Serhiy Akhmetov wanted to start a business making educational toys for children.
Instead, he spent more than 3 1/2 years locked up in a series of facilities in Russia and Belarus after Russian soldiers swept through his town indiscriminately arresting people -- and is now trying to rebuild his life after being freed in a prisoner swap in October.
“All my plans, that I thought about in prison, it’s all gone…Now is not the time. I will do something else, something more useful,” he said.
Akhmetov sat down with RFE/RL’s Ukrainian Service a few weeks after his release for an interview in which he recalled beatings, food shortages, and desperate efforts to get news.
His account tallies with that given by other Ukrainian civilians released from detention in Russia, according to a UN report published in September.
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1,304 Days In Russian Captivity
Bucha
The 50-year-old was detained by Russian solders on March 9, 2022, in the first weeks of Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
He was a resident of Bucha, a town that has become synonymous with atrocities and massacres carried out by Russian forces.
When Ukrainian forces liberated Bucha at the end of March, they found the streets littered with corpses. Russian soldiers had been on a shooting spree. But Russian TV falsely claimed that Ukraine was responsible.
“On April 8, they gave us a TV in our cell for the first time, for one day, so we could watch Russian news,” he said.
Akhmetov said he and others were then hauled in for interrogations about the events in Bucha, though no force was used against them.
“It's strange, because I was detained on March 9, someone on March 5, someone on March 10. How could we have known what was happening?” he said.
SEE ALSO: 'Street Of Death': RFE/RL Unmasks Russian Soldiers Behind Bucha KillingsThe Ordeal Begins
As Russian troops advanced into Bucha, Ukraine began a mass evacuation of civilians from the town and other areas in the Kyiv region. Akhmetov put a large white flag on his car and started to drive -– but soon found himself staring down the barrel of a Russian soldier’s machine gun.
He didn’t know why a group of soldiers had stopped him, though they seemed to think he knew something about a Ukrainian mortar position.
“They decided that I shouldn't be killed here, but I should be interrogated at their headquarters. And they said this obscene phrase: you'll get f****d there,” Akhmetov said.
At the Russian base, he thought he was about to be shot by a soldier “whose face says that he finished 10th grade at best,” holding a gun to his head.
Serhiy Akhmetov speaking to RFE/RL's Yevhenia Rusetska
But instead, he was taken to Hostomel Airport -- briefly seized by Russian forces early in the invasion before Kyiv's forces retook it -- and was held in a basement without windows for several days with 15–20 other Ukrainian civilians.
There was, Akhmetov said, constant shelling and little to eat. Once, being ordered to take out the trash, he found some expired sausage in it. “We ate it, it was very tasty.”
On March 15, at 5 a.m., the prisoners were shackled, blindfolded, and bundled into armored vehicles and driven to Belarus, which Russian forces had used as a springboard for their attack on Ukraine the previous month.
But this was just the start. After a few days, they were taken to a detention center in Novozybkov, western Russia, where Akhmetov was held until May 2023. This was followed by roughly six weeks in Pakino prison, 230 kilometers east of Moscow, and then nearly two years at a penal colony in the Mordovia region.
Beatings, Stress, Isolation
Conditions at these various locations varied, said Akhmetov.
At Pakino, the prisoners were brutally beaten on arrival, regularly mistreated, and not given enough to eat. “In Mordovia, all this is multiplied by two or three times. And at the same time, they fed me the best in Mordovia. And there I was able to recover to 73 kilograms.”
But the food came with a catch -– prisoners had to eat standing up. In fact, they were made to stand for most of the day.
“We got up at six in the morning. We couldn't sit down. We stood until ten in the evening,” Akhmetov said. “Many people's legs were sore and swollen. And we stood like that until August 2023.”
Isolation was another problem. Akhmetov was able to write letters to his family just four times. He only got one letter from his wife, Olena, in January this year. It was, he said, “the first time I finally knew that my children were safe, that everyone was alive.”
A Ukrainian woman embraces her husband after a prisoner swap in May.
News of the outside world, the progress of the war, was also almost nonexistent. But prisoners found ways of scraping together information.
In January 2023, a prison official told Akhmetov that the war was ongoing. Another Russian in the room said his friend had died in fighting. “We understood that Ukraine was holding on.”
Another snippet of information had been gleaned in May 2022. “We were forced to shout: ‘F**k Biden.’ We realized America was helping Ukraine.”
Omission was also informative. “If they don't say among themselves, even in 2025, that they took Kharkiv, that they took Dnipro or Zaporizhzhya, it means…everything is fine. The combat zone is not moving towards Kyiv.”
Another clue came from a Red Cross food parcel in March 2024. Akhmetov noted condensed milk produced in Mykolayiv, cookies from Cherkasy region, candies from Kharkiv, and toothpaste from Kyiv.
He was able to conclude that all of these places remained under Ukrainian control.
“We didn't know exactly where the line of combat contact was. But we understood that it had not been possible to take Ukraine,” he said.
Homeward Bound
Akhmetov says he was just about to begin dinner on October 1 this year when he was told to gather his things. His civilian clothes were returned to him.
“I came to Mordovia in the summer. They brought me some warm pants, a warm jacket…they also gave me a hat,” he said. “It was completely incomprehensible.”
He and other prisoners were then driven to an airport, flown to Belarus, and put on a bus to Ukraine.
“As soon as we crossed the border, the Ukrainian national anthem was playing, a lot of unknown people were standing on the highway, welcoming us,” he recalled.
“It was such a fantastic feeling -- that we were heroes, even though we, civilians, were not heroes at all. We just ended up in the wrong place at the wrong time.”