“Russian warship, go f*** yourself.”
When a Ukrainian border guard on a Black Sea island fired off that reply to a surrender demand radioed from a Russian warship on the first day of Moscow’s full-scale invasion in February 2022, his words quickly went viral, spawning memes, T-shirts, and even a postage stamp.
For Ukrainians, it was a pithy, potent symbol of the nation’s defiance in the face of the Russian attack -- a wall of resistance that bucked widespread expectations, not least in the Kremlin, that the smaller country would be subjugated within days or weeks.
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Popular Postage: Ukrainians Line Up To Buy Stamp Of Defiant Snake Island Guards
For the contingent of about 80 Ukrainian troops on Snake Island, who at first were believed to have been killed but in fact were taken captive by Russian forces that bombarded and then occupied the island, the fame the phrase acquired meant that they faced particularly fierce abuse from their captors, former marine Vladyslav Zadorin told RFE/RL.
'Constantly Beaten'
“This bothered the Russians very much,” Zadorin, 26, said in an interview on the sidelines of the Globsec conference in Prague this month. “How could ordinary military men send [a message like that] to a huge machine” like the Russian military?
“We were constantly beaten for it,” said Zadorin, who spent 679 days in Russian captivity before he was released and returned to Ukraine in a prisoner exchange in January 2024.
SEE ALSO: Globsec Asks When Europe Will Step Up; Moldova Prepares For EU SummitRussian authorities subjected Zadorin and other captives from the Snake Island garrison to audio tests in an effort to determine which of them had delivered the profane reply to the Moskva warship, he said.
“I was taken for a medical examination eight times. I was given children’s stories that I was supposed to read,” said Zadorin, who has retired from Ukraine’s Marine Infantry with the rank of leading seaman. “I realized from the first time that something was wrong and I changed my voice every time -- changed my tone, wheezing, and so on, to confuse it all as much as possible.”
The physical abuse was particularly harsh after the ship that had made the surrender demand -- the Moskva missile cruiser, the flagship of the Russian Black Sea Fleet -- was hit and sunk by Ukrainian missiles in April 2022.
After the sinking, Zadorin said he and his comrades were sent “flying around the corridor like pillows.”
SEE ALSO: Ukraine Has No Navy. But It's Hammering Russia In The Black Sea.'Punching Bags'
But abuse was a daily reality in the Russian prisons where he was held, which he likened to concentration camps: “If you take away the gas chambers and the crematorium, it’s exactly what happened there,” he said.
“We encountered limitless violence there, both physical and moral,” Zadorin said, as well as “humiliation and Russification” -- the latter in the form of forced lessons in a history he said was “completely distorted” to fit the narratives pushed by President Vladimir Putin and his government.
The abuse was unrelenting, Zadorin said.
“There was a lot of rape [and] castration. Even when they beat us with a rubber stick…they would come up and ask questions: ‘Do you like foie gras? Have you eaten foie gras?’ If you [say you have], your liver is beaten.” ‘Do you like candy?’ Any answer…yes or no, they give you this stick, and you either lick it or suck it, imitating you know what.”
“And that’s the least of what they did with the stick, because a lot of guys were raped,” he said. “And if they did it…at first, they interrogated us for some information, but after a while they did it just for fun, because they needed something to do, some entertainment.”
Later, he said, new groups of investigators would rotate to the prison, each taking its turn: “They learned how to beat us properly, how to interrogate Ukrainians so that they could interrogate Russians the same way,” Zadorin told RFE/RL.
“And we were like punching bags on which they practiced: Where to hit with a taser to paralyze the body, how to connect to 220 volts properly, how to use a tapik” -- a crude electrocution device -- “and how to beat the kidneys,” he added. “For example, did you know that you can kick someone’s kidneys through their heels? Yes, you can. If you kick the heels often, the kidneys are hit. We know all this, we’ve been through this, and it’s just our bitter experience.”
'Mice, Soap, Slugs, Worms'
Nevertheless, the “most terrible thing for me personally was not so much physical abuse as hunger,” said Zadorin, who weighed 120 kilograms when the Russian forces stormed Snake Island and 60 kilograms when he was released.
“We ate mice, toilet paper, laundry soap, slugs, worms -- everything we could eat,” he said.
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'We Ate Mice, Slugs, Worms': Ukrainian Soldier Recounts Brutal Russian Captivity
He and his fellow prisoners “were given three pieces of black bread a day mixed with sawdust or sand. They did this deliberately. Either it was moldy or otherwise impossible to eat…. But we ate it because we wanted to live.”
One of the Ukrainians taken captive on Snake Island is still being held by Russia, Zadorin said.
'It Will Not End This Year'
In June 2022, long before Zadorin was released, Ukraine recaptured Snake Island, saying its forces drove Russian troops off the island some 40 kilometers east of the Ukrainian and Romanian coasts. Russia said its forces withdrew as a “gesture of goodwill.”
Zadorin, meanwhile, is living with the physical consequences of his captivity and abuse, including vertebrae damaged by hammer blows, bladder problems, and a brain injury. “I lose my vision from time to time,” he said.
Mentally, he said, the ordeal “is always with me, until my last days.”
Well into his second year of freedom, Zadorin works with other returning prisoners, helping them with food, medicine, health care, navigating the bureaucracy and “reintegrating them into normal civilian life,” he said, explaining that “probably 70-80 percent of people who return from captivity resign from the army because they don’t want to tie most of their lives to it. It will be imprinted on their whole life.”
He also works to counter Russian disinformation and propaganda as an ambassador for the Ukraine-based Break The Fake project.
Speaking after Ukraine and Russia held two rounds of direct peace talks in Istanbul, on May 16 and June 2, Zadorin said “the only benefit” from those meetings has been exchanges of prisoners and the bodies of the dead.
“This is a long-term war,” he said. “It will not end this year.”