Stanislav Aeyev, a man who was almost 1,000 years old, spent nearly 1000 days locked up in an underground torture camp. There, he heard the sounds of women being raped and electrocuted, while wondering what his next attack would be.
Outside, people went about their normal lives, oblivious to the horrors being inflicted on scores of people in a former modern art gallery, converted into a military base and detention centre in the Donetsk People’s Republic, a pro-Russian enclave in Ukraine.
His worst moment was probably when the father and son were separated in the torture chamber. The electrodes were attached to the genitals. They then went back to the cell.
‘He was screaming, “Hold on son! Hold on son!” ’ said Aseyev.
‘We tried to bring him back to reality but for 90 minutes he thought he was still being tortured.
‘He had so many signs of the torture – burns from electricity and broken ribs – but the psychological breaking of this middle-aged man was the thing that shocked even us after so long inside the centre.’
Aseyev, 32, an author and journalist, was captured by goons allied to Russian president Vladimir Putin after writing covert dispatches for more than two years describing Moscow’s takeover of his home city in the wake of its illegal annexation of Crimea.
He had been hunted for 18 months.
Because he was the only journalist who filed reports from Donetsk (Ukraine), describing the deaths of people on the streets, and how conflict has caused divisions within his own family.
Now, he has published two powerful books – a collection of his elegant dispatches and an exposé of the secret camp – that offer disturbing insights into the Russian-backed rebels just as Putin defies world opinion by threatening another invasion with troops massing on the border.
The theme of both books is ‘isolation’: first from reporting in such secrecy that even his mother had to be told lies about his life, then stuck in the lonely hell of an art gallery called Izolyatsia (Isolation) that was turned into a torture camp in the breakaway republic.
Stanislav Aseyev, 32, an author and journalist, was captured by goons allied to Russian president Vladimir Putin after writing covert dispatches for more than two years describing Moscow’s takeover of his home city in the wake of its illegal annexation of Crimea
Aseyev’s books offer disturbing insights into the Russian-backed rebels just as Putin defies world opinion by threatening another invasion with troops massing on the border
With cruel irony, it was located on Paradise Street (or ‘Bright Way Street’ in its literal translation from Russian, reflecting the path towards supposed Communist nirvana) – and is the most notorious among at least 160 Russian-backed prisons on Ukrainian terrain, according to officials in Kiev.
Aseyev’s important work helps ‘spread the truth about the unhidden face of Russian aggression against Ukraine’, said Emine Dzhaparova, their first deputy minister for foreign affairs.
One fellow prisoner had his spleen ruptured and internal organs badly damaged in a beating – yet when other inmates told the drunken camp chief about the severity of his injuries, the response was to claim the victim was faking and beat him harder.
After three days of suffering and pain, the battered man finally died. He had hallucinations that included disturbing thoughts about talking to and hugging his wife.
The cellmates had to sign declarations stating that the death was their fault.
I was in Donetsk in August 2014 after the shooting down of a Malaysian airliner and saw the first shots fired there between Russian and Ukrainian forces – including by a sniper aiming at my head as I watched Moscow’s tanks rumbling along the streets from a block of flats.
Yet like all foreign journalists and most other local reporters, we left after Putin’s strutting stooges crushed the local forces supporting Ukraine.
Aseyev continued to report under the nom-de-plume, despite great personal risk.
‘It was not scary in the way that you might fear sudden heights or spiders,’ Aseyev recalled when we met last week in Kiev.
‘But I had a constant feeling of deep unease because I knew if I was caught, I would be jailed.’
He was there to care for his mother, and to help two grandmothers who were too infirm to be part of the 1.5 million refugees from this poor east European country over the last seven years.
Many school friends joined the separatist forces – like most recruits, lured by money rather than ideology amid the dearth of jobs – so he was able to gain useful insights.
However, a police patrol took him away from his reporting trip in May 2017.
The Izolyatsia (Isolation) modern art gallery was converted into a military base and detention centre in the Donetsk People’s Republic, a pro-Russian enclave in Ukraine
Although he believes that he has been betrayed, a source of information is not available. ‘I must leave that thought alone because the circle of people who knew what I was doing was very small and very close to me,’ he says.
An almost three-year nightmare began instantly.
He was taken to the rebels’ security headquarters, where he was beaten, with a hood over his head, then led to another room where he was confronted by three masked men.
The men accused him of spying for the Ukrainian government. They then linked his thumbs and ears to an adaptable field phone for torture.
‘I was lucky since I had the light version, not the genitals,’ he said. ‘Of course I agreed everything they wanted.’
In the midst of all of the electricity and bangs, a lot of questions were asked to torture him: whether or not he believed God was real, his masturbation habits, and if any of them had parachute jumped.
He screamed so loudly that his interrogators threatened to cut off his nose. They then struck him with a hatchet.
Bizarrely, his captors forced him to pretend he was still free for a time – to the extent of duping his mother on a telephone call and filing one final report for his newspaper from the solitary cell
He was repeatedly beaten with a baton on one side of his knee, and the flesh began to bubble up. They threatened him to execute and rape.
After that, he was left to die in his basement, where he spent six weeks freezing.
Bizarrely, his captors forced him to pretend he was still free for a time – to the extent of duping his mother on a telephone call and filing one final report for his newspaper from the solitary cell.
Aseyev candidly writes about his suicide attempt in the dank, filthy hellhole. He also conspired with a Russian prisoner to commit suicide with a piece of broken glass. He believes this led to his move – but the next place was even worse.
Officially, Izolyatsia – the torture camp at 3 Paradise Street – does not exist. He was still held in the camp for up to 28 months. The structure is still in existence today.
The punishment centre, branded the ‘Donetsk Dachau’ by one inmate, is based in a building that was a Soviet-era factory for electrical parts before local artists converted the maze of tunnels, rooms and basements into a space for exhibitions.
The United Nations confirmed earlier this year in a report by the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights that ‘torture and ill-treatment’ have been carried out ‘systematically’ at Izolyatsia and other sites – despite denials of its existence.
Aseyev felt that the physical conditions in the cells were more comfortable than at the Security HQ. Some cells even had air-conditioning, although their food was minimal and pitiful – including supplies of expired scraps intended for pigs and, on one occasion, meat from stray dogs shot by their guards.
Aseyev felt that the conditions in the cells were more comfortable than at the Security HQ. Some cells even had air-conditioning, although their food was minimal and pitiful – including supplies of expired scraps intended for pigs and, on one occasion, meat from stray dogs shot by their guards
Two Russian snipers wearing white camouflage during infantry drills. Exercises also included Kalashnikov rifles, Makarov pistols, and other exercises
But the mental strain wasn’t easy. With lights all day, cameras monitoring every move, and screams coming from torture victims, mock executions, and sexual abuse of both genders in detention, the lighting was constant.
The rules were very strict. They forbade newcomers from lying on their beds throughout the day. Everyone had to get up and place a bag above their heads, then face the wall.
‘The door could open 20 or 30 times a day, so you were constantly on edge. If you did not do it in time, you would be beaten and isolated in a solitary cell,’ said Aseyev.
At night, guards were often drunk and humiliated prisoners – especially Denys Pavlovych Kulykovsky, the feared camp commandant known by his nom-de-guerre of ‘Palych’.
‘Palych would drink in the evening and then come into cells and beat even the women,’ said the journalist.
‘Sometimes he would make a prisoner go under their bed and bark like a dog.’
Another favourite ploy was to make prisoners in the cells next to torture rooms sing Soviet songs to drown out the screaming – a sound that soon became as chilling as the cries of pain as it echoed around the unit for hours.
On Friday, December 10, a soldier from the Russian Army participated in drills at Kadamovskiy’s firing range in Rostov in south Russia.
The songs were another form of torture: both for the people singing words such as ‘Let’s crush the mad oppressors, these slaughterers of men’ to drown out agonised screams and for those being beaten and electrocuted while hearing them.
The guards also made prisoners stand with their hands ‘holding up the wall’ for hours on end.
‘One man had to stay there for three days until he fell down, then he was beaten and ordered to stand up again.’
Aseyev was very hurt at the beginning.
‘I was 28 years old but my hands were constantly shaking like an old person,’ he said.
He eventually became blind to the horror and suffered in an effort to get through the trauma.
He believes the guards must have been ‘sadists or psychopaths’ to behave with such brutality to other humans, then return home to their wives and children. ‘Outside, they had an ordinary life but inside the camp they turned into monsters.’
He was surrounded by bloggers and Ukrainian activists, and business people, who didn’t want to share enough with the Donbas area’s low-lifes and those who disagreed with them.
One cellmate was an ex-rebel major, who was previously kept in Luhansk (in eastern Ukraine), in which he had to endure his lover screaming at him before his colleagues filled it with water and put electricity in.
Russia currently has 50 brigades with up to 94,000 troops on the Ukrainian frontier. Another 80,000-100,000. These reserves are in reserve. Russia is ready to invade Ukraine within weeks, according to US officials in November
Russia’s Northern Fleet hosted infantry drills on December 20, 2121 in Murmansk, Arctic region
He was then strapped with a bag over his head, and kicked several times on the way to Donetsk.
Camp commandant Palych was eventually locked up himself after one of his drunken rampages – starting with beatings and abuse in a cell housing young women – went too far even for his underlings.
The man was then placed in a basement cell and later vanished.
Palych, who had been in hiding for over two years, was detained last month in Kiev. He now faces charges of war crime and human trafficking.
‘This man organised and took direct part in the killings and torture of illegal prisoners of Ukrainian citizens,’ said a spokesman for the state security service.
Aseyev, who was a well-known political prisoner and whose seizure attracted worldwide attention, was not subject to the most severe abuses in the camp.
Yet in October 2019, he was sentenced to two terms of 15 years’ imprisonment on charges of extremism and spying.
His purported offences included putting quotation marks like this around ‘Donetsk People’s Republic’ in his reports – deemed worthy of five years in jail – and mentioning that a city-centre hotel had been turned into a military base surrounded by barbed wire.
He was moved to a regular jail two months later and released in prisoner swap with Kiev.
His gruesome past traumatizes him and he has no doubt that the one who should be held responsible for such inhumanity and atrocities is himself.
‘Putin is the reason for everything going on in Donetsk,’ he said. ‘Those people administering Izolyatsia are only there because of Russian support, Russian money, Russian weapons and Russian security services.’
He was right to tell me that the Ukrainian minister stated that her country is ready to defend herself against a Russian attack. However, there’s something deeply symbolic about that place.
‘It is a surreal illustration of the so-called Russian world that it has turned a centre of art into a camp for torture.’