was officially registered almost a month later, on April 19.

Maryna Mishchenko, 29

A native of Kreminna in the Luhansk region, she signed a contract with Aidar in 2020 and worked as a nurse at the medical centre. She was detained on March 11, 2022, and spent more than a week in the Donetsk UBOP. It was only on March 20 that she was officially named a suspect, and on April 18, she was charged. In the Donetsk pre-trial detention centre, she was placed on preventive observation as prone to suicide.

Liliya Prutian, 56

Born and raised in the village of Blizhnee, Donetsk region, Liliya Prutyan has three adult children, the youngest of whom has diabetes. She herself has a chronic hearing impairment and was unable to see a doctor while in captivity. At the first hearings in Rostov, Prutyan could hardly hear the judge, and only then was her lawyer allowed to give her batteries for her hearing aid.

She first signed a contract with the AFU in 2017 as an accountant. In February 2020, her contract ended, and in July she signed again, “with the separate 53rd Brigade.” This time, she took a position as a medic. She was detained on March 11, 2022, during hostilities in the village of Petrivske. Later, people “in camouflage uniforms” came to the home of Prutyan’s son and took two folders with documents. She was held in Volnovakha, Dokuchaevsk, the UBOP detention centre in Donetsk. On March 24, when Prutyan was placed under detention and interrogated for the first time, she was in a colony in Olenivka. On April 15, the prisoner was interrogated by an investigator from the DPR Prosecutor General’s Office and officially charged.

Roman Nedostup, 28

Like Makarenko, Nedostup lived in the village of Drabiv in the Cherkasy region. From 2016 to 2019, he served in the AFU and re-enlisted in 2021. He was assigned to the position of senior rifleman. He was detained on March 23, 2022, during a retreat, when he was trying to “make his way to the unoccupied territory of Ukraine.”

“Unoccupied by whom?” the judge asked Nedostup.

“Controlled by the Ukrainian army.”

He was first held in the UBOP, then in the guardhouse in Donetsk. There, unknown individuals filmed an “interrogation” in which the Ukrainian spoke of his disagreement with President Volodymyr Zelensky’s policies and his voluntary surrender. In court, he recanted these words: “They told me to say it, and I said it.” He was charged on April 21.

Serhii Nikityuk, 32

Nikityuk lived in Volnovakha, Donetsk region, with his wife and two children. He signed a contract with Aidar in 2021 and was hired as a grenadier. During questioning by the investigator, Nikityuk’s mother said that after February 24, 2022, the house where he lived “burned down completely as a result of a shelling,” and his wife took the children and left for Dokuchaevsk to stay with her grandmother. Serhii himself was taken prisoner on March 26 and held at the Donetsk guardhouse until April 13. Only then was his arrest officially recorded, and the next day Nikityuk was sent to a pre-trial detention centre.

Taras Radchenko, 25

A native of Rubizhne in the Luhansk region. His father, Ihor Radchenko, was a counterintelligence company commander in Aidar until 2015. In Ukraine, he was suspected of banditry, robbery, and other serious crimes, but was released on the guarantee of several members of parliament. Taras received military training in Odesa and in July 2021 was assigned to the Aidar battalion, which, as he emphasized in court, was part of the AFU and subordinate to the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense. He rose to the rank of chief of reconnaissance and assistant chief of staff. On February 25, 2022, during a retreat on the outskirts of the village of Starohnativka in the Donetsk region, he was captured along with Zabayrachny. He was held in the Donetsk guardhouse and in the temporary centre before being sent to pre-trial detention. The charges were not officially brought against him until April 6, 2022.

Dmytro Fedchenko, 51

Fedchenko lived in Volnovakha with his daughter and wife who had a disability because of her diabetes. In 2016, he was mobilized. He did not like the unit he was assigned to, so his commanders told him, “If you don't like it, sign a contract, then you can choose.” He signed a contract with the AFU to work as a driver. Neither his military ID nor his employment record book mention Aidar. Three years later, he returned home and worked as a rolling stock repair mechanic at a locomotive depot. He was detained on March 17, 2022: “In the afternoon, before lunch, we left the basement of our house in Volnovakha. It was quiet; the shooting had stopped. A sweep was underway. Two people in military uniform approached us and asked for our documents. They took my passport. They called my wife to open the apartment, looked around, and rummaged through our belongings.” His detention was formalised the next day, a criminal case was opened on April 14.

Andriy Sholik, 50

A native of the city of Berestyn in the Kharkiv region. Sholik repaired apartments and worked as a night watchman. He was laid off and had to pay child support for his two kids, so at the end of 2021, he decided to sign a contract with the AFU. He was sent to the 24th Separate Assault Battalion (Aidar) and became a medical instructor. He was captured on March 3, 2022, and held in the guardhouse in Donetsk, then in the colony in Olenivka. His detention was not officially registered until March 18.

The Aidar trial as seen by a lawyer

Lawyer Alexei Orlov calls the main and “all-encompassing” problem in Russian judicial practice the failure to recognize Ukrainians as prisoners of war.

“They are considered ordinary criminals, which, of course, does not comply with any legal norms. The context of international armed conflict is artificially removed, as if it does not exist at all, and therefore the norms of international humanitarian law are not applied to the actions of military personnel. Thanks to this, attempts are being made to classify their actions under terrorism articles of the Criminal Code,” says Orlov.

He is convinced that the choice of articles for the charges is also completely unfounded.

The case of the attempted “seizure of power” in the self-proclaimed DPR long before its recognition by Russia, according to the lawyer, cannot be “retroactively transferred” to Russian jurisdiction, but in the case of the 18 Aidar defendants, this “reclassification trick” was performed.

As for the status of Aidar as a “terrorist organisation,” the investigation refers to an old 2016 decision by the Supreme Court of the unrecognized Donetsk People’s Republic, although in November 2023, Russia’s Supreme Court also recognised the unit as terrorist.

“Why this was necessary is also a question, if the decisions of the republics are to be valid,” says Orlov. “But they themselves agreed that this was not enough to make all subsequent criminal cases slightly stronger than this one.”

The lawyer notes that there are “not so many questions” about the trial of prisoners of war itself, but numerous violations make “this kind of deprivation of freedom illegal.”

“Participants in an international armed conflict have the right to hold enemy personnel captive and not simply release them—there are certain mechanisms for exchanges. But in this case, completely different questions arise: they are being tried as ordinary criminals, which is, in fact, a war crime under the Rome Statute and international criminal law; they are being tortured; they are not allowed to contact their families; they are not being provided with defense," the lawyer lists.

Orlov says he considers what is happening to Ukrainian prisoners in Russia to be part of a propaganda campaign of pressure: “Primarily on Ukrainian military personnel, so that they too will be afraid of being taken prisoner, because they will then be tried under these articles and face huge prison terms.”

Torture

The defendants first claimed they had been tortured when the prosecutor presented video recordings of their “interrogations” as evidence.

In these videos, Ukrainian soldiers repeat similar statements about the crimes of the Aidar battalion, foreign instructors, the betrayal of their commanders—and say about surrender as the only option for ordinary soldiers.

In court, the Ukrainians said that they were interrogated without a lawyer by unknown people in uniform and masks. Many did not know where they were at the time, and for some, the text was specially prepared. Taras Radchenko said that he was “given a topic and told to elaborate on it.”

Another defendant asked directly on video if he could answer in his own words — in court, he confirmed that during the filming, there was a monitor in front of him with text that he simply had to read.

“Could you have refused?” the judge asked him.

“I wouldn’t advise it.”

“After preventive measures, you tell them everything they want to hear,” Vitaliy Hruzynov explained at a hearing in March 2024. He was questioned and filmed for “about twenty minutes,” but the video distributed by pro-war Russian Telegram channels is much shorter and, as lawyer Maria Eismont noted, has noticeable “obvious edits.”

“You said: I apologize for the looting, abuse, and torture of civilians committed by my comrades...” the judge began his question.

“That statement is simply not true,” Hruzynov replied.

“So you’re not apologizing for that?”

“I'm not apologizing for something I didn’t do.”

The video with Nikolai Chuprina was recorded the day after he was detained.

“Were your rights explained to you?” the judge asked.

“Well, it depends what you mean.”

According to Chupryna, before filming, he was given a text to read and told, “Try to do something wrong, and something bad will happen.” But the threats did not end there.

“Beatings. They used a tapik no me,” the prisoner explained laconically in court.

“I think everyone can imagine how a prisoner of war behaves in captivity, so I see no point in commenting on this farce,” Taras Radchenko told the judge. He was forced to sign a statement in front of a camera that he “would no longer fight against the DPR.” He was promised that after that, the prisoner would be exchanged. Radchenko himself noted that he looks beaten up in this video.

At another hearing, Serhiy Nikityuk said that before filming, “a man in a mask with a rubber baton and a pistol hit him a couple of times and said that it would be bad if he didn’t do as he was told.”

“I had no way to refuse, as they beat me with various objects and weapons and threatened my life. They did not turn us against the civilian population; I went to defend my country because I was born and live there; it is my land, and I went to fight for it,” Oleksandr Taranets explained in court.

In addition, the Ukrainians repeatedly spoke in court about the “physical and psychological impact” of the convoy: because of this, in December 2023, all the defendants, except for Zabayrachny and Nedostup, asked not to be taken to court, but to be connected to the hearings via videoconference from the detention centre. Even the prosecutor did not object, but the judge considered this a violation of the defendants’ rights and said that “nothing prevents them from contacting the relevant law enforcement and other authorities.”

On the day the trial was closed to the press, Vladimir Makarenko was connected to the hearing from Taganrog Pre-Trial Detention Center No. 2 (SIZO-2). Lawyer Magomed Bekov then petitioned not only for Makarenko’s personal participation in the trial, but also for his “immediate” transfer to “any other detention center in Rostov-on-Don.”

“SIZO-2 in Taganrog is a facility that strikes fear into the hearts of Ukrainian citizens in particular. In short, when they are transferred to Taganrog, they immediately ask, ‘Will I be tortured?’” said the lawyer.

The relatives of the Ukrainian soldiers told Mediazona about the conditions in which they were held captive.

“The conditions in the Donetsk detention centre were terrible; [the staff] simply hated the Ukrainian prisoners. They wanted our guys to suffer, and they beat them there, very often,“ recalls Kateryna Taranets. ”They were hungry, they were beaten, and 20 people were crammed into a cell in some basement. They just sat there, and, God, you can imagine what went on there.”

At some point, the prisoners’ relatives began to receive “identical” letters: in addition to cigarettes and clothing, the soldiers asked to send potatoes, carrots, and onions. “It was so strange that at some point we didn’t believe that they were really writing, because we know that prisoners of war should be fed,” says Kateryna.

Liliya Prutyan, who returned to Ukraine as part of an exchange, said that in Donetsk, prisoners were fed “unsalted porridge, vegetables floating in water, and tough pieces of meat.” According to her, the guards humiliated the women, “often forcing them to lie face down on the floor.”

Semyon Zabayrachny’s mother, Alevtina, recalls that Prutyan told her that young girls in captivity had to “tear the sleeves off their T-shirts” to “somehow save themselves” during their periods.

It was only when the trial began in Rostov that the relatives of the defendants saw for the first time what they looked like after a year in captivity — in photos and videos from the court.

Kateryna Taranets says she was horrified when she saw a photo of her brother: he had gone from being a huge “muscleman” to a man who “looked like he weighed 60 kilos, so thin it was just horrible, with bruises under his eyes.”

“In some places on his body where there was no clothing, there were bruises and scars — all of it was visible,” Kateryna adds.

Alevtina Zabayrachna noticed a scar near her son’s eye that had not been there before.

In Rostov, the conditions of detention were better than in Donetsk at first. “They fed us more or less normally, there were no problems with letters, they let us read,” says Taranets. But, according to her, in the last six months, the prisoners “began to be beaten there too”; this is confirmed by other Ukrainians who were kept there.

In the photographs, Kateryna noticed that her brother’s arm was first bandaged and then “cut up”; she still does not know what happened to him.

“It wasn’t on his wrist, but on the bend of his arm, just below,” the woman recalls. She says that the prisoners “can’t get rid of their scabies, and it’s clear that they won't go away because the conditions of their detention are not changing”; Alevtina Zabayrachna confirms this.

According to Zabayrachna, after the Ukrainians were briefly transferred to Donetsk, they were returned to Rostov “sick, with bronchitis, in their underwear and T-shirts, and treated only with aspirin.”

A few months before his sentence, Taranets was transferred to Taganrog. Things have calmed down there now. “They don’t beat them and they feed them,” Kateryna says. But since then, she has not received a single letter from her brother.

The eighteenth

Yevhen Pyatyhorets, 39

Pyatyhorets grew up in the village of Volodymyrivka in the Donetsk region. He studied to be a car mechanic at a technical college, worked briefly as a security guard in Crimea, and then got a job with his father at a refractory plant. The pay was low, but it was enough to live on until tragedy struck the family: Yevhen’s mother was diagnosed with cancer, and they had to take on “very large debts.” To pay them off, Pyatyhorets decided to sign a one-year contract with the AFU.

“When he told me, I asked my child, ‘Son, are you really going to shoot people?’ To which he replied, ‘No, Mom, I won’t shoot anyone. The military registration office said I’ll be stationed at a military unit near Volnovakha, serve for a year, and then go home,’” Svitlana Pyatyhorets told the court, where she appeared as a witness for the defense.

In May 2020, Yevhen joined Aidar as a driver. “He asked to join the AFU, but they transferred him there and presented him with a fait accompli.”

The family had been pro-Russian all along. In 2014, Svitlana participated in organising a referendum on the “self-determination” of the republics. When asked by the court why her son “joined the Armed Forces of Ukraine, and even more so the nationalist Aidar battalion,” instead of going to Russia to work, the woman replied that it would have taken too long to process the paperwork — “by the time he earned anything, I would no longer be alive.”

“So the goal was to receive monetary compensation?” the judge clarified once again.

“To save my life.”

“To settle your debts, as you said earlier…”

“Yes. For medical treatment.”

After serving for seven months, Pyatyhorets came home two weeks before New Year’s Eve, saying that his unit had given him leave. When it was time to return, he confessed to his family that he had been “dismissed for insubordination.” He went back to work at his hometown factory. According to his mother, Yevhen was “marked” in his military ID for leaving his unit without permission and “threatened with punishment,” but everything worked out.

Then the full-scale war began. The mayor of Starobesheve, which included Volodymyrivka, asked Svitlana to help the administration. “My son worked with me. We distributed humanitarian aid, delivered bread, and transported the wounded. He carried water from the well to lonely grandmothers who had been abandoned by their children. That’s how he is, he feels sorry for people and sympathises with them,” the woman told the court.

In March 2022, the first Russian soldiers to enter Volodymyrivka were “Chechens,” who began “taking passports” from “many residents.” Svitlana thinks that someone from the local community told on her son’s service in Aidar. In March, they took him from his home.

“I followed them, I tried to explain, but they took him into the woods,” his mother recalled. Due to the curfew, she was “ordered” to return home, but she “couldn’t” and watched what was happening from a neighboring house: “Soldiers were walking back and forth. And then I heard a shot in the woods. Well, of course, I panicked. I immediately went out to them and said, ‘They shot my son.’”

She was promised that Yevhen would return. She watched as he was led out of the forest and taken away to the “factory” — and went home to wait.

Four hours later, Pyatyhorets was returned with “broken ribs and bound hands,” which by that time had “already turned blue.” The house was searched — all the cupboards were ransacked. At that time, Svitlana was told: “You raised a bad son, because of people like him, Aidar soldiers are dying.”

“And I told them, I raised a normal son, that’s just how life turned out,” the mother explained in court. Finding nothing, the military left their home.

Soon, representatives of the DPR Investigative Committee arrived at the Volodymyrivka administration. Svitlana decided to tell them “everything as it is” about her son's military service — the investigators “wrote it down in a notebook, left, and there was silence.” Later, an occupation military command appeared in the village, and Svitlana went there with her son.

On April 6, he was taken from his home, and Yevhen’s relatives never saw him again.

As Pyatyhorets himself recounted in court, he was held for 24 hours in Volnovakha, then at the Donetsk guardhouse. On April 26, his detention was made official, and he was held in the Donetsk temporary detention until May 4, then transferred to a pre-trial detention centre.

On December 1, 2023, at a hearing in Rostov, it became known that Pyatyhorets had become a defendant in a case initiated on May 30, 2014, “on the fact of the use of prohibited means and methods of warfare by the Ukrainian security forces.” The prosecutor requested that the case against Pyatyhorets be separated and sent to the DPR Prosecutor’s Office.

Both Pyatyhorets and his lawyer objected; other defense attorneys noted that the prosecution was making “a bare request without confirmation that there is any criminal case pending.”

Nevertheless, the court granted the request.

What has happened to Pyatyhorets since then and where he is now is unknown. Mediazona has not found any records of his new case in any Russian court.

How soldiers and their loved ones cope with captivity

In an interview, Liliya Prutyan said that as soon as she was taken prisoner, Russian soldiers raped her and killed many of the men. Prutyan asked Mediazona not to ask her about her experiences in captivity, as these memories “trigger obsessive dreams.”

“I’m fine, thank God. I’m back, my children are alive. That was very important to me, I didn’t know how I would live if any of them were no longer alive. I think it would have been unbearable pain. Plus, I am surrounded by people who always support me and try to help me in every way they can. Well, in general, I consider myself a happy person because it's all over now,” says Prutyan.

Now that she is free, she tries to enjoy “every day, every moment, nature, life, and the people around her.”

“I enjoy everything. Because I have something to compare it to, you understand?” Prutyan explains. “The life I had before and the life I have now. I appreciate my life.”

Prutyan tries “as best she can” to support those who remain in Russian captivity. While the trial was ongoing, she regularly sent them letters.

“It’s hard for me to realise that I’ve been free for a year now, that I’m alive, that I’m enjoying life, while the guys are still there, in those terrible conditions. And every day when they wake up, they don’t know what will happen to them tomorrow,” she told Mediazona.

Prutyan says that she has “no ill will toward any Russians in her heart” and wants “all this nonsense to end so that we can live as we did before, peacefully and calmly. So that our guys and yours are alive.”

Those remaining in captivity are waiting for an exchange. Taranets “initially had high hopes that he would be exchanged soon,” but later he wrote to his sister that his comrades were “losing heart” and that “almost no one believes in an exchange anymore.”

“His latest letters express such hopelessness… As if he doesn’t believe he will ever return home, see his family, see me,” says Kateryna. “They are exchanging almost everyone except the Aidar battalion. Aidar, the Donetsk battalion, and Azov: they are simply using them to make headlines. That’s why they keep them, to get publicity."

Ihor Hayokha tries not to lose heart. He writes to his loved ones that he misses them very much. He asks his family “not to be sad and to be beautiful, because beauty will save the world.”

Alevtina Zabaichna and her 70-year-old husband remain in Kharkiv, waiting for their son and sheltering from the shelling in their cellar.

“They tell us we’re fools. Yes, maybe. But I can’t get it out of my head: if I leave, where will my child return to?” the woman explains. “I said: ‘I’ll bend over backwards, but I have to wait for my child at home.’ I write to him: ‘Semushka, I’ll wait for you.’ He writes back: ‘Mom, Mom, leave.’ I say: ‘No, I’ll wait for you. You have to come home, I have to meet you at home.’”

Contributing author Elena Dymova

Editor: Dmitry Tkachev