KYIV — As Moscow massed forces on Ukraine’s borders early in 2022, Serhiy Davydyuk was one of many people who did not expect Russian President Vladimir Putin to launch a large-scale invasion: “I thought they’d flex their muscles and that would be it,” he told RFE/RL in a recent interview.
He was wrong.
“On February 24, I woke up because rockets were flying and they were bombing the military garrison outside the city,” said Davydyuk, who was at home in Nova Kakhovka at the time. Scrolling through social media, he understood that Ukraine “was in flames from missile strikes” and Russian forces were advancing.
Within hours, those forces had occupied Nova Kakhovka, a city on the left bank of the Dnieper River in southern Ukraine, and had raised the Russian flag on the massive Kakhovka Dam, which was breached by an explosion the following year.
Some citizens fled northward into Ukrainian-held territory, but Davydyuk, a deputy mayor who had worked at the dam, was familiar with war from fighting against Russia-backed forces in the Donbas in 2014-15, and he decided to stay.
“I hoped that the occupation would last three or four months,” he said.
Wrong again. While Ukrainian forces recaptured the regional capital, Kherson, in a stunning counteroffensive in the fall of 2022, Russia still holds Nova Kakhovka as the war rages on.
The invading Russian forces were nervous and trigger-happy, “firing willy-nilly, whether it was at civilians or not,” Davydyuk said in the interview. “Also, they knew that not all Ukrainian forces had left the area, so they immediately began to search for soldiers.”
They also began a process of “Russification,” he said, co-opting administrators when they could and trying to impose a kind of Soviet-style rule, seeking to use fear and control to keep people in line and stifle dissent.
“I got the impression that they had just turned back the clock, a kind of time machine,” he said. “As if the past 35 years of development and the formation of a new [Ukrainian] state had never happened.”
When they conducted a search, Russian forces would enter a neighborhood “with dogs, copters, and thermal imaging cameras. And…they would block off the entire quarter so that no one left, no one entered. They needed people who knew the region, who knew whom, what, how,” he said, “in order to persuade them to cooperate, to establish their own order.”
The oppression quickly took its toll, said Davydyuk, 49.
“Some people I knew could not stand the situation. There were even cases of suicide. People just didn’t know what would happen next,” he said, and for many, “there was no light at the end of the tunnel.”
“Within a year, Nova Kakhovka…turned into a dead city,” Davydyuk said. “That is, a flourishing young city gradually turned into a dying city. There were a lot of burials — people were dying one by one. “
Davydyuk went into hiding shortly after the invasion, evading the Russian occupiers for months. At one point in May 2022, he said, “They called me on the phone and said, ‘Turn yourself in.’”
He did not. But that August, one day before he was planning to move to a new hiding place, he said, “I was working in the garden when [Russian] military men appeared, tied me up at gunpoint, and the questioning began.”
Davydyuk was then taken to a makeshift prison — he is not sure where — and was held along with about 15 other prisoners, with some being taken away after a time and others being brought in.
For the first three days, he said, his captors interrogated him, using severe beatings and methods widely regarded as torture, as they tried to elicit information about potential resistance fighters, saboteurs, and Ukrainian troops.
The abuse included “beatings, beating muscles until they burned” and shocks with a crude device known as a “tapik” — a military field telephone whose wires and electric charge are used to torture captives.
“They put a sack over my head and poured diesel fuel over me, but they didn’t set me on fire. So, I understand that these are means of mental influence,” he said.
“I told them, ‘Kill me, don’t torture me,’” Davydyuk said. Soon afterward, he said, “They saw that I was like a piece of meat. They let me rest.”
But they used the same methods on other prisoners, he said.
“I was surprised that people were taken away [and abused] for nothing. They were ‘re-educated’ just for saying ‘Glory to Ukraine,’” Davydyuk said. “In principle, the scenario was the same for everyone — interrogation with electric shocks, beatings.”
He recalled a person who was detained for photographing burned-out military vehicles.
“They took him as an agent [and] beat him, almost like me, for a while…. Then they saw that he hadn’t sent the photos anywhere and they let him go,” he said.
Davydyuk’s account could not be independently verified, but other Ukrainians formerly held in Russia and in occupied territory in Ukraine have reported suffering the same forms of torture or abuse. In Russian-held parts of Ukraine, this mistreatment often occurs in informal holding cells and lockups, survivors and human rights groups say.
“Russian authorities have subjected Ukrainian POWs to systematic and widespread torture, including sexual violence, and poor conditions,” the UN Human Rights Office said in a report published in February, three years into Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. “Torture has been pervasive during interrogation and throughout all stages of captivity.”
After a little over a month, Davydyuk said, his captors came to him and told him to get ready to go home.” Then they drove him, cuffed and blindfolded, to a random spot in Nova Kakhovka and set him free.
It was September 27, 2022, the last day of a plebiscite that Putin used to make the baseless claim that the Kherson region — as well as three other Ukrainian regions that are partially occupied by Moscow’s forces — belong to Russia.
Davydyuk spent a little over two years in the city before he made it out of Russian-controlled territory with the help of Ukrainian military intelligence, he said. He declined to give details, but said he reentered Ukraine about three weeks after leaving Nova Kakhovka, undergoing further interrogation, a lie detector test, and a Russian “filtration camp” in an occupied part of the Donetsk region on a journey that also took him through Russia and Belarus.
These days, Davydyuk tries to help other Ukrainians who have been imprisoned or have managed to make it out of territory held by Russia, which occupies about one-fifth of Ukraine.
The Russians “take away everything from your former life, even the document that says you’re a citizen of Ukraine. That is, you are nobody…. You have nothing from your past life,” he said. “And these people have to learn how to live anew.”
“The Russian authorities take advantage of this, as some people return to occupied territory…because they see that nobody needs them here, and there at least they have a home, more or less,” he added.
Displaced Ukrainians “are tired, they want to go home, where things are close and familiar, where they’ve lived almost their whole lives,” Davydyuk said.
“Most people live in the hope that Ukraine will return” to the occupied territories,” he said. “But the longer Russia is there, the more people despair that it will be different.”
