Russian soldiers had seen his cell phone and accused him of filming him, he told ABC News’ Britt Clennett during a Zoom interview. They took his phone and by checking his photos and social media, they found a pro-Ukrainian Telegram group. The soldiers were enraged, he said, and threatened to kill him on the spot. Instead, he was taken to an infiltration camp and then to a prison where he would spend 48 days before finally being released. Thousands of Ukrainians are reportedly being held as prisoners of war and hundreds of thousands have been forcibly displaced from the country through so-called infiltration camps. The children’s experience during the six-month war was uniquely traumatic and offers a chilling portrait of the painful reality on the ground in Ukraine. The UN estimates that nearly 1,000 children have been killed or injured during the conflict, and more than 5 million Ukrainian children, both inside the country and as refugees, are in need of humanitarian assistance. Firefighters work to extinguish a fire in Sloviansk, Donetsk region, eastern Ukraine, August 29, 2022. Leo Correa/AP The prison he was put in was “so awful and so difficult,” he said, adding that hearing the constant cries of “help me” and “don’t hit me” breaks you inside. His job was washing floors, cleaning rooms that had been used for torture “three or four days a week,” he said. It helped pass information between prisoners, written on small pieces of paper that they would try to smuggle outside the prison walls to family members. He was not beaten, but he saw others being beaten and tortured. Although he noticed everything around him, he tried to be invisible he said, focusing on his work. He didn’t want the Russian soldiers to know how much he was seeing. A soldier with the call sign Bury walks through one of the villages near the Kherson front line in Mykolaiv region, Ukraine, August 8, 2022. The Washington Post via Getty Images During the interview with ABC News, he admitted that he had probably blocked out many aspects of his time in prison. “If you see awful things, your brain forgets it.” If he dwells too much on the past, “I might have a problem in my head,” he said, “and I don’t want to [that].” So, he said, “I prefer not to think about that.” It was very difficult to maintain his mental health in prison, he said. If you showed emotion, there was a fear that you would be beaten and tortured and never be released, he said. “If you start crying, if you start getting angry with these Russian soldiers, these Russian soldiers can kill you or torture you.” To keep himself mentally sane, he talked to himself. “I think about what I do when I have freedom. What I do after prison, what I do with my family, how I visit my friends, how I go to coffee, how I go to McDonalds,” he said. After 48 days, he was finally reunited with his father. “You can’t explain that feeling,” he said, displaying maturity beyond his years. “You can only feel this feeling.”
