He was shown a mass burial and asked if he wanted to join: how Russians tortured one man in Kherson and made him work

Former journalist Ihor Bondarenko was captured by the Russians when he tried to leave occupied Kherson via Crimea. A 45-year-old Kherson resident was detained, beaten, and tortured. Despite everything, he managed to survive and make fools of the FSB officers. How? Ihor told hromadske his story in liberated Kherson.

The abduction

Ihor, a former journalist, changed his profession and worked as a driver in Poland. On January 31, he came to Kherson on vacation. When the Russians captured the city, he realized that he would not be able to leave: he used to volunteer for the information portal "Sector of Truth" of the local branch of the Right Sector.

"I knew they were looking for me, but maybe not as hard as others. I kept in touch with some military, patriots, passed some information about collaborators, supported those people who were hiding here," says Ihor.

The head of the Kherson branch of the Right Sector Natalia Voteichkina was also hiding in the occupation. Ihor met with her several times.

Most of the time, he stayed at home. When he went out, he chose those routes where there were no Russians. He lived in Kherson until August 10, and then "lost his nerve". He decided to get out through Crimea. He took a bus and went to Kalanchak. He passed passport control, customs, and then a conversation with the FSB was awaiting. A young FSB officer called passengers from the bus for an interview one by one. When it was Ihor's turn, the Russian took his documents, phone, and tablet and went to check them. Half an hour later he returned with a stack of papers 1.5 centimeters thick.

"Who is Natalia Voteichkina?" the FSB officer asked first.

"Stierlitz, I realized that we are under surveillance of Mueller (allusion to a Soviet book series and famous television adaptation “Seventeen Moments of Spring” about a Soviet spy in Germany – ed.),” Ihor thought, and uttered that Natalia was his neighbor.

In those papers were printouts from Ihor's phone book, including contacts of the Right Sector leaders, which he had deleted in March, and all correspondence from Telegram messenger for the last six months, there were also messages from Voteichkina. Ihor realized that he would not be able to get away with it. He began to create a legend that he was a former Russian-speaking journalist and actor who starred in Russian films. He even showed his YouTube channel with episodes from the movies in which he actually acted.

After interrogation, he was sent to a container where Russians were holding people on the administrative border. The next morning, security forces in balaclavas with machine guns came for them in a white minibus with the letter "Z". They pinioned Ihor's arms, put a red cloth on his head, wrapped it with tape and took him in unknown direction. Ihor determined the time of the trip by the songs that sounded from the receiver – 13 songs, about 40-45 minutes. When they arrived at the place, Ihor's cloth was removed and he saw a hole dug by an excavator about two meters wide and four meters long. In the pit there were corpses of men, slightly covered with earth. Heads, arms, and legs were sticking out of the ground. Two more pits nearby were already buried.

"That's it,” Ihor thought.

"Do you want to join them?" the security forces asked.

"No," Ihor replied.

The FSB officers shot past Ihor from behind and punched him in the back between the shoulder blades. Ihor fell to his knees. The men were laughing.

"At least this one didn't piss himself," one of them said.

They put a red cloth on Ihor's head again and took him for another 30 minutes to the place where he stayed for 15 days.

Torture

In a separate room with a rag on his head, Ihor was handcuffed to a stove and warned: "If you take off the rag, we will shoot you. If you make noise, we will shoot you". He curled up on a small rug and stayed like that for several days. Sometimes it seemed that three days had passed, sometimes – that five. He was not given food. They gave him only a plastic bottle to relieve himself.

During the day, a man came who called himself "FSB captain", at night – the one whom Ihor called "executioner".

"There are such people, you know, they like to torture people for fun, that is, even if they were not paid for it, they would probably volunteer," Ihor describes him.

For the first two nights, the "torturer" electrocuted Ihor, presumably with a stun gun. Then he switched it on near his ear so that Ihor could hear this electronic sound of torture. When the executioner started to kick, Ihor would group himself and get into a corner so that the blows would not be so strong.

"Let them break your arms and legs, because they are easier to treat than your liver and spleen," Ihor recalled martial arts training

During these five days, his brain worked like a computer. Lying on the tiled floor, he recalled in his head what he had already told the FSB officers and thought about where to take the story further.

On the first day, Ihor said to himself: "They will break me, it's just a matter of time. Someone is broken in a day, someone in a week, but still, no matter how hard a person is, only in the movies does no one break. I will break anyway, I just need to make sure that I break on my own terms, that they believe me that I broke, that I agreed".

Ihor, as he says, sculpted a legend that he worked as a Russian-speaking journalist and actor, and when he was required to switch to Ukrainian, he lost it. He invented that he did not know Ukrainian, so he lost his job, for which he was not fond of the authorities and criticized them in his broadcasts. FSB officers bought it. On August 15, they took off his handcuffs and told him that he would work for Russia. Ihor asked how. They said they needed "journalists".

"I'm done with that, comrade chief," Ihor replied, "please forgive me, I'm a truck driver.”

The same FSB captain, whom the Russians called either Petrovich or "Phoenix", got angry and again handcuffed Ihor to the stove. However, he did not put anything on his head.

"Sit and think for another day. Do you remember the pit?” he asked Ihor.

"I do,” he answered.

The next day the FSB captain returned, and Ihor said that he agreed to cooperate. The FSB officer unshackled Ihor from the stove and ordered him to stand up. He could not: his legs, buttocks, and back were badly beaten. He had to crawl on all fours. For the first time in five days, he straightened up.

Telegram channels

The FSB captain told Ihor about bio-laboratories and combat mosquitoes. He said that Ukraine was going to attack Russia on March 8. When Ihor argued, he got angry, once even kicked him.

"It was obvious that he had read several books on psychology and knew something. But even the FSB captains believe in all this nonsense that [famous Kremlin propagandist Margarita] Simonian writes to them and says on television,” Ihor was surprised.

FSB officers offered Ihor to run a pro-Russian "patriotic" Telegram channel. They returned his phone and left him alone. He turned on the geolocation. His phone had the IGO Israel application installed, which was used by truckers. Maps showed that he was held in Skadovsk near the dolphinarium, at the recreation center. Ihor was in the house of the guard, right at the entrance to the base. From here it was heard that new prisoners were brought every day – they first screamed, and then just cried out in pain. Once Ihor saw how one man was chained around a tree. He stood there for three days, going to the toilet under himself.

On August 16, Ihor was given a phone and a tablet so he could start working. First, he wrote to his wife, sister and friends from the Right Sector: "Guys, I'm resting at my grandmother's at the sea". But he still had to administer the social media groups. The first one he called "Diary of Free Tavria". Then, as he says, he bought bots and wrote to his friends to subscribe to the channel.

"I had three ‘right-wingers’ in my group, my sister, wife, friend, two FSB officers, and 1,600 bots, but it was already in September," says Ihor.

He continued to maintain the group on Telegram after his release to report to the FSB officers.

Ihor was released on August 25. The day before, two Russian security forces forced him to say on camera with a Russian flag that he agreed "to cooperate with the armed forces of the Russian Federation in the fight against terrorists and bandits." Ihor again had a balaclava put on and had to take a minibus on the outskirts of Skadovsk. He got to Kherson. While the occupation lasted, he had to report to the overseers from the FSB.

The overseer

To show the FSB that he was really in Kherson and had not run away, he recorded selfie videos against the background of recognizable places. He stood near the poster "Russia is here forever" at the train station and said that he was at home. He met with the overseer only once – on September 2. He wanted to come to him, but Ihor insisted on meeting somewhere outside.

"You will come to me, and tomorrow a brick will fall on your head," Ihor continued to play the role of a pro-Russian blogger who is afraid of Ukrainian partisans.

The overseer was a young man 25-30 years of age, who introduced himself as Gustav.

"I understand that he was the son of some general who was sent here to increase his authority. I had the feeling that he was a party animal until February 23. From the conversation I understood that he did not like all this at all, that he would be happy to sit somewhere in Moscow or St. Petersburg, sniffing coke, smoking hookah and groping all sorts of ladies in all sorts of places. He could not understand what he was doing here," says Ihor.

It was the only meeting with the overseer. In mid-September, Ihor realized that the Russians no longer cared much about him, because they had learned that they were not in Kherson forever.

"So the stars aligned. I got to them too late. If I had got there earlier, everything would have been much more difficult for me," says Ihor in the center of liberated Kherson.